September 11th, 2021, "Mahakavi Day," marked the death centenary of Indian national poet, C. Subramania Bharati (1882-1921).

Bharati, the greatest Tamil writer of the 20th century, is a legendary figure. He was a multifaceted personality - leading to the interesting situation that, even today, the full extent of the poet's artistic and intellectual contributions is not known. Much remains to be discovered!

This podcast episode deals with a lesser-known aspect of Bharati's creativity: the music that the poet composed for his own poems to be sung. While the words of Bharati's songs are well-known to the public, his melodies are not. When Indian classical musicians do sing his songs, they generally write their own melodies, or adapt them from versions popularized in the movies.

I discuss Bharati's musical contributions with a star of South India's classical music scene, percussion maestro Suresh Vaidyanathan. Suresh plays a uniquely fascinating traditional instrument, the ghatam – a clay pot.

Links:

Maestro Suresh's music teaching site, Ghatam Kulam, is available here. His interview and performance on ghatam with the Sandy Evans Trio was broadcast on Australian radio earlier this week, and is available here.

Music Credits:

Drums of India, Bickram Ghosh on Tabla and V. Suresh On Ghatam. Subscribe to Bickram Ghosh's YouTube channel.

Alice Munro, a Canadian writer who is considered a modern master of the short story form, was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2013. She was 82 years old at the time, a formidable presence in Canadian letters, as described by Guy in this interview, and only one of a handful of women to have received this award. Her death in May of 2024 was a major event in world literature. In July, however, her daughter published an article in the Toronto Star revealing that she had been abused by Munro's husband - and that Munro was complicit in the abuse. Since then, the literary world has been grappling with this revelation. What does Andrea Skinner's story tell us about the world we live in and how it needs to change? This interview was recorded before Ms. Skinner published her story - but Guy presciently raised the difficult question of what to do when, as he says, "bad people are good writers."