Dr. N. Rajam

N. Rajam was born in 1938 in Madras (Chennai) into a family of Carnatic musicians. No source found gives an exact day or month. Her father, Vidwan A. Narayana Iyer, was a respected Carnatic violinist and her first teacher; her elder brother, T. N. Krishnan, became one of the foremost Carnatic violinists of his generation. She also trained with the Carnatic vocalist Musiri Subramania Iyer, and at thirteen she was already accompanying M. S. Subbulakshmi.

Her move north began almost by accident. Having been double-promoted at school, she was too young at fourteen to sit the local intermediate examinations, so her father entered her as a private candidate at Banaras Hindu University, where there was no age bar. One of the required papers was Hindustani music, and she took lessons for it from L. R. Kelkar, a Chennai-based Hindustani musician who was himself a student of a disciple of Pandit Omkarnath Thakur. At the same time a fellow student of Musiri lent her 78 rpm records of Omkarnath Thakur. She decided that if she took up Hindustani music at all, it would be with him. Travelling to Banaras for the examination she carried a letter of introduction to Omkarnath Thakur, then founder-principal of BHU's Faculty of Performing Arts, from Parur Sundaram Iyer; asked to play, she reproduced what she had absorbed from the records so closely that he accepted her as a student. Her family moved to Bombay so she could take lessons whenever he visited the city.

With her father's guidance she then worked out a way of playing the violin that followed the Hindustani singing voice rather than the Carnatic bowing tradition, adding the slow vilambit and ati-vilambit tempos and the fast taans that Carnatic practice did not require. She has described the transition candidly, including learning to feel the tala from the sound of the tabla rather than counting it by hand.

Most of her working life was spent at Banaras Hindu University, where she taught in the Faculty of Performing Arts for close to four decades and became head of department and then dean. Varanasi gave her a long association with the city's musicians, including Ustad Bismillah Khan.

She is married to T. S. Subramanian, a chartered accountant and former Life Insurance Corporation executive; the playback singer Vani Jairam was her sister-in-law. Her daughter Sangeeta Shankar is a Hindustani violinist and teacher; her granddaughters Ragini and Nandini Shankar are concert violinists, and the family performs together as a multi-generational ensemble. Her niece Kala Ramnath is also her student, as are Pranav Kumar, V. Balaji of BHU and Satya Prakash Mohanty.

Her honours run from the Padma Shri in 1984 through the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1990, the Padma Bhushan in 2004, the Akademi's Fellowship in 2012 and the Pandit Bhimsen Joshi Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021, to the Padma Vibhushan in 2026.

Rajam is the musician who made gayaki ang — playing that imitates the singing voice — the natural idiom of the Hindustani violin. Before her the violin was, in her own account, barely present as a Hindustani solo instrument: accompaniment belonged to the sarangi, esraj, dilruba and harmonium, and instrumentalists mostly played in the gatkari or tantrakari manner, idioms shaped by plucked-string technique rather than by singing. Coming from a tradition where the violin already had a strong bowing technique, she reoriented it entirely: the ornaments, the long meends, the phrasing of khayal, all transferred to the bow. "My style is 150 per cent vocal," she told The Hindu in 2021, and she recalled early listeners objecting that she sounded Carnatic before the approach was accepted.

Her contribution is therefore twofold. She established the violin as a solo instrument in Hindustani music rather than an accompanying one, and she turned her approach into a school. Through nearly forty years at Banaras Hindu University and through her own family — daughter, granddaughters, niece — the gayaki-ang violin has been handed down as a recognisable lineage, and an unusually woman-led one.