Having learnt the instrument under Sukanya Ramgopal, best known as the first woman ghatam player in Carnatic music, Sumana Chandrashekar explores the histories of languages, migration, and musical confluences. She talks about her new book, Song of the Clay Pot in which she regales the readers with the history of the instrument, the hierarchies among musical instruments and the biases against women artists.
Excerpts:
You’ve said this book came to you almost unexpectedly. How did it begin?
It really arrived unannounced. I had gathered stories over the years but hadn’t thought of a book consciously. Then in 2023, after a concert in Gurgaon, I was approached to write a book on my experiences. I was apprehensive as I didn’t think I had a story and that the ghatam itself had no documented history. What finally made me do this was a very simple thought: if I don’t do this, my instrument may never have a book.
Yet you didn’t write a word for six months after signing the contract.
Not a word. I had no idea how to begin. And then suddenly something shifted, the book just started writing itself. I think I needed to trust the silences first. Once I did, the stories found their way.
The book moves seamlessly between memoir and music history. Was that intentional?
Initially, it was suggested I write a memoir. I resisted because I didn’t feel my personal story was extraordinary. But I realised that for an instrument like the ghatam: oral, undocumented, carried through bodies rather than archives, the personal is the archive. My life, my teachers, my travels, the stories musicians tell backstage, this is where the ghatam lives.
You began as a vocalist before taking up the ghatam seriously in 2009. Was that a difficult shift?
I don’t see it as a shift at all. I’m still a vocalist. One has simply transformed into the other. My voice now expresses itself through clay. Everything I’ve read, travelled through, experienced, my entire musical training, flows into the ghatam. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, nothing really disappears. It only changes form.
Why is the ghatam such a powerful instrument to write about now?
Because it is fundamentally a people’s instrument. The pot is possibly the first instrument humankind ever played. It’s inexpensive, universally available, found across cultures: from Africa to Australia. The ghatam is simply a specific pot, tuned for Carnatic music. Writing about it is really writing about shared human rhythm.
You are among very few women ghatam players today. Why is the instrument so gendered?
There are many reasons. Percussion itself is a hard space for women, patriarchy works subtly but effectively. The ghatam is also seen as physically demanding, and it’s a secondary percussion instrument, which doesn’t offer visibility. Families often discourage women outright. And then there’s the body.
The body plays a central role in the book, especially the idea of the ‘pot belly’.
Yes. There’s a whole chapter on it. For years, music theory even claimed you need a pot belly to play the ghatam well. Male bodies were mocked, admired, even celebrated for this. But what happens when a woman’s body has a pot belly? Society doesn’t extend the same generosity. Add to that the older practice of playing with an unbuttoned shirt for sound resonance, something Indian women were never permitted to do. So learning, teaching, even sound itself became gendered. Today, all of us, men included, are finding our own sound again.
Were there discoveries during research that surprised you?
Many. Ghatam as an instrument was not allowed in the Madras Music Academy. At a time even MS Subbulakshmi wasn’t allowed to perform but when the Academy wanted to raise money for a new auditorium in the late1940s they reached out to MS who agreed on one condition, that she be accompanied by a ghatam. I found that a lovely story!
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: deccanchronicle.com
