Decoding Balachander, the veena virtuoso from Mylapore

In the 1930s, after suffering heavy loses on his Hindi film, Sairandhri, V Shantaram, the talkie pioneer, decided to make a Tamil film using the same sets and props to recoup his losses. In Seetha Kalyanam, he had a script ready. What was required was a cast, for which he began scouting in Madras. What came out it was a family film – literally.

A culture-loving lawyer of Mylapore, Sundaram, volunteered for the project with his entire family and set forth to Kolhapur. While Sundaram acted as Janaka, his elder son Rajam played Rama and daughter Jayalakshmi was Seeta (one of the rarest instances in which the leading pair in a film were siblings).

Shantaram was particularly impressed by Sundaram’s younger son, Balachander, then all of five years. The boy seemed to be a music prodigy, which prompted Shantaram to cast him as a court musician in Ravana’s court. This would stand out later in life as a striking coincidence, as Ravana was considered as the maestro of veena playing. The young boy, Chandru, didn’t know that his life would be entwined with veena. Those Kolhapur days set him on two of the trails that defined him: cinema and music.

SB, as he was called later in his life, started serving at All India Radio as a young boy (his salary was credited to his father because he was a minor), which offered him access to a multitude of musical instruments. As a boy playing the kanjira, tabla and ghatam, Balachander accompanied his elder brother vocalist Rajam on all-India concert tours. When he was only 11, he stole the show while at Karachi. So impressive was his performance that a lady in the audience ran back home to fetch a sitar – a damaged one – to gift him. Thus he went on to play Carnatic music on sitar, till he was 18 when his attention shifted to veena.

But even then, his initial love was cinema – acting, directing and composing music. Perhaps the best of Balachander’s cinematic offerings was Andha Naal in 1954 – a murder mystery starring Sivaji Ganesan which surprisingly had no songs. It was initially offered to radio but was rejected. AVM Studios, however, evinced interest to make it a movie. The story was set in World War II period, about a traitor in Madras who informed the Japanese on where to bomb the city – an event that really happened in October 1943. It was from the point of view of the investigator, which was narrated with the help of frequent flashbacks as every character described their version of a murder. It didn’t strike a chord with the audience, who did not like the hero Sivaji dying in the first scene and thereafter falling dead a dozen times in the flashbacks.

In his film, Bommai, SB, also the music director, introduced KJ Yesudas as a playback singer in Tamil. The main protagonist of the film was a walking doll – a rather unusual sight in the 1960s. The shooting was delayed till SB located one in the shops that later became Burma Bazaar.

After his film Nadu Iravil (1966), SB just walked away from the world of films. Cinema’s loss was Carnatic music’s gain. As he devoted the rest of his life to playing the veena. A total non-conformist, he would appear on stage in gaudy gold, maroon or red dress, which he himself designed. He was known not to rehearse or decide the playlist ahead. Sometimes, he seemed to be stunned by his own performance, weeping and whispering a clear audible “aandavane” (oh my god) as if thanking god for the brilliant idea given impromptu on stage.

But, controversy was his constant companion. When fellow musician M Balamuralikrishna claimed conceiving a fresh raga, Balachander took up his cudgels. He gave press conferences and even brought out a small book to prove there was a similar raga to the one that the singer claimed to have invented.

An iconoclast, one of Balachander’s famous struggles was against a foe long dead – the 19th century Maharaja of Travancore, Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma, who had shown deep interest in Carnatic music and had composed songs.

The sycophants in the royal court had hailed him as musical marvel, a tale that was perpetuated by contemporary Carnatic proponents who were happy to claim a royal personage as one of them. Anti-Swathi Thirunal campaign remained Balachander’s fixation for a decade. He even accused musicians like Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer to have attributed their own compositions to the king. He even went to the extent of claiming the king was a figment of history’s imagination and never existed.

All his life, Balachander was known as the eccentric genius, one who taught himself veena and ended up creating a style of his own – Balachander Bani. It was his endeavour that made Veena a ‘concert instrument’ from its old status as an accompaniment or one for chamber audiences.