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Voice Of The Veena S Balachander: A Biography
Of all the stars in the Carnatic music firmament from the 1930s through the 1980s, there was one star that glimmered a bit more, that outshone the brilliance of the rest. The irrepressible genius, S Balachander, stormed into the prim Madras music scene with a panache, eccentricity, charisma and verve that no contemporary of his could match.
Born in 1927 in Madras, Balachander was a child prodigy and self-taught musician with no formal training or gurus in music. At the age of 5 he began performing, first on the percussion instrument, the kanjira and started accompanying his elder brother S. Rajam who was a vocalist. Experimenting with several instruments, he taught himself the art of playing a host of them like the Tabla, Mridangam, Harmonium, Dilruba, Shehnai and even mastered the Sitar himself, playing Carnatic music on it. He was in fact the first artist to play Carnatic music on the sitar and gave full-fledged concerts and Radio shows of the same. By then Balachander had also starred in several films as a child artist and was a genius chess player who defeated many stalwart players from across the world.
Slowly his attention was caught by one of the most ancient instruments of India, the pristine and majestic Veena. He lost interest in all the other instruments and became wedded to the Veena making it an indispensable part of his personality. In just about 2 years he taught himself the art of playing the Veena and emerged as one of the most respected vainikas (Veena player) of the times.
The maestro began his music career at a time when stalwart vocalists ruled the roost and instrumentalists played second fiddle to them. But being an independent-minded and self-taught artiste, Balachander carved a unique niche for himself as a veena soloist, breaking free from the conventional stranglehold of past masters. He boldly changed the grammar of instrumental music, contemporized the veena and created a legacy known as the Balachander bani, or style.
But for all his accomplishments, Balachander's iconoclastic and brash ways earned him the ire of the Carnatic music fraternity. He was quick to pick quarrels with fellow musicians in his lifelong quest for perfection and truth. He was the perennial sentinel of classicism and fought courageously for what he considered a just cause.
So, was Balachander a beloved genius or a much-maligned maverick? The book attempts to recreate the towering personality that he was, a lot of this researched from his elaborate personal diaries, extensive interviews with his surviving contemporaries and family members.
While his death in 1990 created a void in the Carnatic realm, Balachander's memory lives on in the minds of the connoisseurs and music lovers.
As the maestro would have smugly said: "Veena is Balachander, Balachander is Veena."
Born in 1927 in Madras, Balachander was a child prodigy and self-taught musician with no formal training or gurus in music. At the age of 5 he began performing, first on the percussion instrument, the kanjira and started accompanying his elder brother S. Rajam who was a vocalist. Experimenting with several instruments, he taught himself the art of playing a host of them like the Tabla, Mridangam, Harmonium, Dilruba, Shehnai and even mastered the Sitar himself, playing Carnatic music on it. He was in fact the first artist to play Carnatic music on the sitar and gave full-fledged concerts and Radio shows of the same. By then Balachander had also starred in several films as a child artist and was a genius chess player who defeated many stalwart players from across the world.
Slowly his attention was caught by one of the most ancient instruments of India, the pristine and majestic Veena. He lost interest in all the other instruments and became wedded to the Veena making it an indispensable part of his personality. In just about 2 years he taught himself the art of playing the Veena and emerged as one of the most respected vainikas (Veena player) of the times.
The maestro began his music career at a time when stalwart vocalists ruled the roost and instrumentalists played second fiddle to them. But being an independent-minded and self-taught artiste, Balachander carved a unique niche for himself as a veena soloist, breaking free from the conventional stranglehold of past masters. He boldly changed the grammar of instrumental music, contemporized the veena and created a legacy known as the Balachander bani, or style.
But for all his accomplishments, Balachander's iconoclastic and brash ways earned him the ire of the Carnatic music fraternity. He was quick to pick quarrels with fellow musicians in his lifelong quest for perfection and truth. He was the perennial sentinel of classicism and fought courageously for what he considered a just cause.
So, was Balachander a beloved genius or a much-maligned maverick? The book attempts to recreate the towering personality that he was, a lot of this researched from his elaborate personal diaries, extensive interviews with his surviving contemporaries and family members.
While his death in 1990 created a void in the Carnatic realm, Balachander's memory lives on in the minds of the connoisseurs and music lovers.
As the maestro would have smugly said: "Veena is Balachander, Balachander is Veena."
- GenresMusic
504 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2012
7 people are currently reading
109 people want to read
About the author
Vikram Sampath
17 books372 followersBorn and raised in Bangalore, Vikram Sampath completed his schooling in Bangalore at the Sri Aurobindo Memorial School and Bishop Cotton Boys' School. He thereafter obtained a Bachelors in Engineering in Electronics and a Masters in Mathematics from one of India's most reputed schools, BITS-Pilani. He then went on to obtain an MBA in Finance from S P Jain Institute of Management and Research, Mumbai. Vikram has worked in many leading multinational firms like GE Money and Citibank and currently is a Team Leader with a information technology company in Bangalore.
His first book, Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars has been widely acclaimed across India, and has been termed as one of the most definitive accounts on the Mysore royal family in recent times. His second book "My Name is Gauhar Jaan!" - The Life and Times of a Musician is the biography of Gauhar Jaan, India's first classical musician to record on the gramophone. The book has been hailed by several luminaries in India and abroad, and has also won the prestigious ARSC (Association of Recorded Sound Collections) International Award for Excellence in Historical Research - the first Indian book to have ever won this honour. Vikram's third book Voice of the Veena: S Balachander - A Biography narrates the story of eminent Veena maestro late Padmabhushan Dr. S Balachander.
Vikram has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany (for 2010-11) where he studied the early gramophone recordings of Indian music. He has also established the Archive of Indian Music (AIM) as a private Trust that seeks to digitize and preserve old gramophone recordings of India.
Vikram publishes regularly in leading Indian dailies and magazines on a wide array of topics. In addition, Vikram is also a serious student of Carnatic Classical vocal music and has been training under various eminent practitioners of the art form. Subjects related to history, music, art and culture are close to his heart.
His first book, Splendours of Royal Mysore: The Untold Story of the Wodeyars has been widely acclaimed across India, and has been termed as one of the most definitive accounts on the Mysore royal family in recent times. His second book "My Name is Gauhar Jaan!" - The Life and Times of a Musician is the biography of Gauhar Jaan, India's first classical musician to record on the gramophone. The book has been hailed by several luminaries in India and abroad, and has also won the prestigious ARSC (Association of Recorded Sound Collections) International Award for Excellence in Historical Research - the first Indian book to have ever won this honour. Vikram's third book Voice of the Veena: S Balachander - A Biography narrates the story of eminent Veena maestro late Padmabhushan Dr. S Balachander.
Vikram has been a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin, Germany (for 2010-11) where he studied the early gramophone recordings of Indian music. He has also established the Archive of Indian Music (AIM) as a private Trust that seeks to digitize and preserve old gramophone recordings of India.
Vikram publishes regularly in leading Indian dailies and magazines on a wide array of topics. In addition, Vikram is also a serious student of Carnatic Classical vocal music and has been training under various eminent practitioners of the art form. Subjects related to history, music, art and culture are close to his heart.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 6, 2026
Mission 2026: Binge reviewing (and rereading on occasion) all previous Reads, I was too slothful to review, back when I read them.
The central figure of this tome, S. Balachander was a man whose relationship with the Carnatic establishment oscillated between brilliance and controversy. Sampath captures him not as a sainted maestro but as a fiercely independent artist who refused to bow to orthodoxy, even when doing so made him an outsider within the very tradition he helped electrify.
Balachander’s story unfolds like a raga that refuses predictable progression. A child prodigy, film actor, filmmaker, and eventually a revolutionary veena player, he inhabited multiple artistic worlds before settling into the instrument that would define his legacy.
But “settling” is perhaps the wrong word. His approach to the veena was disruptive: unconventional fingering techniques, dramatic tonal clarity, an insistence on technical precision that bordered on obsession. Where some performers sought devotional serenity,
Balachander pursued intellectual intensity. Listening to him, one senses argument as much as melody.
Sampath’s book does an admirable job situating this temperament within the wider ecosystem of Carnatic music in the mid-20th century. The music world, like any cultural institution, carries hierarchies, loyalties, and aesthetic dogmas. Balachander questioned many of them—sometimes dazzlingly, sometimes abrasively.
Balachander criticized established gurus, rejected inherited pedagogies, and insisted that musicians must rely on rigorous self-study rather than unquestioned lineage. Predictably, this made him both admired and resented.
What connoiseurs of art and musicfascinated me was how the biography frames Balachander’s artistic philosophy. For him, music was not merely performance but inquiry. The veena became a laboratory of sound where tradition could be tested, stretched, even contradicted.
This experimental attitude gives his recordings a certain electric unpredictability; the listener never feels entirely safe within familiar patterns.
Sampath captures that restless energy with evident sympathy, though he does not conceal the personality’s difficult edges.
Reading the book, I kept returning to the paradox of genius within tradition. Classical systems depend on continuity, yet they are revitalized by individuals who challenge that very continuity. Balachander embodied that tension. He revered the music deeply while simultaneously refusing to inherit it passively.
In the end, this book feels like more than biography. It becomes a meditation on artistic individuality within a highly codified cultural world.
Balachander emerges as a musician who insisted that tradition must remain alive—meaning argumentative, evolving, and occasionally scandalous.
And in that insistence, the veena found not just a performer, but a provocateur.
This book, to conclude, is one of those musical biographies that reads less like a polite accolade and more like a chronicle of creative stubbornness.
Most recommended.
The central figure of this tome, S. Balachander was a man whose relationship with the Carnatic establishment oscillated between brilliance and controversy. Sampath captures him not as a sainted maestro but as a fiercely independent artist who refused to bow to orthodoxy, even when doing so made him an outsider within the very tradition he helped electrify.
Balachander’s story unfolds like a raga that refuses predictable progression. A child prodigy, film actor, filmmaker, and eventually a revolutionary veena player, he inhabited multiple artistic worlds before settling into the instrument that would define his legacy.
But “settling” is perhaps the wrong word. His approach to the veena was disruptive: unconventional fingering techniques, dramatic tonal clarity, an insistence on technical precision that bordered on obsession. Where some performers sought devotional serenity,
Balachander pursued intellectual intensity. Listening to him, one senses argument as much as melody.
Sampath’s book does an admirable job situating this temperament within the wider ecosystem of Carnatic music in the mid-20th century. The music world, like any cultural institution, carries hierarchies, loyalties, and aesthetic dogmas. Balachander questioned many of them—sometimes dazzlingly, sometimes abrasively.
Balachander criticized established gurus, rejected inherited pedagogies, and insisted that musicians must rely on rigorous self-study rather than unquestioned lineage. Predictably, this made him both admired and resented.
What connoiseurs of art and musicfascinated me was how the biography frames Balachander’s artistic philosophy. For him, music was not merely performance but inquiry. The veena became a laboratory of sound where tradition could be tested, stretched, even contradicted.
This experimental attitude gives his recordings a certain electric unpredictability; the listener never feels entirely safe within familiar patterns.
Sampath captures that restless energy with evident sympathy, though he does not conceal the personality’s difficult edges.
Reading the book, I kept returning to the paradox of genius within tradition. Classical systems depend on continuity, yet they are revitalized by individuals who challenge that very continuity. Balachander embodied that tension. He revered the music deeply while simultaneously refusing to inherit it passively.
In the end, this book feels like more than biography. It becomes a meditation on artistic individuality within a highly codified cultural world.
Balachander emerges as a musician who insisted that tradition must remain alive—meaning argumentative, evolving, and occasionally scandalous.
And in that insistence, the veena found not just a performer, but a provocateur.
This book, to conclude, is one of those musical biographies that reads less like a polite accolade and more like a chronicle of creative stubbornness.
Most recommended.
Read
November 15, 2022The author has sparked an interest of carnatic music in me. These are the stories that we normally dont read about. He has done a good job in bringing out the personality as it was without hiding the not so pleasant part of the great musician. The part that i also liked in this biography was how deeply inspired was the maestro to keep the sanctity of the music. He would say that it was a privillege to play music and even if there were no listeners, there is someone up from the heavens who is always listening to your performance. So play as if the God is your audience.
October 10, 2021
A very well written biography portraying the genius artist from a neutral vantage.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews