Keshav & His Music

Samanth Subramanian

I’ve been asked to write about Keshav’s relationship with music, which I consider a great privilege, because Keshav loved his music so much that he seemed to live for it, and so to talk about Keshav and music is to talk about his life force itself, the thing that occupied his mind more hours of the day than anything else. Carnatic music in particular filled his heart. You will also doubtless have read his biography of MS Subbulakshmi, called “Of Gifted Voice,” which was published earlier this year. But there was something in the way Keshav related to this music that was very eloquent, that said so much about the kind of person he was, and even about the kind of person we could all hope to be.

I was first introduced to Keshav back in 2012, when we both lived in Delhi, by a couple of friends who knew of our shared interest in Carnatic music. I have a feeling Ram was one of them. For a couple of years, I’d been writing a short column on music in a weekend paper, and Keshav had read some of these pieces and asked for an introduction. In itself, this was remarkable. He was still working in the civil service; he had a full life, and he had friends all over the city; he didn’t particularly have to make the effort to meet new people. Moreover, there was no question that his knowledge and appreciation of music was vastly superior to anything I or my brief columns could claim. Introducing us must have felt, to Ram, like introducing Gundappa Viswanath to a fourth-division cricketer. But it didn’t matter to Keshav; to share an enthusiasm was the most important thing. It revealed his sense of egalitarianism, and his disregard of disparities in age or experience. I’ve never met anyone else who has forged genuine, equal friendships with so many people so much younger than him.

To sit next to Keshav at a concert was a terrific experience. He wasn’t one of those constant talkers, thank heavens, and if he hummed, it was only very occasionally and very quietly. But he had a very mobile face, and he’d use it to turn to you in silent communication. The raised eyebrows in puzzlement if he heard a phrase that was off, or a song that was unexpected. The rolled eyes if a singer started pandering. The pursed-lip nod of appreciation when he heard something he admired. He knew what he liked and what he didn’t like, but this never made him dogmatic. He was open to being surprised or to being unexpectedly pleased.

Keshav with his sisters

This is even more extraordinary when you consider just how much he knew about music. This was a man who recalled song lists from concerts in the 1960s, a man who, out of his own interest, meticulously created an index for the music magazine Shruti. In the lecture demonstrations that mark the mornings of the music season’s schedule every December, it was invariably the case that he knew nearly as much or more as the person delivering the lecture. Once, after we’d attended a talk by a very well-respected violinist, about a set of songs by Muthuswami Dikshitar, Keshav went right home and emailed me a journal article he’d read and digested years earlier, on aspects of these songs that the violinist hadn’t talked about. But this depth of knowledge never interfered with his capacity for delight, which if you think about it is a very unusual thing.

Part of the reason was that, while he seriously loved his music, he never took it—or himself—seriously. There were no holy cows, there were no ineffable sanctities. He recognised music as a human enterprise, as something that could be inspiring on one day and comical on the next, just as humans are. My absolute fondest memories of sitting next to Keshav in concerts have to do with the occasions when he did lean over to say something to me—not to share information, but to remind me of an inside joke or make a gossipy remark. And then we would both dissolve into fits of giggles, shaking silently next to each other, while others stared at us. One day he called me, falling all over himself with laughter, just to say that he’d found out a fact that verged on the absurd: that the two young great granddaughters of MS Subbulakshmi, who often perform together, always do so with a painted effigy of MS backstage—that they take this effigy along to every concert everywhere. A little while later, he found a photo of the effigy and sent it along as well. That photo became atrope for us: a literal idolization of the kind that Keshav never subscribed to, and that he thought was positively injurious to the appreciation of art. while later, he found a photo of the effigy and sent it along as well. That photo became atrope for us: a literal idolization of the kind that Keshav never subscribed to, and that he thought was positively injurious to the appreciation of art.

If Keshav had idolized MS, his book wouldn’t have been half as good as it is. The thing that made the book was that he was able to regard MS with both fondness and clarity. MS’ concerts over the years formed the spine of his life, so it would have been so easy for him to drown the book in nostalgia. As he was writing the book, and as we discussed the things he was finding, he’d say, in fact, that his first responsibility was to avoid that temptation to be sentimental. And the book shows how he succeeded in that—how he’s warm towards MS but aware of her failures or her missteps. Here’s an example. One of the most popular criticisms of MS was that many of her concerts sounded the same. That they were made up of some subset of a small number of songs and ragas, and that she sang these with little variation—even the alapanas, which are theoretically composed on the spot, could feel predictable. Anyone else who loved her music as much as Keshav did might have felt defensive about this. But Keshav acknowledged it, explained it, and looked beyond it: he saw it as a part of a greater picture. Which didn’t stop him, of course, from sending me emails every time he found an MS rendition of a song he’d never heard her sing. His excitement was palpable every time, as if he’d found a lost Picasso.

I consider it an honour to write about this side of Keshav, in part because I think it offers us some secrets on how to live. I’ve been reading a new book by Rebecca Solnit, titled “Orwell’s Roses,” in which she writes about George Orwell’s politics but also about his love of gardening and nature. It’s easy to think of liberals as dour scolds, she writes—easy to think, in fact, that if we are politically engaged in facing up to the world’s problems, we shouldn’t really have time for roses or music or literature. But Orwell’s love of nature, like Keshav’s love of music, complicates that easy stereotype and raises different kinds of questions. “They were questions,” and here I quote Solnit, “they were questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”

About the author

Samanth Subramanian is an Indian writer and journalist based in London. He studied journalism at Penn State University and international relations at Columbia University. In 2018–19, he was a Leon Levy Fellow at the City University of New York. He is also a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian and WIRED.