CHENNAI: Sundaram Balachander, the self-taught veena player, director and actor, had passionately been documenting every aspect of his life. He collected and pasted in his enormous albums among other things details such as letters and photographs associated with the concerts he had performed in. Balachander, the eccentric, controversial musician, was one day hoping to write his autobiography and tell the world what he had been fighting for all along. He was trying to undo the social ostracism that he and his family had faced because of his untimely outbursts. But unfortunately, because of a cardiac arrest, the veena player could not complete chronicling his life. Taking off from where Balachander left is Vikram Sampath, who has written the first biography of the vainika. “He definitely would be disappointed that I have not dedicated an entire chapter to frauds (like he wanted to in his autobiography), especially not categorised as local, national and international frauds. Fraudulence in the music industry had always been his biggest peeve. But I’m sure he would have appreciated the sincerity of the effort,” says Vikram. Voice of the Veena: S Balanchander is the third book of the young author. Though Vikram is a trained vocalist, one would see no immediate connect as to why he picked Balachander as the subject of his book. “The book started off on a very personal note,” explains Vikram, whose guru Dr Jayanthi Kumaresh would always talk about her guru Balachander during his music classes. “Our music classes had anecdotes about Bala mama. She would tell us stories about his controversies and his speeches,” Vikram remembers. “All of that stood for someone who was standing up for a cause, even though he was the last man standing.” But unlike most other biographers who have lamented the lack of authentic resources, Vikram was lucky. Balachander’s family willingly provided him with all of Balachander’s aforementioned albums and Vikram had more than what he needed to work with. “Those were not just dry diary jottings. It starts from his horoscope to hospital bills. He also had his own annotations,” Vikram says. “People whom he hated would have their faces scratched with a red pen and have a circle around their faces.” But to put together such abundant resources with two years of research, that included interviews with close acquaintances and contemporaries of Balachander, must have definitely put him in a tricky situation. Vikram admits that like any other biographer, it was difficult for him to not put Balachander up on the podium. “But I have tried to assess his contributions objectively throughout the book,” he clarifies. Vikram also confesses that a lot of sanitisation has gone into the book. “I had to use my judgment to decide what to use and not, because there were many unparliamentary words in it,” he laughs.Balachander’s albums might have been his way of venting his anger at the music industry then, and similarly, Vikram also owns up that this book might be his own platform to vent. Apart from deceitfulness in the music industry, there are his personal qualms. “I don’t intend to become a performing artiste, but I want to be a student of music for the rest of my life,” he says.
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