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.

— Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan

It is 13.22 PM. December, 25th, 2025. Thursday. Venue: R R Sabha, Mylapore. Auspices: Brahma Gana Sabha.

It is not every season that young rookies get to perform on stages of major Sabhas.

The atmosphere carried that unmistakable Margazhi electricity—part incense, part expectation, part silent prayer that at least the front rows would be occupied. Under the benevolent umbrella of Brahma Gana Sabha, the young vocal duo took the stage, supported with quiet assurance by Madhumitha Doraiswamy on the violin and Rishi Manoharan on the mridangam, both well aware that afternoon concerts are less about applause and more about faith.

They opened with Eka Dantham in Bilahari, a buoyant homage to Muthuswamy Dikshitar in his 250th birth anniversary year. Bilahari did what it does best—smiled reassuringly—even as the reviewer slipped into a philosophical emergency. What does one do when the pen in one’s hand shares both lineage and lunch table with the voices on stage?

Music criticism, tradition insists, has a Lakshmana rekha. One may father a musician, encourage them, finance them, even panic discreetly on their behalf. But the moment one reviews them, criticism risks becoming autobiography.

To review one’s own daughters’ concert is parental courage masquerading as detachment. If generous, it is nepotism; if severe, it is courage admired only by those not invited home thereafter. Subtlety, that elusive madhyama mārga, rarely survives blood relations. Music demands ruthless honesty; parenthood thrives on selective deafness.

History offers little comfort. Paternal commentary has oscillated between terrifying severity and indulgent advocacy. These are cautionary tales, not templates. Mercifully, this afternoon required neither. When the duo rendered Parthasarathy Nannu Palimpara in Madhyamavathi, the choice felt geographically apt—a gentle salute to Triplicane, once enfolded within Mylapore’s cultural embrace.

As for the turnout, let us be charitable. The hall was… spacious. It would have taken a RaGa to fill it. Get it? Margazhi, however, is forgiving; empty chairs have heard great music before.

Full disclosure, then: the performers were Bhargavi and Ranganayaki, and the reviewer their father. In the Chennai season, even the most improbable family arrangements eventually find their rhythmic resolution—usually in Ādi tāla.

          Narasimhan Vijayaraghavan

The thinning of audiences in the 2025–26 season is not a quirk of calendar but a structural malaise. Free afternoon concerts were once crowded proving grounds for artistes on the cusp, with halls that quietly drained at dusk as ticketed celebrity evenings began—a ritual that signified abundance.

This year, the chairs stay vacant regardless of hour. The paradox deepens when one recalls that the supply of trained musicians has never been richer: millennials and Gen Z artistes, global pedagogy, and technical polish aplenty. Yet demand appears anaemic.

One explanation is saturation. Too many Sabhas, too many concerts, compressed into too few weeks, competing for the same finite pool of listeners. Scarcity once created pilgrimage; excess now breeds indifference.

Another shift is behavioural. Rasikas have not vanished; they have dispersed. Social media is awash with images of packed venues elsewhere, suggesting attendance has become selective and episodic—driven by buzz rather than habit.

Most curious is the failure of live streaming. Offers found no takers, despite an obvious constituency: homebound listeners and the elderly, long assumed to crave access without travel. Streaming fell between stools—neither the gravitas of the hall nor the intimacy of private listening—an idea right in theory, wrong in execution.

One can almost hear Subbudu sharpening his pen. He might have remarked that when music multiplies faster than listening, halls will echo, artistes will perspire, and only the sambar will enjoy standing ovations.

The canteens thrive because food adapts faster than institutions. Until concerts do the same—spread across the year, reimagined in form, and freed from seasonal congestion—the music will endure, but the halls may not.