Souvenirs of the Season

Flipping through past issues of music season souvenirs, one finds musicians endorsing brands, ads for films and restaurants, catchy illustrations and studio portraits

The concept of the December Music Season souvenir was most probably pioneered by K.V. Krishnaswami Iyer, leading lawyer, who brought it out every year after taking over as the president of The Music Academy in 1935. Thanks to these publications, the Music Academy has a continuous record of the annual festival. The Indian Fine Arts Society, which came into existence in 1932, followed suit but, sadly, this sabha has not maintained its archives, and just a handful of its souvenirs survive. The Tamil Isai Sangam has a full set, beginning from the first annual festival it held in 1943.

Today’s souvenirs are rather drab affairs — endless pages of ‘with best compliments’, a couple of articles, then lists of songs for the year’s concerts, shared by those artistes who care to do so. But at least until the 1960s, these well-produced publications were a record of the times. They scored high in aesthetics too, with illustrations, half-tone block images and black-and-white photographs. Despite poor-quality paper and not-so-sophisticated printing technology, their content was always interesting.

If Musiri Subramania Iyer endorsed the efficacy of Kesavardhini hair oil for the tresses of the women in his family in one ad, Chittoor Subramania Pillai paid glowing tributes to a doctor whose patent medicine cured him of inflamed tonsils. But all of this is nothing compared to the paean that TRK Rao of Car Street, Triplicane, composed in praise of Dr. Naru, sexologist, of Naru Hospital, 24, Broadway, Madras. Just a few lines will give you a broad idea — “I was a perpetual nuisance to my wife who just could not bear to see in me someone as her husband. Today the regeneration brought about by you compels the same wife of mine as though through magic to kiss the dust that I tread beneath my feet. The new strength that your treatment has infused...” Presumably, Mr. and Mrs. Rao lived happily ever after.