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asked Hari what it was like to be working with her. “First out it was really quite nerve wracking, sitting down with an artist of her calibre, your music absolutely raw and exposed, is quite humbling but once you get over the initial shyness she was just inspiring and moreover supportive, like an old friend. I miss sitting down with her in our sessions. What did I learn? What did I learn? Hmm it's hard to
pinpoint.She opened my eyes in so many ways. Most of all she reminded me that music is not apart from life and life apart from music. Sounds simple but experiencing it, feeling it, is a different thing”.
Although a mentoring scheme, the World Routes Academy goes far beyond a series of master classes from mentor to mentee. By working with a mentor in their home country, the protegé is able to get an insight into their musical tradition from a local per- spective which in turn gives them a new perspective and role. One particular place which illustrated this well was a local excursion on our India trip which Aruna organized. We headed for Thanjavur, an important centre of South Indian art and architecture – most of the great living Chola temples which are UNESCO World Heritage Mon- uments are located in and around Thanjavur. It wasn’t a Chola tem- ple, however, that made the biggest impact on Hari, but a more modest place, the shrine of composer and saint Thyagaraja (the equivalent of Beethoven in Carnatic music), which Aruna took Hari to for their first collaboration to be recorded by Radio 3. The shrine itself was a modest whitewashed temple, in a small village some 20 km from the capital and situated on the banks of a dried-up holy river, but it inspired both musicians to play a stunning rendition of a song by the composer in question (which early readers can catch on Radio 3 on 16th July at 3 pm and online for a week after) and dig deep into the life and legacy of this important figurehead.
As well as working with a mentor belonging to the same musi- cal tradition, part of the Academy journey is about taking the mentee to their ancestral home and to help them reconnect to their own personal family history and cultural background.
For Hari this was Jaffna, the North of Sri Lanka where his par- ents were born but decided to leave around the time of the civil war to study abroad. Hari was born in the UK, but was sent back to Jaffna as a baby, to his grandparents house whilst his parents pre- pared for a new life for their small family in the UK. When Hari was 2 years old they were finally able to look after him and so toddler Hari was now ready for London. The recent BBC trip to Sri Lanka was an emotional journey for Hari as well as for the BBC crew. It certainly was the first time our team had entered what was virtual- ly still a police state littered with military checkpoints, the majority of which were occupied by teenage soldiers not knowing any dif- ferent. It felt eerie to be driving into Jaffna on the bumpy A9 road as the only Westerners apart from the odd UN convoy, and we were not sure how much (or little) music we’d encounter.
Hari reminisces: “There was definitely a mixture of feelings returning to Jaffna. My excitement to go back was mixed with anxi- ety and of course sadness! For my parents, Jaffna isn’t the same place they grew up in. Hence there was a mixture of old and new, joy of being there, seeing what the breeze felt like, what the dust felt like, what the people were like but also seeing the bullet holes in neglected houses, the landmine warning tapes and the stories and sobs of those who had lost loved ones or were still in pain. See- ing the landscape, the soil, the trees, the temples, the paddy fields was breathtaking, and visiting the houses that I grew up in was a lit- tle emotional as well, remembering my grand parents.”
But we did record music and were touched by the chilling sto- ries we heard first hand from musicians telling us what had hap- pened to them during the war. We heard (and recorded) a group of stick dancers/singers who had lost manuscripts and instruments, funeral singers mourning their own children and grandchildren, and yet many classical musicians had remained in Jaffna and con- tinued performing Carnatic music against all odds.
One of Hari’s musical highlights was a group of nadaswaram players which we recorded in the shade of a courtyard of a local Hindu temple. The nadaswaram is a typically South Indian reed instrument and the world's loudest non-brass acoustic instrument. In Hindu culture, the nadaswaram is considered to be very auspi- cious, and it is a key musical instrument played in practically all Tamil weddings and religious ceremonies. The fact that it was Tamil new year when we were in Jaffna, meant that the nadaswaram horn was part of our daily soundtrack and seeping out of the dozens of Hindu temples we encountered on our trip. Hari describes the music of this breathtakikng ensemble we recorded better then I can: “a concentration of 5 fully fledged 3- hour Carnatic concerts into an hour. Such was their depth, grandeur and intensity of raga or melody. And to top this, such simple sweet people, a truly humbling experience which made me proud of my Jaffna ancestry and moreover realise that Jaffna Tamils are what I know call diamonds in the rough! ”.
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