Indian Ocean’s Nikhil Rao remembers Uppalapu Shrinivas

I grew up in a south Indian family resisting endless replays of MS Subbulakshmi’s Lalitha Sahasranamams and desiring instead to shred the guitar like Marty Friedman and Kirk Hammett. As an adult, I was reintroduced to Carnatic music and the genius that was Shrinivasji through Worldspace radio and its dedicated 24-hour Carnatic music station (another brilliant idea that left India too soon). His music hit me right between the eyes and gave me sleepless nights. Listening to him made me restless and hungry to understand what he was doing and how to apply it to the guitar. I found a teacher and began Carnatic lessons in earnest. Six years later, I still don’t possess a technique to brag about and keep trying haplessly. But I often go back to his recordings to listen to the delightful way in which he connected notes — each note having a subtle shadow of the previous one, and for his edge-of-the-seat microtonal brilliance, extracting beauty from phrases that had been played for hundreds of years before he existed. I sometimes imagined the smiling, young Shrinivasji walk in and turn on a light in a room full of fumbling scholars. That was the light his playing shone on the music.

I saw him in concert more than a few times and felt that regardless of the set-up he was playing in, the instrument and instrumentalist removed themselves from the arena and what remained was pure, primal sound. The only other artiste who has ever done this to me is Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia. We are often guilty of showing others down in the name of praising someone and I hope I am not doing the same when I say the sound of Shrinivasji’s mandolin meant more to me than Zakirji’s tabla, John McLaughlin’s guitar and Selvaganesh’s kanjira when I attended the Remember Shakti concerts in February 2012. This teetotaller, non-smoking vegetarian was probably the sweetest man anyone would ever meet and it just isn’t right he had to leave so young. I am glad I got the chance to meet him and shake his hand and stammer out what an inspiration he was to me. In classic Shrinivas style, he grinned and said “Thank you, sir” with folded hands. He called me Sir!

It is extremely unfair that the music community is being forced to introspect so prematurely what the man and his music meant to us. U Shrinivas leaves behind scores of music fans in grief and a unique, unparalleled legacy in a world full of brilliant musicians.