Pooja, Kerala's first autistic woman to hold Carnatic concert

The unmanageably restless girl was taken to a music teacher with the hope of wooing the 10-year-old to a far peaceful world. There, as she heard the basic notes being rendered by fellow students in unison, Pooja Ramesh screamed out and created a mess that scared the whole classroom. That was how her first day of attempted Carnatic training went in a modest Thrissur house in 2007.

Today, Pooja, out of teens, is on the verge of completing her graduation in south Indian classical music. She even gave a concert last week in the same central Kerala town where the vocalist had a nasty start with learning Carnatic. So what? Isn’t it after all common that a reluctant student of an art form eventually becomes its passionate practitioner? True. Only that Pooja was — and is — autistic.

That mental impairment severely constricts her interaction with anything around owing to genetic disorders or/and environmental factors. The neuro-developmental problem usually shows in childhood, which was the case with Pooja as well. “Till, say, one-and-a-half years old, the girl was fine. She’d play with us and the families in the neighbourhood,” her father V S Ramesan recalls about the years spent in the industrial town of Kodakara as an employee with a tyre-manufacturing company. “Then she began withdrawing...rapidly, into a shell.”

The self-imposed isolation equally worried Pooja’s mother. “We took her for countless consultations with doctors...of different medical streams,” says Sujatha A R, a homemaker, raised in the Ayyanthole suburb of Thrissur, 25 km south of Kodakara where she had begun marital life. “There were faint signs of betterment, though we knew there was never a chance of recovery.”

All the same, the parents noticed that Pooja had a flair for music. “All of a sudden, she would sing in snatches a song we all heard the other day at a temple or a jingle that was becoming a hit advertisement on the TV,” reveals middle-aged Ramesan. Adds Sujatha: “The tunes came out well, but more than anything we were excited that lines were coming out of our daughter who’d otherwise utter not a word.”

It was then the parents, on expert advice, took Pooja to a Carnatic teacher in Thrissur. Sujatha had briefed vocalist Krishna Gopinath in advance about the grievous limitations of the girl, who was a lower-primary student in the city’s vintage Government Model Higher Secondary School. “To be frank, I had no idea about autism,” says Krishna, who later went on to research on the disorder in the context of music therapy that won her a doctorate in 2014. “I just thought it was retardation of another kind. In fact, I already had one such music student then, alongside another with Down syndrome.”

So, in 2007, on Vijaya Dasami that Hindus consider auspicious to start learning an art or trade, Krishna received Sujatha with her daughter dressed in silk blouse and skirt extending till the toes. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be a one-on-one, given that the day is for a whole new batch to be initiated to Carnatic and their seniors to refresh classes ceremoniously. “Just as I made her sit with fellow freshers and delivered the three octaves, the girl began scowling in fury,” recounts Krishna. “She rushed into the bedroom and just wouldn’t come out!” There was stunned silence around, when an extremely embarrassed Sujatha finally left the scene with the peevish girl somewhat quietened.

The story, yet, didn’t end there. Krishna, on recommendations from well-meaning friends who learned about the episode, prompted her to recall Pooja. “It was never easy. Communication, or total lack of it, was a major issue,” the teacher notes.

For instance, Krishna would cajole Pooja into learning the seven fundamental notes, saying “Let’s sing sa-ri-ga-ma?” To this, the girl would, at best, respond by echoing the same question. This kind of a non-response frustrated the two elders, who eventually found a way out. Krishna would pose mock queries for Sujatha, who would answer them. Such sustained interactive sessions had a positive effect on Pooja: into the third month, she began getting attentive. For the first time, the seven notes in serene Mayamalava Gowla found musical response from the girl. The morning raga, finally, lit up their day. Soon, Pooja’s family shifted from Kodakara to Thrissur — solely for the girl’s cause.

It wasn’t that everything ran smooth thence. The girl would occasionally be in foul mood, throw tantrums. “The classes too weren’t necessarily held on the mat on the floor,” winds back Krishna. “There had been occasions where Pooja would prefer to lie on the cot and sing. Unconventional, but nothing wrong! It was everyone’s need the girl sang howsoever.”

Those five years under Krishna saw Pooja performing in group music programmes around their city. “Mostly devotional songs at temples,” points out Ramesan, a native of Alappuzha district’s Vayalar, 110 km south of Thrissur. “She learned 40-odd songs. Karaoke practice, too, helped a lot,” he adds, referring to the Japanese-devised interactive singing system used by amateurs across the globe.

Overlapping with that phase, Ramesan and Sujatha were among the people instrumental in starting a registered society of parents of autistic children in and around the city. It would hold get-togethers that would double as potentially vaster and vibrant interactive session for the boys and girls. The functionaries would also hold guidance lectures by experts, one among whom was an allopathic doctor from Malappuram district.

Tirur-based Dr C P Aboobacker, in the intervals of his Thrissur talk, noticed the singing potential of Pooja. “I convinced them, yet again, that autism is no retardation but a disorder of another kind altogether,” says the medical practitioner, basing the fact on a pioneering research paper that came out from two Westerner psychiatrists in 1943-44. Austrians Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger had presented a paper that traced the exact reasons behind autism, though the term was coined way back in 1910 by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler who had dubbed it (wrongly) a form of schizophrenic thought. Such bits of knowledge, what with Dr Aboobacker enlightening them more on the benefits of music in autistic minds, gave Pooja’s parents tips on ways to proceed tenaciously with the matter.

By 2012, when the girl was 15, Pooja’s parents thought she required individual attention at her music classes. Thus, they took her to another Carnatic teacher in Thrissur. Kala Parasuram, who is an alumnus of Chembai Music College in Palakkad, found that her new student could also be taught veena. “There were phases when I (too) felt stuck,” she recalls about the teaching sessions with the weighty string instrument. “But tenacity prevailed. She even learnt ashtapadis,” the teacher adds, recalling the vocal training on reciting the famed stanzas from 12th-century poet Jayadeva’s Geeta Govidam.

Then, in 2015, just as Pooja was through with her Plus-2 studies under Vocational Higher Secondary Education, the parents thought of her pursuing solely in the only art she enjoyed. Thrissur has a Chetana Music College, where its founder Paul Poovathingal noticed certain faults with Pooja’s throat muscles. “The right sphere of her brain, I could sense, was strong, making the girl strong in artistic sensibilities,” says the vocologist, a trained Carnatic musician. The Catholic priest suggested that the autistic girl can improve her mental faculties as much as her musical talent by enrolling with the institution he had founded in 2007 with the blessings of his renowned guru K J Yesudas.

Thus, for the past three years, Pooja has been under a third vocal teacher at Chetana, which is affiliated to the reputed University of Madras. Desamangalam Narayanan, who post-graduated in Carnatic from Delhi University’s music department, devised his own methods to deal with Pooja to yield the desired results. “Initially, there were hiccups, yes. I found the girl sometimes slipping on her shruti (pitch), but her sense of rhythm was terrific!” says 62-year-old Narayanan, to whose Wadakanchery home Pooja’s parents began going for special weekly classes, travelling 20 km northward from Thrissur. “Overall, she has learned some 140 compositions, including ‘tukada’ items like javali, tillana and kavadichinthu. It’s no small achievement.”

Thus, when Pooja rendered an hour-long kacheri at Chetana’s medium-sized auditorium on August 11, it was the high point of her career by far. The listeners were particularly struck with her sense of melody and time, as Pooja, for instance delivered Muthuswamy Dikshitar’s famed kriti Annapurne Vishalakshi in the lilting Shyama raga (see video). Accompanying the vocalist were Raghu B on the violin, Sreedev Srinivasan on the mridangam and Aluva R Rajesh on the ghatam. The concert featuring a dozen compositions was also dotted with alapanam (an abstract take on the raga) and swaraprastaram (freewheeling solfa patterns), both of which requiring imagination.

Kerala thus got a girl who mounted the challenges of autism to present a full-fledged Carnatic, the 500-year-old music form of the Deccan. Across the peninsula, the idiom has had a recent history of a handful of performers with the disorder performing the classical form. Their numbers are steadily on the rise, more so with an allied endeavour frontline musician Bombay S Jayashri floated in 2013. Hitham, as the Chennai-based trust is called, has, like a few other similar initiatives, been churning out autistic boys and girls as classical musicians, instrumentalist and percussionists. As Jayashri herself once noted, “autistic children truly imbibe the meaning of what we call sadhana.”

That is totally focused attention. Selfless devotion. Or, in other words, the meaning of the word Pooja. A girl with that name is the newest protagonist in an amazing socio-cultural-medical story from mankind.