Invasive tourism will not faze culture hub Chennai
Unesco’s Creative Cities honour comes with its own set of challenges, but the city has the resilience to deal with it
Following Unesco’s imprimatur on October 31, 2017, Chennai, famed for its rich musical heritage, has joined Unesco’s Creative Cities Network as the Creative City of Music. The city has been an irresistible force in music since the earliest period of recorded Tamil history. One of the most virtuosic early exponents of Carnatic music was Purandara Das (1484-1564). The immortal kritis of saint-composers from Thanjavur, Thyagaraja, Muttuswami Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri have inspired generations of musicians and continue to be part of the living repertoire of Carnatic music celebrated in festivals such as the Vaggeyakara .
The charm of the classical repertoire still manages to attract Tamil teens brought up with a strong sense of their cultural heritage. Consider young vocalists Anahita and Apoorva, who started their training with their grandmother, Shanti Jayaraman. Srivastha, a flautist who learnt the flute from his father P V Ramana and Ambi Subramaniam, son of Dr L Subramaniam, who proudly traces his musical lineage back to the trinity of singer, saint-composers. So do, Usha Uthup’s granddaughter Ayesha Elizabeth John, AR Rahman’s son Ameen, among others .
There are more than 350 cultural institutions, 25 large institutional performance spaces and several neighbourhood grassroots venues. The Madras Music Academy, the Narada Gana SabhaSri Parthasarathy Swamy Sabha, Sri Krishna Gana Sabha, Sir Venkatasubba Rao concert hall, Tamil Isai Sangam and the Kalakshetra Foundation are iconic venues with a distinct old-world charm.
Musically, the season kicks off with a big festival in November, which features a plurality of genres in intimate settings. It works as a preamble to the month-long festival held in December, the Tamil month of Margazhy, traditionally dedicated to spirituality.
Waltzing into Unesco’s Creative Cities Network comes with its own challenges. The city will have to work within the framework of UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and effectively demonstrate culture’s role as an enabler for building sustainable ecosystems. Unesco’s validation is bound to lead to a tide of invasive tourism, in what is playfully called ‘Unesco-cide’ but Chennai is not a city that gets easily fazed by attention. It has been splaying itself open, but in a guarded way. Ghatam, khanjira, Thavil, Mugaveenai and other instruments are still in vogue and organisations such as the Kalakshetra have begun restoring their traditional performance spaces. Chennai will continue to retain the charm of its classical repertoire even as it dabbles with technology, multiplicity of genres, the quirky and even the implausible.