By Ambili S [ February 02, 2010 ]
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Multifaceted musician is no more; S. Rajam passes away

By Randoy Guy

During the dawn of the 1930s, Papanasam Sivan, the classical Carnatic Music maestro and Thamizh Thyagaiah, then virtually unknown, relocated in search of greener pastures in Madras, the cultural capital of south India then and now. Here in the metropolis, the capital of the sprawling Madras Presidency, he found a Good Samaritan in a Mylapore lawyer, V. Sundaram Iyer. Mylapore was then the stronghold of successful lawyers, mostly Brahmins and is to this day a hectic hive of culture with an air of artistic ambiance of its own! Sundaram Iyer became his friend, guide and patron. Sivan taught music to the lawyer's children, the eldest son, a strikingly handsome artistic teenager, and his sister Jayalakshmi.

This handsome lad, hardly 16 and stunningly charismatic with a wide array of inborn talents and acquired skills was Sundaram Rajam, who became the first disciple of Papanasam Sivan in Madras. The guru boarded with the affluent amiable lawyer during his early days in Madras.

Rajam learnt classical Carnatic music under the soon-to-be-famous teacher and quickly acquired a high degree of proficiency and professional skills. Being a lawyer's son, his education was not neglected either. He studied at the famous P.S. High School, then on North Mada Street, Mylapore.

He had a flair for drawing and painting, and to encourage such artistic traits, his father had him admitted into the famous Madras School of Arts in Park Town.

Music.. Painting.. And those were not all. Rajam was also an avid moviegoer. Not many are aware that in 1920s-early 1930s, Mylapore had its share of tent cinemas where silent films were regularly screened. The tickets were cheap with the floor going for one 'kalana' or 3 'dambidis'! (Until the mid-1950s, the Indian rupee consisted of 16 annas = 64 kal annas = 192 dambidis.) Rajam saw many silent films in a tent cinema located in an open space behind the P.S. High School compound. Meanwhile, at Kolhapur (then a 'native' state ruled by a maharajah), V. Shantaram, one of the greatest film-makers of India (then making his way in movies with the celebrated Prabhat Pictures), wrote to Sound and Shadow, a Madras-based movie magazine, seeking help to make a Tamil film using the sets, props and all of his Hindi film, Sairandhri (1933, India's first colour film). The film had not done well and the company was trying to cut its losses by launching a Tamil film using the same re-usable materials. The magazine was being run by the talented trio, Muthuswami Iyer (later filmmaker under the name Murugadasa), A. K. Sekhar (art director, production designer, and master of all, and later a big name in south Indian cinema), and K. Ramnoth (brilliant technician and genius of South Indian cinema, sadly forgotten today). G.K. Seshagiri, a rich impresario and fine arts lover, talent scout and all, financially backed them.

Soon the trio, Seshagiri, the Mylapore lawyer, his children, Rajam, Jayalakshmi and the youngest son, the seven-year-old prodigy S. Balachandar, and members of an amateur drama troupe boarded a train at Madras to Miraj (a railway junction) en route to Kolhapur. Accompanying them was Papanasam Sivan as music composer, blissfully unaware that as the trains chug-chugged its way, he was on his way to fame and fortune.

Rajam faced a movie camera for the first time in Seetha Kalyanam (1934). A Prabhat production, it was directed by Baburao Phendharkar, the well-known Marathi-Hindi filmmaker of his day. The success of Seetha Kalyanam (1933) brought its handsome singing hero S. Rajam into the limelight. That was the period when most Tamil movie heroes came from theatre and were not as handsome and charismatic as Rajam! His aristocratic bearing, sharp features and slim figure made him a favourite of women of all ages! One of the interesting -- and unexpected -