But perhaps her greatest accomplishment was that she enticed an entire new generation of young Indians to Carnatic music. In a career that started when she was 13 years old, Subbulakshmi performed before audiences all over the world, and received scores of awards, including the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. She sang bhajans, or spiritual songs, in 12 Indian languages in venues ranging from her native Chennai to Carnegie Hall. She enthralled audiences with her mellifluous voice that captured the seven talas - or rhythmic cycles - and 72 fundamental ragas - or melodic scales - of the genre in a way that could only be characterized as mesmerizing. While maestros like Pandit Ravi Shankar of India and the late Nusrat Ali Khan of Pakistan, along with the show-biz tunes of Bollywood, put South Asian pop-classical music on the global map, it was Subbulakshmi who introduced Carnatic music to the West. Subbulakshmi was more than a voice - she was the very embodiment of a centuries-old music tradition that lives on in the homes of millions of Indians in the subcontinent and around the globe. Known widely as just "M.S.," she was the greatest singer of Carnatic music, the South Indian genre that's considered to be one of the oldest systems of devotional music in the world. SINGAPORE - She was known as the "nightingale of India," but that scarcely captured what Madurai Shanmukhavadivu Subbulakshmi - who died on Saturday at the age of 88 - was all about.
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