CARNATIC MUSIC – “The Grammar of Ragas Lives in the Voice”

Aishwarya Ravichandran and the Classical Roots

Known across South India for her distinctive voice, Chennai-based singer Aishwarya Ravichandran traces her musical identity not to the recording studio but to years of rigorous Carnatic classical training — a foundation she says shapes every note she sings.

On a quiet Tuesday morning in the Velachery neighborhood of Chennai, Aishwarya Ravichandran is working on a varnam — one of the most demanding compositional forms in the Carnatic classical tradition, a piece that compresses the full melodic grammar of a raga into a single, intricate composition. Her voice moves through the Bhairavi raga with the careful attention of a craftsperson, pausing, correcting, returning. This is not preparation for a recording session. It is, as she describes it, “just practice.”

Carnatic foundation is not a background detail. It is the whole thing.”

At 30, Ravichandran has built a profile that straddles the more austere world of Carnatic classical performance. She is now preparing for a series of classical concerts and teaching engagements in the United States, where she will perform before South Indian diaspora communities in California and Texas. The tour, she says, will be exclusively classical — no film songs, no commercial program.

“The raga is not a scale that you learn once and then use. It is a living entity. You spend years with it — hearing it, internalizing it, understanding what makes it different from every other raga. That process only happens through a guru. There is no shortcut.”

A Childhood Shaped by the Guru-Shishya Tradition

Ravichandran’s introduction to Carnatic music came early. Born and raised in Chennai — a city whose cultural life is inseparable from the annual Margazhi music season, when the city’s sabhas fill nightly with classical concerts — she began her formal training at the age of six under Smt Meera Ramesh, a vocalist of the Ariyakudi tradition who had trained under Sangeetha Kalanidhi B. Rajam Iyer. It was, by any measure, a rigorous initiation.

“The training starts from the very beginning — sarali varisai, the foundational exercises — and every note has to be precisely placed,” she recalls. “My guru was exacting. There was no moving forward until the previous stage was completely internalized. I spent months on each varnam, each composition. Years before I sang a full concert.”

This method of transmission — known as the guru-shishya parampara, the teacher-disciple lineage — is the defining feature of Indian classical music education. Unlike Western conservatory training, where students learn from notation and recorded material, Carnatic music is transmitted orally and kinetically: the guru demonstrates, the student imitates, the guru corrects, the student internalizes. The process is slow by design.

“The raga is not a scale that you learn once and then use,” Ravichandran explains. “It is a living entity. You spend years with it — hearing it, internalizing it, understanding what makes it different from every other raga. That process only happens through a guru. There is no shortcut.”

She trained under Smt. Meera Ramesh for 10 years, a period that encompassed the foundational exercises, the major varnams, and an extensive repertoire of kritis — the devotional compositions of the Carnatic Trinity, Tyagaraja, Muthuswami Dikshitar, and Syama Sastri, whose works in Sanskrit, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada form the backbone of every serious classical concert. She performed her first formal kutcheri —the traditional Carnatic concert format — at the age of 15 at Nageshwaran Temple in Kumbakonam, India at the age of 15.

The Carnatic Backbone

The Carnatic classical training is one of the most distinctive features of the regional music landscape — and one that is sometimes invisible to casual listeners. To trained ears, however, it is unmistakable. The ornaments, the microtonal inflections, the subtle gamaka patterns that characterize the finest South Indian film songs are, in almost every case, the product of classical training.

“Music directors like Ilaiyaraaja and A.R. Rahman — their compositions require classical knowledge,” says Ravichandran. “The ornamentation, the raga-based melodies, the way a phrase needs to be shaped — a singer without a classical foundation simply cannot do what those compositions demand. It comes from the same place. Carnatic music is the grammar.

This view is widely shared among South Indian music practitioners. Many of the most celebrated playback singers of the past century — from the legendary K.J. Yesudas to S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, from Chitra to Bombay Jayashree — received foundational training in Carnatic music. Classical training is, in this tradition, not an alternative to commercial music but its prerequisite.

She Says, ”I never stopped doing classical concerts, I kept performing kutcheris. I kept practicing alapana and niraval. The classical practice does not stop — if anything, it deepens as you get older, because you understand more.”

Performing for the Diaspora: “They Come for the Real Thing”

The upcoming U.S. tour will take Ravichandran to venues across the South Indian diaspora — temple auditoriums, cultural organization events, and community sabhas in the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas. For these communities, she says, the appetite for authentic classical performance is intense and largely unmet.

“The diaspora community is very discerning,” she observes. “Many of these families have been in the U.S. for twenty or thirty years, but they maintained their connection to Carnatic music — they listen to the great masters, they send their children for lessons, they come to concerts. When a classically trained artist comes from India, they know the difference. They come for the real thing.”

The classical kutcheri format she will present — opening varnam, followed by kritis with alapana and kalpanaswara improvisation in different ragas, concluding with a devotional mangalam — is specific to the South Indian classical tradition and has no equivalent in any other musical practice. Each performance will draw on ragas such as Todi, Bhairavi, Sankarabharanam, and Kambhoji, using the gamaka ornamentation and improvisational forms that can only be transmitted through the direct lineage of classical training.

Beyond performance, she will also conduct workshops for students at Indian classical music schools in the diaspora — a transmission of the same guru-shishya tradition, in a new geography.

Recognition and the Road Ahead

Ravichandran’s classical standing has been recognized by formal institutional channels in India. She holds a distinction classification from the Raaba International Cultural Academy, Chennai — a grading awarded by the Government of India’s national broadcaster following formal audition by a panel of senior Carnatic musicians, and widely regarded as a reliable indicator of professional classical standing. She has performed at Madras Music Academy in Chennai, including during the Margazhi season, and has received

Appreciation for her classical work.

These credentials are distinct from, she says. “The classical and the devotional and the popular have always been in conversation. The classical foundation is what allows you to move freely between these worlds without losing your center.”

As the morning practice session draws to a close and the Bhairavi varnam gives way to a cup of filter coffee, Ravichandran is already thinking about what comes next: a new kriti to add to her concert repertoire, a difficult passage of kalpanaswara she wants to refine. The classical world, she suggests, is where it was shaped.

“The grammar of ragas,” she says simply, “lives in the voice. It does not go away.”