Kannada Will Grieve, As Its 'Adopted Son' Bids Farewell

The pinnacle of Bhava, Bhakti and Bhasha (Emotion, Devotion, and Diction) is how one may describe the man who passed away last noon gently, placing anyone who has heard him even once, into a strange, musical silence.

Even as the ‘gaana gandharva’ merges into the five elements today, he has left behind an ocean of admirers who have forgotten how else to emote, but through the songs he rendered the ‘bhaavas’ in.

Devotion embodied itself through the ‘Bhakti’ music that he wooed possibly all the gods with.

And, in a time where fanciful ideas of not knowing anything other than one’s own language is being flashed as a virtue, here was a Telugu man, who sang more Kannada songs than he did in the language of the state he chose to be based out of — Tamil — or his own mother tongue, Telugu.

On 8 February 1981, this son of Ma Saraswati recorded 21 songs for composer Upendra Kumar, in a straight 12 hours.

For SPB, in a way, also, is characteristic of the multilingual and linguistically creative, yet composed Karnataka, as it was during the era of the Vijayanagara empire — a court of culture, a confluence of languages, and a commitment to keep all of it intact in its entirety.

In SPB's own words, while he received love and respect wherever he went, what he received in Karnataka was a 'notch more'.

The man himself, time and again clarified, at the risk of inviting trouble from 'language dividers', that if given another chance by God, he would like to be born a Kannadiga.

And none would sound like the other, strangely. Not for once could someone who hears a song on a radio mistake the actor for another, though SPB would have sung for both.

He sounded like Shankar Nag when he gave the bell bottoms generation their youth and life anthem ‘Santoshakke’, and Anant Nag’s graceful self in ‘Chandanada gombe’.

Every Kannadiga truly would want to tell SPB ‘ninna shere aadenu’, in the very style he did, his little non-Kannada slip turning ‘sere’ into ‘shere’.

The laughter, the hiccup, the smirk, the silence, the anger oozed out in his singing as seamlessly as one can only imagine any other singer trying to do.

Even when the emotion was exactly the same, not a single listener could mistake a nuance of an actor for the other.

When SPB sang for Srinath, the audience only heard Srinath sing; when SPB sang for the extravagant Ravi Chandran, only the curly haired, flamboyant actor was heard by the audiences.

The intimacy that he achieved reaching homes through the radio, was only enhanced when he turned judge and mentor on ‘Ede tumbi haaduvenu’.

Participants of that show remember that all the exposure and experience was secondary, the mentorship and the bit of SPB they took home with them transformed every single singer who dared stand on that stage and sing in front of the maestro himself.

"There is something I owe to this land, which is why I have come back to sing and finish my ‘rhuna’ to its people’ — he was known to have said, as Ramesh Aravind quotes him in an interview.

Five decades of connecting, communicating and convincing listeners of every word that came out of his lips and a lifetime of simply singing (apart from his acting and voice overs, of course), S P Balasubramanyam has 'desserted' Kannada musicscape in a much more denser fashion than any other land that can own him.

For, come 1 November, as Karnataka celebrates its statehood, almost the whole state resounds with the numbers he has rendered in praise of Kannada and the state.

In as much grace that the river Kaveri flows, these notes in her praise flowed seamlessly in his voice.

The jeevanadi, literally, took musical birth in the rendition of SPB.

Equally gently nudging and convincing of his warmth for this land is when he hummed:

"Kalladare naanu Beloorina gudiyali iruve (If I be a stone, I shall be one at the Belur temples)

This one, for Dr Vishnu Vardhan, whose voice he represented almost throughout the legendary actor's career.

Hear the love with which he renders Elelu janmadalu kannada kulavagiruve.