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Kaloor:
Kerala
Harmony
High
This
man is not just a music lover, he's a passionate collector too
By
M. G. Radhakrishnan
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| Namboodiri
can talk in detail about each title in his 25,000-album collection
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When
the leftists rode to power in Kerala in the 1950s, political rallies-both
for and against the world's first elected communist government-were the
order of the day. The meetings invariably ended with music or a popular
play and it became difficult to tell whether the crowds came there as
political supporters or to entertain themselves. P.T. Krishnan Namboodiri
has no qualms about why he went: "I attended all meetings irrespective
of the party organising them. My only aim was to listen to the songs."
What began
as a pastime soon grew into a passion. Then an employee at Kawdiar Palace
of the Travancore royalty, Namboodiri, 65 now, would go over the songs
played at the meetings and make sure he acquired the albums in which they
featured. Within four years, he had managed a collection of a couple of
hundred albums, mainly of music from Malayalam, Tamil and Hindi films.
Today Namboodiri's home, Aswathy, at Kaloor in Ernakulam, is a museum
with over 25,000 titles.
"Our
space is shrinking," says Namboodiri's wife Parvathy, pointing to
the records, cassettes and CDs-the collection has kept pace with the times-neatly
stacked like library books in every conceivable space in the house. But
she isn't complaining. Even if it means her husband, now a manager with
a marine exports firm, spends most of his "meager" income on
them. Nothing, the couple emphases, can compensate for the wealth of notes
that resound in the air at home.
Anyone with
an ear for music would vouch for that. For those who have visited Aswathy-and
they come from far and wide-it's a whole new experience. Malayalam composer
G. Devarajan apparently stayed on for three days to get his fill. But
that's nothing. "If one spends eight hours a day one would need 34
months to finish listening to the songs in my collection," beams
Namboodiri as he places a disc carefully on a century-old hand-winding
gramophone with a magnificent brass horn.
The treasured
titles include those from the pre-film song era, of the likes of Miss
Dulari, the "gramophone girl", and Pearu Qawal-all recorded
on wax discs. For those who are interested, Namboodiri will tell you that
these recordings were done by pioneers like T.W. Gaisberg who had worked
with Emile Berliner, the American inventor of disc recording. Berliner,
along with W.B. Owen, had set up the Gramophone Company Ltd in England
in 1898. Its operations in India began in 1902 and continues under RPG
Enterprises. Equally interesting is evidence that the English valued Hindustani
music even then. "These Hindustani records," the still legible
print on a record jacket in Namboodiri's collection goes, "are probably
the best proof of the far-reaching properties of the gramophone and they
must be of special interest to all loyal Englishmen as being representatives
of our large eastern possessions."
Hindi film
songs comprise the largest part of Namboodiri's collection. They include
such vintage scores as Chhod aakash ke sung by Govindrao Tembe
for V. Shantaram's Maya Machindra (1932), released a year after
the first Hindi talkies Alam Ara hit the screen, and Raat aai
hai by Shanta Apte in Amrit Manthan (1934).
The 1940s
and thereafter are equally well represented. From K.L. Saigal to Lata
Mangeshkar-they are all there. There's a vast range of Malayalam and Carnatic
music-rarities include a song from the second Malayalam talkies Jnanambika
(1940)-as also Bhojpuri, Bengali and western pop. The collection also
has speeches of Gandhiji, Rabindranath Tagore and others, recorded by
HMV and H. Bose.
With the
help of his son K.T. Unnikrishnan, Namboodiri has even documented his
collection in detail. For Unnikrishnan, it's a full-time occupation. "This
is my greatest legacy," he says. The stream of music lovers apart,
many recording majors too approach the family for long-forgotten titles.
They always oblige. And it's generally for a worthy price: pleasure. The
pleasure of sheer harmony.
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