In Memoriam: Sri Tumuluri Satyagopal (1935-2023)

I did not publish a review of my spring or summer (though they were drafted) because I wasn’t ready to talk about the most important thing happening in my life.

After a sharp decline in his physical health over the past year, my beloved Tatayya, Sri Tumuluri Satyagopal, passed away on September 10th. I know it’s typical to write an obituary or provide a biography, but I don’t think I could do justice. He has been an immense gravitational force on me, blessing me and my young family in more ways than I can enumerate, and I am just one of so many lives he’s touched. A scientist, a musicologist, a composer, a music educator, a musician, a devout father (and grandfather and great-grandfather), a dutiful son, and beloved husband who has finally crossed over after walking alongside my Ammamma for over 73 years.

These past few months have been one large set of lessons - about grief, fortitude, saying goodbye, healing wounds, and so much more. I’m still unpacking and processing them, but I do want to share a few things I’ve learned from watching him over the years, in no particular order.

Devote yourself to the work you find meaning.
Tatayya retired from his work as a coal scientist for the Indian government in 1995, as was the norm. He never stopped work, learning, doing, thinking, writing. After retiring, Tatayya signed up for HTML classes (and created garishly colored website designs, as was typical during the wild-wild-west era of the early internet days - if only I had a screenshot to share…) He became well-versed in using his personal desktop specifically for the purpose of his work in music, devising a complex folder system for his materials and putting together hundreds of pages of learning materials for his students.
Tatayya composed, taught, played, created because he was compelled to do so. He prayed, read and recited sacred verses, and taught them with the same ardor. He took up the violin, wholeheartedly, joyously learning from a teacher who was much younger than him.
End of day, he devoted himself to what he found meaningful. And also, he devoted himself to what he found meaningful (more to come on that).

Agency and self-efficacy is the best gift you can give young people.
I must have been around six or seven. I was spending hours each day with Tatayya, my cross-legged knees touching his, practicing sarali swaras, janta swaras, alankaras, and geetams. He would explain the relationship between the swaram, the sahityam, and the bhavam, as well as how to manage breathe to ensure the sanctity and wholeness of each word was maintained.

One day, he gave me a simple swara pattern and asked me to come up with lyrics -
Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Da Ni - / Sa Ri Ga Ma Pa Da Ni Sa / Sa Ni Da Pa Ma Ga Ri - / Sa Ni Da Pa Ma Ga Ri Sa

A few hours later, I shyly came back with this -
Go - var - dhanuni - / Ett - tina Va- - du / Chin - - - ni - - / Kri - - - shnu - - du
“Little Krishna is the one who raised the mountain Govardhana”

It rhymed. The mountain went up the scale, and lifting it went higher. “Small” went down the scale and as did Krishna - with finality. To this day, his delighted laugh at my offering is a core memory for me. He believed in my ability and I lived up to it, and I thought I too can write and create.

I don’t think I ever sang that couplet again, but that sense of possibility and competence left an etch in my spirit, and while I’ve forgotten to trust myself time and again, that mark has served as a guiding sign to prompt remembering.

In his children’s stories, that same sense of possibility and self-efficacy serve as a unifying thread that’s part of three very differently woven paths - the surgeon, the dancer, the engineer.

I cannot recall him ever cautioning me against my dreams, be they my college, my professional path, my choice in life partner, or my artistic pursuits. It may have manifested as an occasional encouraging word and a steady presence - but most of all - a certitude that I am capable and I can be - no, will be - successful.

Above all, love.

Tatayya could be cantankerous at times. I watched him rage at God, grumble over minor movement of his things, and huff and pout dramatically when he was waiting for news. But when it mattered, he would be there, welcoming, unconditionally loving. I watched him model time and time again, that regardless of how others approached him, or what had transpired in the past, he would greet them with love and a fresh new page to start a new chapter.

Even with my own fair-weather approach to music classes and multiple breaks away from the art that formed his life-blood, he never once raised his voice at me, and even on the occasions when I went back to class only to learn a song for dance, he taught lovingly and shared willingly with no expectations in return.

It is with the secure knowledge of his love that I could confide in him OR go off for long periods doing my own thing, and come back to sit with him. Whether I was there for music class or just his sheer presence (even on my most grumpy, contrarian days), whether I was there to learn, or to dramatically rant, or even just sit and listen to him practicing violin, I was always welcome.

I cannot even begin to truly unpack all the ways he personified unconditional love, but I imagine I’ll only be learning more and more as I continue to grow both as a parent and as a dance teacher.

Be independent.

At surface level, Tatayya’s independence looks like him teaching classes for as long as he could, and he and Ammamma living as independently as possible my entire life. (Oh, the number of times my mom would try to dissuade them from walking along a busy street to make their own way to the grocery store and back!)

There’s another facet of independence that’s much more subversive, much more radical. Just in my limited lens, I have seen him come up with at least two or three distinctive transliteration schemes, revamp the approach to the fundamentals of Carnatic music pedagogy to tie the relationship between swaram and sahityam from day 1, and recalibrate the 35 talas alankaras so that they’re internally consistent between the basic 7 talas and other 28. He used the same inductive reasoning approach that led to his presentation on blend ragas at the Music Academy to re-imagine a tala system where the length of the laghu isn’t fixed within a tala (e.g., we go from 5 variants to many more if each of the three laghus in the dhruva talam could be different lengths). He similarly began devising a different framework for naming ragas that reveals the raga’s structure (just as is the case with the names of the 72 melakarta ragas).

Quite honestly, my visceral reaction for the last two was “is this necessary?” but - that’s not the question that leads to innovation and growth. “Why not?” or “what if?” or “where does it lead?” paves the path to more grounded explorations than “why bother?,” as Tatayya - ever the scientist - was demonstrating.

This fierce independence of thought is, in a sense, compulsion to follow questions to new grounds rather than treading familiar “traditional” ways, and whether or not there’s ever wide-spread adoption of any one of his many frameworks, they provide but a tacit permission to explore and rethink the systems supporting the arts we love AND a template for how to engage differently with convention and tradition. After all, would the Carnatic Trinity have been the Carnatic Trinity had they not revolutionized the form? Isn’t art supposed to be ever changing like a flame that’s passed along rather than be fixed photocopies?

Meaning is there wherever you want to see it.

Here’s the - erm - proper version. Tatayya had a scientist’s mind and an artist’s heart, and he was a man of immense faith. Regardless of how difficult or cruel life got, he had faith in divinity and the ultimate balance of the universe because “God is the one protecting and taking care of everything, we shouldn’t be worrying.”

Here’s the more light-hearted version. Tatayya reveled in puns - not just any puns, but multi-lingual, multidimensional word play to create understanding and meaning with a light touch and a sly sense of humor.

Richmond is very rich, he would joke, and honestly, it has been, for our lives. It’s been home for longer than any other place I’ve been rooted, and it’s been a grounding, fertile place where I’ve grown personally, professionally, and artistically. Isn’t good soil what makes a place rich?

The day of my performance last December, when I presented several of Amma’s choreographies set to his compositions, he made an elaborate extended metaphor to Ganapati in the form of our mridangist Vijay Ganesh and our vocalist Vignesh Subramanian. It was a jovial play on their names, but the deeper truth is, it took a series of events and these artists’ convergence with our family for these choreographies (and Tatayya’s compositions!) - so meaningful for my own growth and stuck within the four walls of our dance class for years and years - to come into the public space.

My favorite one though is one he’s rolled out on a regular basis - a gentle chiding to stay grounded. He’d say “Mee andariki chaala high pitch, ante high picchi,” meaning we all have a high sruthi, as well as a lot of crazy.

Taking the time to notice and delight in the absurdities of life and then seeking meaning in them has just been so helpful to reclaim a semblance of control at time when my world has felt like it’s in free-fall, and it’s also a tool to accept “through understanding” what I cannot control.

The final one I’ll leave you with is the single lesson he would insistently tell me again and again and again (and not only me), a remarkably simple one that, I must admit, I’m still working to implement: Practice every day, at least for five minutes.

He would beseech that I go turn on the sruthi box, sit in front of my altar, and just sing for five minutes. For that matter, the same can apply to all the things - singing, praying, writing, dancing, practicing an instrument - to make it a small, grounding, sacred practice that anchors each day.

Love and Light to you all.