Ilaiyaraaja did not believe in God: L Subramaniam

L Subramaniam, 66, learnt to play the violin from his father and guru Prof V Lakshminarayana Iyer who died in 1990. For a year after his father���s death, he stopped playing the violin till his first wife Viji reminded him that one of the dreams his father had was to see the violin being played as a solo instrument internationally. Till then, the violin was only considered an accompanying instrument.Dr L Subramaniam made his father���s dream a mission and started the Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival. While the festival had humble beginnings in Chennai, it became a national festival and today, even a global one with the Times of India as its collaborator. This year he will perform a special morning concert on December 25, with the Sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan at Bhavan���s TAG auditorium, Kilpauk Garden Road, at 10am. Excerpts from a conversation with Dr Subramaniam...
Ilaiyaraaja is your close friend and considers your father his guru. Talk about him.
My father was a wonderful teacher. Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer���s grandchildren would tell him, ���You are such a good teacher that you can even teach a wall.��� Raja wanted to learn traditional south Indian Carnatic music, so he would come to my father to learn. My father used to initially work in Sri Lanka as a visiting professor. By 1958, the riots started wherein they were killing Indians and Tamilians in Sri Lanka. We narrowly escaped and moved to Chennai where we lived in a rented house. My father continued to teach music.
Raja (as I called Ilaiyaraaja) also started learning from him. He was very close to my elder brother L Vaidyanathan. When my brother passed away a few years back, Raja told me, ���I didn���t cry when my mother passed away. I cried for your brother.��� They were both very good friends. My brother was very spiritual. Initially, Raja and his whole family did not believe in God. Whenever we used to come from US and play in the Music Academy, Raja used to come. There was also a famous Kannada actor Rajkumar, who would come to Chennai only to listen to the concert. Raja told me that once my brother took him to Mookambika. My brother used to go there regularly. My brother told him, ���Even though you do not believe in God, you just accompany me once.��� Raja told me once he stepped in, something happened to him and he felt some vibrations. Even though he was already a composer by that time, post his visit, there was a big change and transition in his compositions.
From then on, everything he composed clicked with the public and his life changed. He also went with my brother to Ramana Maharshi in Tiruvannamalai. Raja said, going there, whatever question he had, got answered. Raja became completely spiritual and used to go to these two places from that time onwards. Raja has been one of my closest friends. Once he came to my concert and told me, ���Tomorrow, I am going to meet all three Shankaracharyas. Would you like to come?���
I went with him and that is the first time I met all three of them together. I had once played for the senior Shankaracharya many years back and I was shocked when he looked at me and immediately recognised me. Raja and I sat with him in the dark, with just a little candle, for a lot of time and Raja also contributed to the building of his Gopuram (top part of the temple). Whenever I have invited Raja, he has always come. He had composed some pieces for me.
When his wife died a few years back, his daughter had organised a tribute concert, where my son Ambi played for her, all the pieces that Raja had written for me. Raja invited me on stage and said, ���All these pieces I wrote for Subramaniam. He refused to play, so I stopped writing for him.��� People in the audience were looking at me. I said, ���Come on, Raja. You can���t do this. People will throw stones at me: Raja is very focused on his music. Anytime I have asked him for anything, he has never said a no to me. We never speak about other musicians. We only talk about spirituality.
You put so much of your time and money behind organising the TOI Lakshminarayana Global Music Festival named after your father. What made you start the festival?
My father died on December 4, 1990, at the age of 79. We were planning to have a big celebration for him on his 80th birthday, where I had organised for all three of us brothers to pay our tribute to him by performing together at the Music Academy. In my concerts he would usually keep the taal on stage. Everything was planned. My father was extremely spiritual, too. He had told my sisters, ���When I die, I have to die in Kunju���s lap (he used to call me Kunju, meaning the little one).��� And that is exactly what happened. I was in Europe playing an all-night concert with the legendary Stephane Grappelli. I called my father, who lived with me in LA, just before the concert.
That was the first time in my life that he praised me. I would always ask him after each of my concerts how was the concert and he would just say, okay. He would never praise me. That night, I was playing with none other than Grappelli, that too, in France, where he was like God. The organisers had put my name on top of his. So I call my father and tell him that I must play well and how people must, as it is, not be happy seeing my name put on top of Grappelli���s on stage. For the first time, he said, ���I have taught so many people, but there could be only one chakravarthy (it means like an emperor, it���s a title). Why do you worry, you are that?��� I had earlier been given the title of Violin Chakravarthy when I was very young, but my father had still never said anything to me. But on that day, he said this. It was a historical concert and I got a great reception. I remember going to Grappelli in the green room just before the concert to wish him and he said, ���Please go away, you make me nervous, I need to warm up.���
After the concert, I called my father. At that time, my first wife Viji (who later died in 1995 due to a brain tumour) was alive and was with me in France. She brought a camera and recorded the video to show it to my father when we returned to LA. I arrived back in the US and my father said that he wanted to go for a regular checkup the next day. He was very happy seeing the video. I told him, ���I am writing a book and want to dedicate it to you.��� He had some premonition. He just looked at me, smiled and that day he kept all his personal letters addressed to all my brothers and me, which he had never sent to us, in my room. Next day, I was taking him for his checkup when he said to me in the car, ���I am having breathing difficulty.��� I told him, ���Please lie down on my lap.��� We rushed to the hospital and I called Viji to tell her and have her inform the others. He looked at me lying in my lap, with just one tear in his eye, and sunk. After he died, I totally stopped playing the violin till Viji said, ���It was your father���s dream to make the violin internationally known. He would not have liked you to stop playing. Let���s start a festival under his name.��� We waited for one year after his death and on January 11, 1992 (Jan 11 was his birthday), we started the festival and since then, come what may, we do it every year.
Talk about your jugalbandi concert with the sarod maestro Ustad Amjad Ali Khan on the morning of Christmas?
I have known Amjad ji for quite some time. The unique part of the concert will be an alaap where we will take a raag and do a jugalbandi together. The uniqueness of the alaap will be that we will both play together with just a tanpura, without any percussion. Both of us are devotees of Sri Sathya Sai. He is one of the finest musicians India has ever produced. The sarod in his hand speaks.
Collect your complimentary invites from the Times of India office, Chamiers Road, Nandanam on a first-come, first-served basis today, from 10am to 6pm.