Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan
The mid-winter air of Chennai is expected to smell of jasmine, wet silk, and filter coffee. This Margazhi, however, it carried something heavier—a quiet dread. For weeks, the great sabhas stood like emptied temples after a festival aborted midway. The silences were not restful; they were accusatory.
Whispered theories circulated in canteens and corridors: had the rasika moved on? Had the long apprenticeship of listening finally yielded to distraction, convenience, and screens? Was the Mahotsav itself becoming a relic, fondly remembered but no longer lived?
Then, at precisely eighteen hundred hours on the twenty-fifth of December, at Narada Gana Sabha, the spell broke. The emptiness did not merely dissolve—it was overwhelmed. Review of the concert could wait. What mattered first was the unmistakable sound of return.
For nearly a decade, the sixteenth hour on the twenty-fifth of December had been a fixed star in the Margazhi firmament. At four in the afternoon, year after year, Ranjani and Gayathri—RaGa to rasikas—took the stage at The Music Academy before a sell-out crowd that treated that slot as sacrosanct.
The Academy, long regarded as the elitist preserve of Carnatic orthodoxy, yielded effortlessly to their presence. Aisles filled, stairways were claimed, and even the edge of the dais became fair game. That certainty, however, ended in rupture.
In the 2024–25 season, RaGa chose to step away. Their boycott of the Academy was neither theatrical nor impulsive. It was a deliberate act of principle—to uphold the values that have made Carnatic music what it is at its core: a divine, inward, bhakti-driven experience, not a negotiable cultural commodity.
Predictably, the choice unsettled the ecosystem. The gesture was variously labelled arrogance, obstinacy, courage, or defiance. Yet what many mistook for abandonment was, in fact, leadership. In a cultural horizon accustomed to quiet compliance, RaGa demonstrated—without slogan or sermon—that conviction still had a spine. They did not merely wear the mantle of musicianship; they wore the pants.
This season, the answer came not as a hashtag or viral clip, but as bodies—thousands of them—queuing, jostling, negotiating space with the old choreography of devotion. The turnstiles groaned. The ticket counter was irrelevant.
Balconies were staked out with handbags and handkerchiefs, those quiet insignia of veteran rasikas. Extra chairs appeared like emergency rations. Even the ground floor, priced beyond nostalgia, was a heaving ocean of heads. This was not attendance; it was allegiance. The prodigal rasika had come home.
In an age that tempts music into T20 bursts and algorithmic approval, this gathering affirmed something older and sterner: that the rasika still recognises conviction. Mastery alone no longer suffices; it must be accompanied by moral temperature. The audience did not merely come for raga and tala—they came to stand with musicians whose choices mirrored their own unease with inherited hierarchies.
When the curtain rose, the artistes were not isolated beneath lights; they were held. The crowd on the dais formed a human rampart, shielding them from the ghosts of institutional seasons past. Every alapana crackled with shared intent.
Every thani avarthanam was met not with polite approval but with thunder. Power had shifted. Fame, it seemed, was no longer dispensed solely by entrenched gatekeepers but forged anew in the furnace of collective belief.
That evening, the music was luminous—but it was the second miracle. The first was witnessing a community rediscover its pulse, reclaiming Margazhi not as a schedule, but as a shared inheritance. The rasika had not vanished. They had merely been waiting—for a reason to return, and for music worthy of calling them home.
