T Sadasivam: The Man Who Saw How Far A Great Voice Could Travel

Ever since the announcement of the MS Subbulakshmi biopic, one question has been lurking in my mind: Who will play the two people without whom the story of India's greatest singer would be decidedly incomplete?

One, of course, is T Sadasivam, her husband. The other is Radha Viswanathan, Sadasivam's daughter and MS's accompanying singer for decades.

The two have suffered very different fates in the retelling of MS's life in the last few years. Sadasivam has often been projected as some kind of Svengali, the controlling presence who fashioned every aspect of the singer's career. Radha, meanwhile, has too often been reduced to a footnote, despite having been so intimately woven into MS's musical life that the two voices eventually became inseparable in the public imagination.

Indeed, Sadasivam and Radha could each sustain a book of their own. For the moment, though, Sadasivam deserves attention.

There is a personal reason for this too. The news outlet in which this article appears, in an earlier avatar, owes a considerable debt to him. Three years after C Rajagopalachari (Rajaji) helped launch Swarajya in 1956, Sadasivam took charge and ran it with the same instinct for people, presentation and public impact that marked so much of his life.

He operated from Kalki Gardens in Kilpauk, Madras, now gone but once one of the city's important cultural addresses. For more than three decades, the place was part home, part newsroom, part cultural salon and part nerve centre.

In that sense, Sadasivam's DNA remains embedded in Swarajya. And perhaps that gives us an additional reason to look at him afresh and dispel the wrong notions about him.

Before MS, there was Sadasivam

But the easiest mistake would be to begin Sadasivam's story with MS. The thing is, his life had already acquired considerable shape before the two met.

Born in 1902, Sadasivam was drawn into the freedom movement when still young. He abandoned formal education and became involved with the nationalist movement, eventually embracing the Gandhian path of non-violence. In the fullness of time, he was a freedom fighter, journalist, publicist, political organiser, film producer, magazine manager, cultural impresario and philanthropist.

He travelled through villages as a khadi activist, spreading the nationalist message and encouraging people to reject imported cloth. He also sang patriotic songs, particularly those of Subramania Bharati. Music was therefore not something that entered his life only through his marriage to MS. It was already part of his political and emotional vocabulary.

Rajaji was his political mentor and lifelong guru. The relationship was not simply one of political allegiance. Sadasivam helped carry Rajaji’s ideas into the public sphere through journalism, publishing and political communication.

Rajaji is said to have described Sadasivam as being to him what Lakshmana was to Rama. That was high praise, but it also reveals Sadasivam’s characteristic position. He was rarely the person at the centre of the official portrait. He was the organiser, protector and strategist who made the public figure’s work possible.

The advertising mind

Before he became identified with MS, Sadasivam had already displayed an extraordinary instinct for publicity.

He worked with the Tamil magazine Ananda Vikatan, and one of the stories associated with him from then concerns a campaign in the London Times.

Full-page advertisements were reportedly placed there for the Tamil magazine, asking London-based firms and advertising agencies to include Ananda Vikatan as part of their media plans in India.

Those firms are said to have referred the matter to their Indian branches, helping generate a surge of advertising interest in the magazine. The story may have acquired an element of folklore over time, but it accurately conveys Sadasivam’s approach as he possessed a rare understanding of audience, positioning and institutional prestige.

This was long before modern public relations became a formal profession. Sadasivam’s methods were intuitive, inventive and sometimes audacious. He knew how to make a publication appear larger than itself. Later, he would apply the same understanding to music.

But MS was not his first great cultural project.

The Kalki partnership

It was Kalki, both the person and the eponymous publication.

Sadasivam’s friendship with Kalki R Krishnamurti was one of the defining relationships of his life. Both had hit it off during their time in Ananda Viktan. Krishnamurti was the writer and editor, Sadasivam was the organiser and manager who understood how to convert literary talent into a durable institution.

In 1941, after leaving Ananda Vikatan, the two launched the magazine Kalki, named after Krishnamurti’s pen name. It was conceived as a nationalist publication and quickly established itself as an influential force in Tamil journalism.

The venture required money. MS’s acting in the film Savitri, reportedly around one lakh rupees, helped raise the capital needed to establish the magazine. That detail is often treated as evidence of Sadasivam’s influence over her career. But it can also be read differently. The couple understood that cinema could be used to finance journalism, just as music could later be used to support public causes.

Anyway, Sadasivam saw the brand value of Kalki’s writing and created the institutional conditions in which it could flourish. The magazine reportedly outsold the well-established Ananda Vikatan in its early years. Its success was not the result of writing alone. It required capital, distribution, publicity, political access and managerial discipline. Kalki brought one, and Sadasivam brought the other.

The complicated beginning with MS

MS Subbulakshmi first met Sadasivam in 1936, probably around June, according to several accounts. He, in his mid-30s, was then associated with Ananda Vikatan, and she, in her early-20s, was already a gifted and increasingly visible young singer.

Their relationship, initially a bit vague, began under difficult circumstances.

Sadasivam was already married to Apithakuchlambal, also known as Parvathi, and had two daughters, Radha and Vijaya. When MS eventually left her home in Madurai and came to Madras, she reached Sadasivam’s residence on Big Street in Triplicane.

This was not a simple romantic story. It involved an existing marriage, two children and the vulnerability of a young woman entering a new city and an unfamiliar household. The emotional consequences for Sadasivam’s first wife cannot be minimised. Nor should the domestic situation be softened by retrospective sentiment.

At the same time, it is important not to impose upon MS the image of a passive young woman who was simply carried along by a powerful man. She had already defied her mother’s wishes by leaving Madurai in pursuit of a musical career. She had entered the public sphere at a very young age, performed before demanding audiences and taken decisions that altered the course of her life.

She was barely 20 when she made that decisive move. It required courage, conviction and a strong sense of self.

Of course, Sadasivam could have taken the relatively convenient option of having MS as the other woman in his life. After all, it was not uncommon for married men to have such a secondary domestic arrangement in those days.

It is here the story of Balasaraswati is instructive. Balasaraswati, another great contemporary artist (dancer) from the same broad social world of MS, remained the other woman in the life of RK Shanmukham Chetty, independent India’s first Finance Minister. Their relationship never acquired the formal legitimacy of marriage.

But Sadasivam chose transparency and responsibility over convenience.

A family made by affection

Sadasivam married MS on July 10, 1940, after the death of his first wife. His two daughters continued to live with them, and MS became their Amma.

That household arrangement should not be dismissed as a minor biographical detail. It was one of the central achievements of their shared life.

Sadasivam and MS had no children together. But MS formed a warm and enduring relationship with Radha and Vijaya.

Radha would later become her accompanying singer and musical partner for close to six decades. It is tempting to describe the household as harmonious and leave it at that. But harmony in such circumstances does not emerge automatically. It has to be built through trust, patience and affection.

The two daughters could easily have regarded MS as an interloper. She could have remained emotionally separate from children who were not biologically hers. Sadasivam could have attempted to impose his authority and insist on an artificial unity. Instead, the family evolved into a genuine emotional unit.

That achievement belongs substantially to MS and the daughters. It also reflects warmly on Sadasivam’s ability to create a conducive climate to sustain relationships without any rancour or ill-will.

The later public image of the Sadasivam household — MS singing, Radha beside her, Sadasivam organising behind the scenes — was built on this domestic foundation. Radha was not a decorative appendage to her mother’s career. She was a trained musician, an interpreter and a crucial part of the sound that millions came to identify with MS. Any account that reduces her to a daughter standing beside the great singer misses the family’s actual musical history.

The manager, not the master

After the marriage, Sadasivam became the central managerial force behind MS’s career. He negotiated appearances, planned programmes, shaped public presentation and chose occasions with care.

The familiar criticism is that he decided what she would sing and what she would say on stage. That is often presented as proof that he controlled her. The charge requires a more historically grounded reading.

A concert is not simply a sequence of technically excellent compositions. It is an encounter between performer, audience, venue and occasion.

Sadasivam understood that a programme for a temple, a national gathering, a public fund-raiser, a music academy or an international audience could not be identical.

He planned concerts in detail. He included songs in different Indian languages and selected compositions that would speak to the location and purpose of the event. He paid attention to diction and chose devotional and contemplative lyrics from different parts of India.

This was not necessarily an attempt to suppress her artistic personality. It was the work of an impresario who understood context.

MS herself later acknowledged the value of his guidance. She is recorded as having said that her husband assured her that if she sang with true feeling, listeners would automatically be drawn to her. After Sadasivam’s death, she said: “Whatever I did in my life and music was guided entirely by him. What the world calls my achievements are his gifts to me.”

These statements reveal the intimacy of their collaboration and the way she understood his contribution. A woman who had already made difficult decisions for herself was not necessarily incapable of appreciating a husband’s guidance.

The importance of the devotional turn

One of the most persistent arguments about MS’s career, especially put forth by revisionist critics, is that her movement towards devotional music diminished her as an artist. According to this view, the young singer was more adventurous, flamboyant and musically creative, while the later devotional icon represented a narrowing of her artistic personality.

The argument contains a partial truth only if it is stripped of context. It is true that her public image changed. But it may not be true that devotion was imposed upon an otherwise secular artist by a controlling husband.

For one, Carnatic music’s core is Hindu religious devotion. And for another, bhakti had been present in her musical life from the beginning.

Even in Madurai, she felt that she was singing for Goddess Meenakshi. Her devotional disposition was not a marketing device invented after her marriage.

As TJS George observed even in that a tad harsh book MS—A Life in Music, her devotional singing arose from an inward spiritual passion rather than from a strategy imposed by Sadasivam.