It came to me as one of the sudden shocks of age that the first music album I ever bought will have its 20th anniversary this year. It begins piously enough with the voice of that dulcet baritone Hariharan singing the Telugu words of the 18th-century saint-poet Tyagaraja: “ Parulanu vedanu, patita paavanuda ” (O purifier of the fallen! I shall not beseech others). Already, it’s clear something is odd: the strings being plucked in the background are not those of the tanpura but of an acoustic guitar.

Soon, the drums join in, and then the mildly American tones of Leslie ‘Lezz’ Lewis, singing lyrics of striking impiety: ‘Your mamma said yes / Your daddy said no’. It really oughtn’t to work, and some early critics didn’t think it did. India Today ’sanonymous reviewer was unimpressed: “little more than icky-pop fusion”, “trying lyrics”, “unfortunate experiment”, “at best a commute tape”. The enormous popularity of the Colonial Cousins and their eponymous first album would put that piece of music criticism in its place. There are indeed trying lyrics, parts of it verge on icky-pop, and like most interesting artistic experiments, much of it is a failure. But when it hits the mark, it hits it indeed.

At first blush, the experimentation seems to be of a fairly conventional sort: mixing up Carnatic music with the idiom of bog-standard American pop music (guitars, drums, backing vocals). But the sound of Hariharan singing the English words ‘I need you’ in the Carnatic style of the opening is the first intimation of what the album is trying to do: to push at the boundaries of what pop music can be and how one can sing in English. Gently, cheekily, pop music is being given a Carnatic shot in the arm.

Other tracks in the album look for inspiration in other places. ‘Indian Rain’, probably the album’s best track, though not the best known, has Hariharan draw on other parts of his background in Hindustani music and the Urdu ghazal. The traditional sounds of Raga Megh find an unconventional counterpoint in the acoustic guitar and saxophone, both played with the calm and reflectiveness that characterise the best classical aalaaps .

The lyrics to one of the better-known songs of the album, ‘Krishna’, draw on the Kannada words of the much-loved ‘Krishna Nee Begane Baro’ (Krishna, come quickly). The political comment in the lyrics, and their sense of rhyme or grammar, is not sophisticated: “Religion is the reason / the world’s breaking up into pieces / Colour of the people / Keeps us locked in hate /”

The refrain, ‘Come back as Jesus’, naming in order the gods of several warring religions is part of a long Indian tradition of too-easy syncretism. Yet, there is a sincerity to the effort that exalts the attempts at a simple message of inter-religious harmony. Most of all, there is a quiet intelligence in how the words of a 16th-century philosopher writing in Kannada of the beauty and deeds of the baby Krishna have been transformed to address the political concerns of the present.

The video for the album’s most popular song, ‘ Sa Ni Dha Pa ’, gives the Cousins a fictional back story as cheeky pranksters in a disciplinarian school for Brahmin children. The video’s most memorable image has the future Colonial Cousins strumming wildly on an illicit guitar as soon as their teacher leaves the room, when they ought to be sitting cross-legged and praying in silence. The satire is affectionate and its target is not so much the caste system as it is the self-importance of a certain strand of south Indian Brahmin life.

But of course, that very strand of Brahmin life has always had the potential for other creative and ethical possibilities. Not everything in Sanskrit need be oppressive, and not everything in classical music need be stultifying. As generations of little girls bundled off to singing and dancing lessons have learned, the songs of the tradition can certainly be exalted, but they can be other things too: irreverent and naughty. Their lyrics can be pious, but they can express other sentiments: anger, disappointment, endless longing.

One of the first concert-standard compositions of the Carnatic music novice, let us recall, begins with the stock phrase, ‘ Ninnukori ’. It means ‘Yearning for you’. ‘You’ refers in its context to the god named in the rest of the lyrics, but the yearning expressed in the music is open-ended. The Colonial Cousins in the video find a path from orthodoxy to experiments, art and freedom. The actual experiments of the Cousins point towards the many possibilities a classical tradition offers for living, feeling and creating.

(This monthly column discusses questions of morality through pop culture)

Nakul Krishnais a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge

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