ABSTRACT
On 30 September 1982, T. Sankaran interviewed in Tamil, T. Natarajasundara Pillai, one of the great nagasvaram players of the Shri Tyagarajasvami temple at Tiruvarur, for All India Radio. One of his questions concerned the issue of change in the tradition of ritual performing arts. Problems of change and continuity cut deep into the heart of the hereditary community of ritual artists (Ta. melakkarans). Both music and dance are part of South Indian, Karnatic tradition. The male colleagues of the late T. Natarajasundara Pillai continue their ritual labour up to this day in South Indian Hindu temples and in social rites of passage; their instrument, the nagasvaram ‘sound of the snake’, marks them as members of the periya melam, or, ‘big band’. In contrast, the ‘small band’ of female dancers, (Ta. cinna melam), was ousted by law (1947 Devadasi Act) from its ritual tasks. (Kersenboom 1987: xxi) Taking this drastic verdict into consideration, T. Natarajasundara Pillai’s answer to the problem of ‘change’ is amazing: ‘marapu marutal alla’. What does this mean? Tamil is a very flexible language, capable of expressing concepts that are broader and more sensitive than simple black-or-white contrasts. In this case the choice of ‘alla’ is crucially revealing. On close scrutiny, the verb ‘to be’ offers three, not two variants; instead of opting for a ‘yes’ employing the verb ‘to be’ (Ta. ul, untu) or for a ‘no’, using ‘not to be’ (Ta. il, illatu), T. Natarajasundara Pillai chose ‘al, allatu’, that is, ‘to be different’. In other words, tradition (Ta. marapu) cannot be defined conclusively in terms of ‘continuity’ or ‘change’ (Ta. marutal); they are ‘different’ (Ta. allatu), different from stasis and different from change: changing and not changing at the same time. Something else is at work. It is this ‘difference-at-work’ that is central to this essay.
