She left the film industry at her professional peak as a playback singer to pursue personal happiness. And today, Kavita Krishnamurti Subramaniam’s life and music are richer for it, as she tells Tanmaya Kumar Nanda

 
Bollywood is an intensely ageist industry. Worse, its ageism is also intensely sexist. For decades, heroines have been discarded simply because they got married, or hit 30, or were no longer young looking enough to play lead roles. Many a female actor has gone in a matter of years from playing the romantic lead opposite an actor to playing his mother or bhabhi, while the man continues to romance women half his age, sometimes even younger.

Evidently, that old line, Age cannot wither her, not custom stale/ Her infinite variety, is not one you are likely to come across in the histrionics department in India’s leading film industry. Only a handful of female actors have been able to stick it out for long, and that too because they were smart enough to move on to scripts that were either more challenging for an actor or roles that accurately reflected their changing years even as heroines kept getting younger. But like in everything else, the Indian film industry is not immune to the law of exceptions. In this case, if one were to look closely, it would be music. Music, fortunately, has played it the other way: our best composers and singers have been the ones who have sung well into their 40s, 50s, even 60s. Perhaps this is a function of music itself—the longer you are around, the more life experiences you are able to put into your music.

Indeed, Bollywood’s music industry has consistently defied the ageism rampant in the acting system. Perhaps because they are hidden safely behind the soundtrack, in soundproofed studios, cloaked in the purity of their art rather than just looks, some of our greatest music directors and singers have worked, and successfully, well into their 60s and 70s. While a quick count of these luminaries would sound like a roll call of honour, the latest to join this club of legends is Kavita Krishnamurti Subramaniam, 55, who is on the verge of releasing a new album later this year.

She makes the process sound wonderfully casual. “There were some songs lying in the dabba, and I asked my husband [renowned violinist Dr L Subramaniam], ‘Why don’t you finish this for me?’ ” she tells Harmony-Celebrate Age. “Finally, it has been completed; he has been mixing it. He hasn’t had the time to finish it. It’s a collaboration between us.”

The songs on the album, some recorded almost a decade ago, were re-recorded to make her voice sound like it does today. “You want the latest voice,” points out Krishnamurti, who began her Bollywood singing career 40 years ago. “Thankfully, my children and everyone say I sound better today, so that’s good,” she adds, breaking into a light, almost embarrassed giggle.

Of course, there is no cause whatsoever for embarrassment for Krishnamurti, who for long was held up as the next Lata Mangeshkar, and at one time was the film industry’s leading female playback singer. And just when everyone thought she had a good thing going, she upped and quit.

The game changers

Krishnamurti, though, has never played to the script. She began learning Rabindra Sangeet in Delhi, instead of Carnatic music, which at the time was considered de rigueur for most girls from conservative middle-class Tamilian families. Her own older sister was learning Bharatanatyam, incidentally in the same class as Hema Malini.

In fact, as Krishnamurti reveals, it was Hema Malini’s mother Jaya Chakravarthy who would later put her in touch with music directors Laxmikant-Pyarelal, a meeting that would set the awkward Tamil girl from Delhi on course to becoming a celebrated playback singer. But intriguingly, the one person who is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for Krishnamurti’s success has no connect with the film industry, or music. Throughout our conversation, Krishnamurti keeps returning to the role her family friend—aunt, as it were—from Delhi, Protima Bhattacharya, played in her journey. They were neighbours in Delhi and Mrs Bhattacharya was like an older sister to Krishnamurti’s mother; at some point, she spotted talent in the young Kavita.

“She was the first one who said, ‘This girl’s voice is suited for the film industry’, and she took it upon herself to realise that dream,” recalls Krishnamurti, who refers to her as nothing less than her own mother. It was Mrs Bhattacharya who first insisted she learn Rabindra Sangeet instead of any other form, and she who first reached out to Jaya Chakravarthy. When the Krishnamurti family moved to a different part of Delhi, the Bhattacharyas gave up their spacious quarters to move together so they could remain close and ensure her singing career didn’t take a hit. “I was over at their place all the time; it was where I sneakily learnt to eat fish,” recalls Krishnamurti, giggling at her memories of illicit culinary pleasures.

When the time came for her to dip her toes into the film industry, her own family was fairly clueless about how to go about it, and how their daughter would manage alone in Mumbai. But Mrs Bhattacharya insisted she needed to be where the industry was; after some persuasion, the Krishnamurtis agreed to let her take admission in a college in Mumbai. What’s more, Mrs Bhattacharya herself moved to Mumbai to be her guardian in the new city. The older of the two slipped easily into the role of a mother, something Krishnamurti emphasises time and again. “She is the one who really helped me stay grounded; she made sure I went to college, to practice, came home on time,” she says. “Even after I became successful, she was the one who made sure I didn’t get any airs. I would go sing, record, all that, but when I came home, I was the person I had always been.”

Another person who made sure Krishnamurti remained true to her roots was the legendary singer Manna Dey. “He would tell me, ‘Make sure to carry your own things; don’t get a manager to carry your files for you’,” she remembers. “The beauty of Mannada was that he was such a gentleman and so humble; he would go to the market and buy his own vegetables, buy his own fish.” In fact, it was Manna Dey who assured her father that she would be safe in Mumbai. “Initially, there was a lot of apprehension about me moving to Mumbai; my father’s concern eased only after he met Mannada because he knew I was going to be in safe hands.” Indeed, she acknowledges that it were people like Manna Dey, singer Hemant Kumar and composers Laxmikant-Pyarelal (LP) and R D Burman who made her feel at home in the industry. “I’ve been fortunate to have been around people like them,” she says almost wistfully. “They are the reason I’ve been able to go through life with rose-coloured glasses.”

The ‘struggle’

Not surprisingly then, Krishnamurti’s story has only faint shades of resemblance to what has today become an integral part of success stories in the film industry: ‘The Struggle’. Today, you could well be forgiven for thinking that ‘struggling’ is a full-time profession for those looking for a break in the industry; those who do not have a family connection already, that is. The term has almost acquired a mythic aura, and no outsider fails to mention his or her ‘struggler days’ in media interviews or at awards functions.

When Krishnamurti speaks of her own struggle, then, by today’s stories of casting couches and lecherous talent spotters, it sounds like something of an anti-climax. Make no mistake, though, she has suffered her share of trials and tribulations, like the time composer C Ramachandra told her to come back after 10 years when her voice was more mature. “Some years later, when his office called me, I went to him and said, ‘Sir you’d said to come back after 10 years, here I am after only six’,” she recalls, laughing.

Initially, she would also sing at concerts or weddings, but these were places where singers usually did not get much respect. “Once there was some filmi concert and people were drinking,” she shares. “There was this one person who must have seen how uncomfortable I was, and he came up to me and said ‘Go home now’. It was Majrooh Sultanpuri.”

Another time, she went to audition for LP. “I must have sounded like a schoolgirl singing with my hands clenched tightly,” she says with a laugh. But through it all, she had Mrs Bhattacharya by her side, her rock, as it were. “She would go to music directors and tell them to give me a chance whenever Lataji was not available.”

Krishnamurti got her first break in 1978, for a Yash Johar film—the song went Baatli ko tod de, sharaab chhod de (Smash the bottle, quit the boozing). It was a dubbing for a Lata Mangeshkar song to help with the shoot, and her rendition was not retained in the final film. But it was a start, and more dubs for Lata Mangeshkar’s voice followed. Eventually, she started getting songs in her own right but by her own admission, true recognition only came after the catchy Hawa Hawaii number in the Anil Kapoor-Sridevi blockbuster Mr India.

That was a golden period, so to speak, with the likes of Krishnamurti, Anuradha Paudwal, Kumar Sanu and Udit Narayan establishing themselves as the leading singers for a generation as technology from companies such as T-Series put audio cassettes and electronic audio players well within the reach of a slowly growing middle class, and even in the vast hinterlands of India.

The struggles were over, finally. R D Burman, or Panchamda as he is popularly known, remembered a promise he had made to her years ago. “At the time, he had himself admitted that his career was on a downhill slope but he promised that he would call me whenever he got a good film,” Krishnamurti recounts. He was true to his word, and called her to sing for him in 1942: A Love Story, a period romance set against the backdrop of India’s struggle for Independence, and for which she won her first National Award. Shortly after, she got her first Filmfare award for another blockbuster, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (HDDCS) in 1999.

“For me that was the big one, because Lataji was getting an award for Lifetime Achievement and on stage, in front of the entire industry, she said that she was very happy that a deserving singer had got the award,” she recalls with emotion. “I had finally gotten my due.”

The twist in the tale

And then out of the blue, just like that, Krishnamurti quit the industry. “People were shocked; I had just done HDDCS and I left it all to get married and move to Bangalore,” she says, laughing lightly. “I was at the peak of my career. A lot of people were very happy for me, but some said ‘What will happen to her career?’”

But Krishnamurti knew exactly what she wanted. Dr Subramaniam, a widower, already had three kids from his first marriage. “The kids just took me in like I was family; there was absolutely no problem at all,” she says. Today, she has no regrets about her decision. “Marrying him has not affected my career,” says Krishnamurti very matter-of-factly. On the contrary, she credits Dr Subramaniam, one of the most famous fusion musicians to come out of India since Pandit Ravi Shankar, with introducing her to a new way of thinking about music. “My mind has opened up a lot,” she iterates. “I’ve started appreciating how certain instruments are a personality of the artist himself. When I see George Duke playing the piano or Stanley Clark with the bass guitar, or my husband on his violin, the instrument speaks for their character, it speaks for their personalities; it’s really an extension of their personalities.”

Listening to new forms of music came after marriage, she admits candidly, unhesitatingly crediting her husband with opening her ears to new sounds, new interpretations, even a new way of looking at music. “Now I’ve started listening to instrumentalists, I’ve performed with some jazz artists,” she says. “When you’re in an orchestra, you look at the conductor and say, ‘This is my cue’, and then you’ve got to get the rhythm from there. So all these things, they’ve opened up a new world for me. And even when I sing now, the way I try to listen to my pitching, it’s all different now, and the fine tuning has come from him. He’s really helped me open up in music a lot.”

Which is not to say they were always on the same page. “He’s not a Bollywood composer, right? He’s a classical musician and he’s been into fusion, he’s mainly worked with instrumentalists and sometimes with vocalists, and he doesn’t look at Hindi the same way that I look at Hindi as a language,” she points out. “He is more familiar with English and Tamil. He’s never lived in the North; he lived in Madras and went straight to the US, so his approach, most of it, is a crossover approach.”

Then and now

Now, equally comfortable in her personal life—“He’s the calm one, I’m the panicky one”—as she is straddling many musical worlds, she is able to address Bollywood’s obsession with youth with equanimity.

“I haven’t pulled back from the industry, I’m still here, but I sing less because I don’t get good songs,” she says candidly. “I would still love to do a Devdas or HDDCS but someone needs to write it for me. My assessment is that most actors are very young, sometimes in their teens, and I feel that some of the older actors also probably want a younger image. So why have a singer of my generation? It might make them sound older.” Krishnamurti stays attuned to the times by using technology as a tool to communicate with her fans, whether it is Kavita KS, a free app available on the Apple Store and Google Play, or her Facebook fan page, on which she is quite active.

Sadly, as pop culture morphs, the demand for a singer of Krishnamurti’s style has decreased, giving way to songs that are peppy alright, but also easily forgettable and replaceable. The Munni-Sheila-Jalebi-Fevicol assembly line has claimed its victims to the point where Udit Narayan must sing Ratti-patti to stay relevant. “If you are too much of a trained singer, is the audience ready to accept someone who is very well-trained?,” she asks, raising a pertinent question about not just the quality of singers but as much about the quality of audiences. And now, instead of asking what kind of music should be produced for generations to come, the dominant question is what kind of album will sell. “We need to have a commitment to listeners, to lift up the standards of the listeners as well.”

Photos: Vilas Kalgutker
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
May 2013