Let us pause, for a moment, from the endless churn of news about crumbling empires and intellectual decay. A report arrives from the British Isles, of all places, that the orchestras of London – those storied temples of Beethoven and Britten – are bowing before an Indian composer named Ilaiyaraaja. Fifty years of his work are now being hailed as a cross-cultural revolution. Forgive me if I choke on my Earl Grey. This is not the first time the Victorian masters have been forced to admit that their musical monopoly is a fiction, but it is, perhaps, the most delicious.
Ilaiyaraaja, for the uninitiated (and if you are uninitiated, you are probably reading the wrong column), is a man who has, over five decades, produced a staggering 7,000 compositions for the Tamil film industry. This is not the polite, anodyne music of the conservatory. This is a torrent of melody that borrows from Carnatic ragas, folk rhythms, and the orchestral sweep of Western cinema. It is, in short, the sound of a civilisation that refuses to be provincial. And now the British – those guardians of musical orthodoxy – are performing his works with the same reverence they reserve for Elgar. The irony is almost too heavy to bear.
Let us examine the historical parallels. When the Roman Empire was at its zenith, it absorbed the cults of Isis and Mithras, only to later declare them barbaric. Victorian England, in its imperial pomp, took what it pleased from India – spices, textiles, and a few exotic melodies for popular operas – while sneering at the 'native' musicians as primitives. Now, in the twilight of that same empire (or its cultural shadow, at any rate), we see a reversal. The orchestras of London are not merely tolerating Ilaiyaraaja. They are hailing him as a genius. Why? Because the West has run out of musical ideas. The avant-garde has become a predictable scream of dissonance. The classical repertoire is a museum of dead composers. And in its desperation for authenticity, it turns to India.
This is not multiculturalism as a virtue signal. This is the exhaustion of a civilisation that has, for too long, believed its own propaganda about progress. The British orchestras are not being generous. They are being fed from a foreign table. Ilaiyaraaja’s music does what Western classical music has failed to do for a century: it combines technical mastery with emotional immediacy. It is both sophisticated and popular. It is both ancient and modern. And this, I suspect, is what frightens the gatekeepers. They can no longer claim that high art is the preserve of the West. The maestro from Madras has proved that a man can write a thousand film songs and still be a serious composer. He has shattered the Victorian distinction between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’, between ‘classical’ and ‘folk’. And he has done it without a single degree from the Royal Academy.
Of course, the usual critics will wring their hands. They will call this a dilution of pure traditions. They will mutter about cultural appropriation. But I say this: if a man can write music that makes the London Philharmonic swoon, then he has won. The intellectual decadence of our age is that we spend so much time policing boundaries that we forget to create anything of value. Ilaiyaraaja has been creating for fifty years. He has not stopped to ask for permission. He has not curated his output for Western approval. He simply made music, day after day, for a madly demanding film industry. And in doing so, he achieved something that the grand orchestras of Vienna and Berlin could not: he made his art essential to millions of people.
So let the British orchestras play his ragas. Let them learn that the musical future does not belong to their tired canons. The revolution, if it can be called that, is not about East meeting West. It is about the collapse of the West’s monopoly on cultural seriousness. Ilaiyaraaja has taught us that genius can emerge from a crowded film studio in Chennai, that it can be expressed in the language of the common man, and that it can endure for half a century without the blessing of any establishment. If that is not a lesson for our intellectually decadent times, I do not know what is.
