M.S. Anantharaman Sterling Exemplar Of The Parur Bani

I took my father to an eye specialist for a test near our residence. The doctor was pleasantly surprised and was most willing to do the eye test for my father, since he was a fan of my father. When he started testing his eyes, he was really taken aback, for my father’s right eye was good but the eyeball had no movement. My father never revealed this during his life time”.

This is a (slightly edited) Facebook post by my brother M.A. Krishnaswamy, on 17 March 2018, nearly a month after my father M.S. Anantharaman’s demise. We received hundreds of phone calls from his disciples and our relatives, after they read these lines. To them, my father was akin to a sage in not revealing his visual disability to anyone till he passed away.

M.S. Anantharaman learnt to play the violin from his father Parur Sundaram Iyer who had four daughters and two sons. Sundaram Iyer’s first daughter was Seethalakshmi married to Kalakkad Ramanarayana Iyer. Adept at both vocal and violin music, she played many duets with her younger brother Anantharaman and taught vocal music to the famous nagaswara vidwan Karukurichi Arunachalam (according to my father). The second daughter Muthulakshmi was married to Manakkal Shivaraja Iyer, elder brother of vidwan Manakkal Rangarajan whose second daughter learnt violin from Anantharaman. Sundaram Iyer’s third daughter M.S. Maragatham enrolled as a student in the department of music, University of Madras, along with Anantharaman, when Sundaram Iyer was a Professor of violin (1932-1946). Another daughter M.S. Rajam was a good vocalist and violinist but gave up her career as a performing musician; her husband P.R. Ramachandran was a leading civil lawyer.

Born on 26 September 1924, Anantharaman was the third born and first son. His famous brother M.S. Gopalakrishnan was the eighth child. Sundaram Iyer lost his wife Bhageerathi (my father named me after my grandmother) when she was only 32 years old, and his two daughters were given in marriage at a very young age. Hence, Anantharaman became a father figure for the family, though Maragatham, Raji and MSG addressed him as “Anna”. This practice continued in the family—while his sons and daughters called him “Anna”, his grandsons and granddaughters called him “Anna Thatha”.