Academics
Of all the stars in the \nCarnatic music galaxy from the 1930s through the 1980s, there was one star \nthat outshone the brilliance of the rest: the irrepressible genius, S. \nBalachander, who stormed into the prim Madras music scene with a panache and \neccentricity that no contemporary of his could match. The veena maestro began \nhis music career at a time when stalwart vocalists ruled the roost and \ninstrumentalists played second fiddle to them. But being an independent \nminded and self-taught artiste, balachander carved a unique niche for himself \nas a veena soloist. He boldly changed the grammar of instrument music, \ncontemporized the veena and created a legacy known as the balachander Bani, \nor style. But balachander’s iconoclastic and brash ways earned him the ire of \nthe Carnatic music fraternity. He was quick to pick quarrels with established \nfellow musicians in his lifelong quest for perfection and truth. So was \nbalachander a beloved genius or a much-maligned maverick? The book attempts \nto recreate the towering personality that he was- a lot of this researched \nfrom his elaborate personal diaries. While his death in 1990 created a void \nin the Carnatic realm, the issues he fought for remain relevant till date, \nand his memory lives on in the minds of music connoisseurs. As the maestro \nhimself would have smugly said: ‘veena is balachander, balachander is veena.
Bangalore-based historian Vikram Sampath is the author of seven acclaimed books, including Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars; My Name Is Gauhar Jaan: The Life and Times of a Musician; Voice of the Veena: S Balachander: A Biography; Women of the Records and Indian Classical Music and the Gramophone: 1900-1930. His latest books, published by Penguin Random House India, are the two-volume biography Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past and Savarkar: A Contested Legacy, 1924-1966. Both the volumes have gone on to become national best sellers.In 2021, Vikram was elected as fellow to the prestigious Royal Historical Society of the United Kingdom. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi's first Yuva Puraskar in English literature and the ARSC International Award for excellence in historical research in New York for his book on Gauhar Jaan. The book has also been adapted to theatre as a play Gauhar by Lillette Dubey and is being adapted to a Bollywood film by Ashutosh Gowariker. Vikram was among the four writers and artists to be selected as a writer-in-residence at the Rashtrapati Bhawan in 2015. Vikram has a doctorate in history and music from the University of Queensland, Australia, and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. He is also an Aspen Global Leadership Fellow and an Eisenhower Global Fellow 2021. An engineer/mathematician from BITS-Pilani and with an MBA degree in finance from S. P. Jain, Mumbai, Vikram is also a trained Carnatic vocalist. He has established the Archive of Indian Music, India's first digital sound archive for vintage recordings. He is the founder-director of the Bangalore Literature Festival and curates the ZEE Group's ARTH-A Culture Fest.
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