About The Event
Musical Maestro
The first Malayalam film score was composed in 1948, yet the renaissance truly started in the late 1950s, 60s and 70s. Kerala cinema became the ideal medium to reflect social themes and revolutionary zeal. It required the blend of enormous talent and great skill to create such phenomenal change. Great Malayalam novels and plays were made into superb films and poets and ‘bhagavathars’ entered the music arena. One of them, G. Devarajan, entered the scene with his scintillating score in the 1955 film Kaalam Marunnu, foreshadowing the fate of music in Kerala; it was never the same again.
A colossus in the world of Indian Film Music, Paravoor G. Devarajan, or G. Devarajan Master as he is widely known, was undoubtedly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, composers in the history of Indian Film Music, nay Music. To label Devarajan Master as merely a music director who composed songs from 400+ films and almost the same number of theatrical plays would be a gross injustice. For he was one of the most influential figures of music in the Indian subcontinent, influencing a large range of musicians and instrumentalists from all decades, in addition to being one of the frontline crusaders and a prominent cultural ambassador of the progressive movement in the 1950s Kerala.
He was the first original composer of Malayalam Film/Drama Music, refusing to copy from Hindi/Telugu tunes, and instead utilizing the beauty of Indian Classical Music and juxtaposing that with the folk idiom in a rustic, albeit melodious manner. If one looks at the astonishing, varied, world of his music, one will not find perhaps anywhere else in the world of music even.
That is who G. Devarajan Master was: a person who was so prolific in his musical prowess, and remained consistent all throughout. It has been 17 years since he passed, but he continues to live on in the hearts of millions who simply don’t go a day without hearing at least a couple of his songs, remaining ever so young in the minds of millions of ardent music connoisseurs
