(From top) D.K. Pattammal and Gangubai Hangal

The voices of two grand old women fell silent last year. With the passing of D.K. Pattammal and Gangubai Hangal in 2009, we lost two of our most important performers, one from each of the two streams of classical Indian music. They had quite a bit in common, these extraordinary women. Both were lauded as brilliant performers. But more important, they were hailed as musicians who engaged deeply with the technical nuances as well as the spirit of classical music.

Both said they listened to different types of music. But they were committed women. Their commitment anchored them firmly in their respective streams, with a steadfast loyalty to their schools of music and to their gurus.

Neither woman was viewed as particularly feminine, either in terms of appearance or voice. Both had unusually strong and deep voices, with Gangubai’s voice often being described as masculine. (Typically, this did not bother Gangubai — it did not “hurt” her, she said, because “as long as sur and bhaav are right, nothing else matters”.) The integrity the two radiated — the refusal to compromise with principle — was as powerful as their voices.

Neither was cliché feminine, but both women emanated a sense of simplicity and innocence. They had modesty, in the best sense of the term, meaning a humility that comes from knowing that more can be learnt. Pattammal and Gangubai were great musicians, but they were also students of music, practising, learning, always wanting to be mid-song. Pattammal said in an interview, “Carnatic music is like an ocean. There is so much to learn. How much ever you learn, there is always more. One lifetime is not enough even to fathom the depth of the art. My wish is that I should die singing. I ask for nothing more.”

This was the goal they strained toward; but both knew how difficult the way there was. In an interview, Pattammal spoke of the demands of music on a singer, even when the singer is still a child. She recalled how she used to practise every morning from 3.30 to 6:00, then again in the evening after returning from school. Gangubai too recalled the work she had to put in day after day, work that sometimes seemed to be drudgery. Her guru, Pandit Sawai Gandharva, was in a village in Kundgol. Gangubai would take the train from Hubli every morning at 5:30 and return by the last train at 9:30 pm. During the day, she and the other pupils were expected to meet their guru’s exacting standards. Gangubai remembered how she would be close to tears because of having to repeat the same phrases over and over again. But she was only allowed to stop when her guru thought she had it right.

In fact, Gangubai described the musician’s life in her usual style, honest to the point of bluntness. It’s a hard life, she said, and not everyone can bear the hardships that are part of a life of music. When she said this, she must have had more in mind than the backbreaking practice sessions. Perhaps she recalled some of the hard personal decisions involved. And the compromises, made by more than one person so that a musician could be born. Gangubai’s mother, for example, stopped singing Carnatic music so that Gangu’s talim in Hindustani music would not be affected.

And talking of hardship, the musical achievement of Gangubai and Pattammal cannot be separated from their struggles to overcome prejudice and discrimination, and, eventually, their great triumph: extending the space of women performers. To begin with, they shared the restrictions imposed on them because of their gender. But more specifically, the two women faced the brick-wall rules of caste.

In the case of Gangubai, it was the numerous ways in which she could be isolated as lower caste. Gangubai spoke of the niggling little fears that dogged her even as a schoolchild. She recalled, for instance, that she would often hide when she saw a teacher passing by, in case she was asked to sit separately. And when she was part of a group of school students who sang an invocatory hymn at the Congress session in Belgaum in the 1920s, she was again afraid; this time that she would be asked to go out and eat separately. (She wasn’t.)

Pattammal, too, suffered from the rigidities of caste conventions — but in a different way. As a Brahmin woman, the benefits of gurukul training were denied to her. Her own mother sang well, but was not allowed to perform even for friends or the family. Pattammal was forced to notate songs in concerts and take down the key phrases of ragas. And when her talent was discovered, her father, a lover of music, was worried about the stigma that would be attached to public performance. Luckily, the headmistress of the school Pattammal studied in convinced him. Later, her husband was also a supportive figure.

How did these two women manage their delicate balance between strength and openness? An openness growing out of their generosity but also their vulnerability?

Maybe there is an oblique answer in two endearing images of Pattammal that I will always cherish — one from a concert at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, and the other on YouTube. The YouTube gem features a 90-year-old Pattammal singing the Indian national anthem. The syllables are measured and solemn as she spells out the anthem in that slow and clear way she has. She sings the words so they seem to be describing a spacious land with room for everyone. What you hear conjures images of a place on a grand scale. And there is such a sweet expression on Pattammal’s face as she sings, that nothing need be said about what the song means to her. It can be seen, the deep joy and the sense of belonging the song brings to her even as she sings it. Patriotism becomes something else the minute it is called by that word, the minute it is valorized and made official. Perhaps those who hate in the name of patriotism or bore on forever about packaging a commodity called Brand India should be made to learn from the look on Pattammal’s face as she sings the anthem.

And at the JNU concert I referred to earlier, Pattammal spoke to the students briefly about the distinguishing features of the two great composers whose work she sang that day. She described them in homely images that showed how much their work was a part of her: a song by Thyagaraja, she said, was like a banana, it went down so smoothly and sweetly. But a song by Muthuswamy Dikshitar was like a coconut. You would get something worthwhile in the end, but you had to work for it by breaking open the resisting nut.

Pattammal and Gangubai were both keepers of tradition who were not traditionalists. They enriched tradition, and in the process became trailblazers. Ultimately these women, through their music and their lives, extended the meaning of ‘progressive’, filled it out so we get a better idea of the possibilities of the word and the reality.