I’m reading Kalki Selected Short Stories, translated from Tamil by Gowri Ramnarayan. Highly recommend. The collection is full of period details (many nods to the freedom struggle, not surprising, Kalki was active in the movement) and tiny cultural cues that are so RK Narayan to me. I just finished with “Sivakozhundu of Tiruvazhundur” and loved how Kalki uses music as a shorthand for the soul.
What the story is about
Sivakozhundu of Tiruvazhundur follows Sivakozhundu, a gifted young musician who goes through some highly emotional love-drama. The way the first-person story teller summarizes that phase: “Earlier, his zest had been reserved for ragams like Kalyani, Sankarabharanam, Hamsadhvani, Nattai and Kedaram. […] But more recently, Tambi had taken to playing ragams like Khambhoji, Kedaragowlai, Huseni, Mukhari, and Khamas.” Aahaa….
You know me—I don’t know these ragams, but you know me, I needed to know about them.
Classic Kalki symbolism, and then some
I expected Group A ragams to be happy and Group B to be sad. Yes, they pretty much are that, but way more nuanced. Group A ragams are bright, majestic, confident: Kalyani, Sankarabharanam, Hamsadhvani, Nattai, Kedaram—these are all ragams associated with brilliance, valor, stability, and clarity. They symbolize a person whose life is ordered, hopeful, energized, basically someone that’s emotionally upright.
Group B ragams revealed a different kind of emotional complexity. LIke intimate, melancholic, and vulnerable. Kambhoji, Kedaragowlai, Huseni, Mukhari, Khamas—these ragams lean toward longing, introspection, romantic yearning, emotional turbulence. Moods of pleading, nostalgia, and inner conflict. Mukhari is apparently one of Carnatic music’s definitive ragams for pain mixed with sweetness. These are the ragams symbolic of someone whose inner world is aching, unresolved, vulnerable. So our man Sivakozhundu switching from A to B is typical of the psychological shading Kalki loved to do.
[I’m looking for the right YouTube links to post for each ragam, so my dear reader can experience for yourself what Kalki was talking about. Will update this writeup once I have them all.]
Carnatic music has a codified emotional palette. Certain ragams are culturally recognized as “love-ragams,” “separation-ragams,” or “lamentation-ragams.” When the hero switches ragams, readers know his emotional state without a single explicit sentence because the ragams Kalki references are almost textbook examples of these contrasts.
Why this still hits
Kalki’s trick is your timeless “show, don’t tell.” Like when the DJ abandons all dhinchak Bollywood pretense and surrenders to Jagjit Singh at 2am—everyone knows we’ve entered the emotional damage zone.
That Kalki could write a sentence like: “He no longer played Kalyani; his fingers sought Mukhari”—and readers of Kalki, Ananda Vikatan or Kumudham would immediately decode the psychological meaning—says so much about the cultural knowledge of ragams among 1930s/40s middle-class Tamil readers. Carnatic music wasn’t a niche—it was ambient culture. Using ragam names as emotional shorthand wasn’t highbrow, infact Kalki was writing in the common vocabulary of the time.
Again, not “elitist, Brahminical, kutcheri culture”—simply the cultural environment. Popular weeklies relied on shared symbolic codes. Writers of that era—Kalki, Devan, Pudhumaipithan, even Balakumaran later—used raga names, temple towns, mythological figures, astrological references, flora and fauna from Sangam and bhakti poetry because they assumed readers would instantly catch the emotional undertone.
This was the lingua franca of the literate but non-elite reader—just middle-class Tamil sensibility.
Some interesting links:
A recent writeup on Gowri Ramnarayan, the translator and Kalki’s granddaughter
Here’s a meticulously compiled database of Carnatic ragas in Ilayaraja’s film compositions. Illayaragam: Ragaam in tamil film songs by Illayaraja