Gender and Karnatik music: Women percussionists breaking a century-old divide

Among the many questions I have pursued as a student of Karnatik music, is the question of gender. I have always been interested in how notions of gender get constructed, perpetuated and enacted within the field of Karnatik music.

The reason I started to engage with this question is because I grew up in a pretty much gender-neutral home. My parents insisted that all chores had to be done by everyone. My brother and I grew up without once being told ‘girls do this’ and ‘boys do that’. Therefore, when I stepped into the larger world of Karnatik music, I discovered that reality was quite different. Deeply embedded gender stereotypes became apparent to me in the most stark manner. In over 20 years of my training as a Karnatik vocalist, I observed how, in many music classes, girls were asked to keep all gesticulations to the bare minimum, contain the expressiveness of the body so as to not take up too much space, and to ensure that tala is tapped on the lap with ‘girl-like’ gentleness. There were also strict caveats on how girls and boys must dress for the stage.

This question around gender took on another dimension when, in 2009, I started learning the ghatam under Sukanya Ramgopal, India’s first woman ghatam player. Many people around me were startled by my choice of a percussion instrument and that too a ghatam, which is anyway considered only a sub-accompanying instrument. A melodic instrument – perhaps a veena or violin – would have been better, they felt. Subsequently, I learnt from my guru that in her illustrious career spanning over four decades, I had been her first woman student. To have that privilege has been humbling for me to this day. But why did she have to wait for so many years to find a woman student became a pressing and urgent question for me. On the one hand, vocal music classrooms were mostly filled with girls; on the other hand, the world of percussion seemed to be dominated by men. It was this puzzle that led me back into history to understand how the idea and infrastructure of Karnatik music as we know today was created nearly a century ago.

Gender stereotyping The process of gender stereotyping, with its main focus on essentialising women’s bodies, has a long and complex history across the world. We don’t have to go too far to understand this. If we were to look at everyday lives around us, we can easily see how the capitalist economy constructs gender ideas for us. Advertisements that show cars and bikes or mountaineering invariably portray men, while ads for cosmetics, domestic cleaning or kitchen appliances almost always show women. Adding to this is our system of education. In 2024, the think tank, Center for Global Development, published a report that analysed the content of school textbooks in India, stressing the high incidence of gender stereotypes in the use of language and imagery in educational materials. The study confirms that even today, in most of our textbooks, mothers are largely represented in their domestic spaces, while fathers are depicted in ‘respectable’ professions as doctors or engineers.

What has happened in Karnatik music over the past century is an outcome of these same processes. In the first half of the 20th century, when India as a new nation was taking birth, there was a dire need for it to have its own ‘classical’ arts.

A complex set of socio-political-cultural processes coalesced to ‘sanitise’ certain art forms of their legacies and to accord them the high pedestal of the ‘classical’. Among the many ramifications of this process was the bifurcation and gendering of melody and percussion; from then on, it became common for girls and women to train in vocal music or in melodic instruments such as violin and veena, while percussion became almost exclusively a male preserve.

Karnatik music training tradition

So does that mean that Karnatik music training used to be different before this? Most likely, yes. A holistic pedagogy included the practice of singing and dancing, and learning a stringed instrument and a percussion instrument. Many women commonly played percussion at that time, as they always have since medieval times. Murals and paintings that we find across India testify to this. In fact, contemporaries of the legendary M S Subbulakshmi remind us that she was proficient in playing the mridangam too, although she never seems to have played in public. However, given the image of M S that we all carry today, can we even imagine her sitting with her mridangam, without being mildly startled? Like M S, were there many other percussion-playing women who may have never played publicly? Or, were they ever allowed to play in public? I often ask myself this — is documented history hiding something from us?

If erasures of women’s histories – wholly or partly – is on one side, there is the exoticising of women’s bodies on the other. There have been massive percussion ensembles without the presence of a single woman artist; and there are women’s percussion ensembles that are unabashedly framed for the male gaze. Both are deeply problematic. 

To essentialise women’s bodies or for that matter any body, is not just patriarchy’s suppression of their immense potential; it is, in my view, a huge disservice we do to the art form itself by limiting its expanse and shrinking the possibilities of diverse voices and varied creative expressions.

What is of course reassuring for me is that there are women in the Karnatik space today, both from cities and small towns, who continue to learn and play percussion.

On good days, the algorithm gods on social media uncover for me a video of a young girl or a woman playing the mridangam, khanjira, thavil or ghatam. More often than not, the artist is unnamed. As a society we are often content watching videos that say ‘amazing !! girl playing percussion’ or some such tag. To begin with, let us acknowledge that this is where both erasure and exoticising begin.

(The author has just published Song of the Clay Pot: My Journey with the Ghatam with Speaking Tiger Books.)