Hamsadhwani was launched on 18 August 1990 to cater to music lovers living in the Adyar area of Chennai. R. Ramachandran, a founder-member who christened it Hamsadhwani and who is also one of its secretaries, feels it has done exceedingly well in fulfilling its objective of promoting classical music and he is proud of the sabha’s record in the past 10 years.
During the first three years, Ramachandran– a former editorial staffer of The Hindu popularly known as RRC– functioned as convenor with a 12-member committee. The sabha now has about 20 office-bearers and a strength of 900 dues-paying members (effectively 900 x 2 or 1800) belonging to any one of the three categories: patron, life member and annual member.
The Hamsadhwani programmes are by and large well attended. “There is no `all are welcome’ bait for our concerts,” says RRC. “We do not believe in offering `free lunch’. We believe music will then lose its value.
To attend any of our programmes, one has to be a member or has to buy a daily ticket.”
“We adopt a judicious blend in featuring known or promising young musicians and very senior artists. For festivals we line up all the top musicians and middle-level performers who are in the concert arena, plus extraordinary talent even if he or she is not so well-known.”
Hamsadhwani has offered more than 1300 concerts in the past 10 years as part of its regular monthly programmes and festival series. It has featured as many as 1270 main Carnatic musicians and 30 main Hindustani musicians.
According to RRC the average attendance for non-festival performances in the Youth Hostel premises has been around 250. The festival concerts attract a larger audience, varying in size from 300 to 1500 persons, depending upon the popularity of the performers.
Hamsadhwani offers two or three Hindustani music recitals during 31 December and 1 January every year. “Our experience is that quite a number of Hindustani music enthusiasts in Chennai who are not our members buy tickets and a section of our own members as well demand such recitals,” says RRC.
Virtually all the programmes are held in an open-air ambience in the premises of the Youth Hostel. The rains and mosquitos have been irritant factors for rasika-s, but these have not had an adverse effect on audience turnout. Says RRC: “In the last 10 years, hardly 25 concerts might have been disrupted by rain.” However, in the last three years, again, arrangements have been made to hold the concerts in the Youth Hostel Hall in the event of rain.
“Mosquitos were not a problem till four years ago,” says RRC and adds: “The mosquito menace is not a problem peculiar to Hamsadhwani and our members are aware that it is a common feature. They do not grumble much about it. A few members bring repellants with them.” However, efforts have been made to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Hamsadhwani has been undertaking massive fogging of the open-air lawn prior to the concerts, spending as much as 300 to 400 rupees a day. “Our members are appreciative of the measures we adopt to mitigate the problem. Our artists too are understanding and have not made an issue of it.”
The sabha’s office-bearers have plans to construct an auditorium for it once they are able to locate and procure the suitable acres of land for the purpose. The Tamil Nadu Chief Minister has reportedly given them an assurance that the Government would examine Hamsadhwani’s request for land in Taramani close to Adyar. However, a beautiful stage is being built in the present premises, retaining the open-air ambience for the audience.
Hamsadhwani has also been offering various innovative programmes from time to time in order to sustain audience interest. During the last five years, musicians are asked to give a solo concert without any accompaniment on Saraswati pooja and Vijayadasami days. Quite a few musicians like Bombay Jayashri, S. Sowmya, O.S. Arun, T.M. Krishna, Sriram Parasuram, Kiranavali, S.P. Ramh, Anuradha Suresh Krishnamurthi, Suganda Kalamegham and E. Gaayathri (veena) have accepted it as a challenge and have each performed for 90 minutes. A concert by O.S. Arun and Nityasree Mahadevan, who sang Carnatic songs in Hindustani raga-s, was also very well received. “We had a rare concert by Sudha Raghunathan with a former Union Minister playing the dhamp (a big-sized khanjira) standing all the time; his tala sense was perfect,” says RRC. M. Chandrasekharan (violin) gave a vocal recital with flute as accompaniment. Lalgudi G.J.R. Krishnan (C-violin) was featured with R. Visweswaran (santoor) and again, Krishnan was featured along with Shahid Parvez (H-sitar).
Hamsadhwani has organised interactive sessions wherein the audience can pose questions to the musicians. “We had an exceptionally rewarding and most effective evening of interaction between our members and Carnatic musicians N. Ravikiran and Vijay Siva. The members sent in a bewildering number of queries on music- the place of accompanists; balancing raga, swara and tala; the extent of devotion in music, etc. It was a very interesting session where not a minute was wasted and there was no digression.”
When most sabha-s have problem raising resources for their programmes, how does Hamsadhwani manage?
“We have no special schemes for funding programmes,” says RRC. “Our March-April festival of 70 concerts is covered sizeably by sponsorships. It is the NRI festival of 30 concerts in December that is expensive to us. We meet the cost totally from our own resources. We do not mind the expenditure because we offer happiness to NRIs who work hard on their music, what with their job pressures abroad. We appreciate that they spend enormous amount of money to come to India and the least we can do is to provide them a platform. The applicants are growing. The only thing we expect of them is to become a patron member (a one-time payment obviously); and they have responded to this request with pleasure. We remunerate them as we do for our artists. The festival has brought us immense satisfaction and earned us a distinctive reputation. We repeatedly explain how we conduct our NRI festival, wedded as we are to openness and transparency in all our activities on sponsorship and NRI festival.”
Is Hamsadhwani doing anything to popularise classical music among the young?
“Yes, we are. We offer complimentary passes to students to attract them to our programmes. But the response has not been to our expectations,” says RRC. “We are now attempting to take classical music to educational institutions. We organised a concert by Neyveli Santhanagopalan in Queen Mary’s College and a concert by a young girl in Kola Perumal Chetty School during class hours when the turnout was 500 and 1000 respectively. We plan to continue the practice.”
Hamsadhwani’s latest initiative is a music school which was launched on 19 September 1999. As many as 160 students enrolled on the opening day. Classes are held in vocal music, violin, veena, flute, keyboard, mridanga and Bharatanatyam. There are 10 part-time teachers to conduct the classes which are held in the evenings in a hall facing the sea on Elliots Beach Road.
Hamsadhwani has also been contributing to charitable causes. “Even before Kargil happened, we had a Maharashtra quake relief concert by Mandolin U. Shrinivas. It was perhaps the first such effort by a music organisation and we collected 84,000 rupees,” says RRC proudly.
Hamsadhwani is not a member of the Federation of City Sabhas, but its office-bearers have been invited to attend some of the meetings from time to time.
Hamsadhwani has ambitious plans for the future. At the 10th Annual General Meeting held on 30 September a resolution was placed, passed and unanimously adopted to extend Hamsadhwani’s field of operations beyond performing arts to include social service. Ramachandran feels the Hamsadhwani ought to take steps in the new decade to promote the well-being of its 1600 members. “Good health and nutritious food are vital to all of us. We desire to take steps to organise and run a not-for-profit, non-commercial community kitchen as well as a clinic, enlisting the services of caring medical doctors, to reestablish the family welfare system, which seems to be vanishing today, for the benefit of the Hamsadhwani family and the public at large. We will go ahead with the project and take the first steps if our members respond positively.”