To concoct a performance by Roopa Mahadevan, you’d have to take the expansive voice of Mariah Carey, marinate it in unflinching south Indian tradition, add a zest of percussionist Zakir Hussein, and top it off with the sway of Whoopi Goldberg dreadlocks. When Mahadevan bursts into a soulful aria of Carnatic music (the classical music of south India), she’s bold and breathtaking, a quality that didn’t escape the Fulbright committee back in 2006.
Mahadevan has returned to the Bay Area after completing a Fulbright scholar program in Carnatic music in Chennai. She’s now working with a UCSF professor on diabetes and cardiovascular disease epidemiology, singing at Indian classical dance concerts, and exploring cross-genre performances.
Carnatic music, believed to have evolved over 4,000 years, is based on ragas (arias in a melodic scale) and talas (rhythmic cycles). Its rhythmic intricacy captivates first-time listeners, as does its spiritual tradition of improvisation (Manodharma).
Chennai was a natural destination in Mahadevan’s musical journey given the “culture of music in the house.” Her father is a percussionist on the mridangam, a two-headed South Indian drum. For more than a decade, she trained with popular Bay Area vocalist Asha Ramesh. “But to really take it to the next level,” Mahadevan says, “I needed to go to Chennai, which is the hub.”
So after wrapping up a master’s degree in psychology, Mahadevan sought advanced musical training in a place where “if you open the city’s daily, The Hindu, there’s at least one evening concert a day right around the block.” In a Carnatic concert, the main artist, often a vocalist, is accompanied by at least two instruments: a violin and a mridangam. Improvisations comprise half of a concert while the rest is the rendition of elaborate devotional songs.
“The best way to improve is by giving concerts,” Mahadevan says. “You can sing kalpanaswaras (improvised rhythmic passages) on your own for hours, but how well can you bring it out on stage?” She gave more than 25 two-hour performances and realized her dream of performing in Chennai’s annual festival of music and dance. Each December, arts aficionados fly in from all over India and abroad; some 100 theaters host more than 4,000 two-hour performances.
“The last year in India was amazing,” says Mahadevan. She lived in an apartment in the historical quarter Mylapore, where bells peal daily at a 16th-century Shiva temple and alleys smell of incense, rancid coconut and jasmine. A “displaced Indian-American” was pleased to find her roots in the distant land her parents still consider home.
