Early in the 1930s, Mayavaram Subramaniam Natarajan set out to put together his own band to play the fantansies he heard in his head. Born in 1920 to a famous dental surgeon in Bangalore, Natarajan had mastered at least 18 musical instruments by the time he was a teenager. Living in the cosmopolitan city of Bangalore in the erstwhile Mysore state, whose royals were great patrons of the arts, he started to search for others who were looking to take a different path along with him. By 1935, he had got five like-minded friends together to form the Saraswathi Orchestra.


Natarajan heading a contingent of folk dancers to the Republic Day parade with Nehru and Indira Gandhi.


Natarajan was all of 15 at the time, and the others in his band were just as young. It wasn't long before they were performing across south India. Within a year their popularity grew so rapidly that 20 others joined them. The 25 musicians in the orchestra in 1936 included a couple of vocalists and a musicians performing on a eclectic range of instruments: tabla, mridangam, veena, sitar,esraj, rubab, jaltarang, banjo, violin, mandolin, guitar, piano and organ. Between them there were musicians who could play classical Hindustani and Carnatic music as well as jazz.


Natarajan with his wife Maya.


This extra-large orchestra was soon invited to concert tours across India. Like the traveling drama companies of the era, Nararajan, who was also in charge of the logistics, would book a whole bogie in a train for the musicians. They would also have their own cooks, launderers and instrument repair experts. A retinue would number approximately 50 people.


Over the years, the orchestra travelled to Madras, Travancore, Bombay, Jaipur, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Patiala, Gwalior, Srinagar, Lahore, Karachi, and even took two trips to Kabul. Though they cut several discs of their music, none of those recordings seem to exist today ‒ not even the recording they made for All India Radio in Madras in 1938.


Seeing their unprecedented popularity, the celebrated dancer Ram Gopal hired them to provide the music for his famous dance productions for more than a decade till the mid-1940s. The only group photograph taken and available of the orchestra after a performance at the Town Hall in Bangalore in 1943 shows 22 of its members posing with their instruments. It was in one such artistic encounter that Natarajan met the famous dancer Maya Rao, who would become his future wife.

When not travelling, the orchestra would gather in Natarajan’s bungalow and rehearse, think up new ideas and jam, as they enjoyed Maya’s gracious hospitality. “I have heard his orchestra perform several times,” said KKS Murthy, a close friend of Natarajan for six decades and the owner of the famous Select Book Shop in Bangalore. “He was popular as Banjo Nataraj or Silk Nataraj as he was always dressed impeccably in silk fineries at all times.”

Murthy added, “The orchestra’s tunes Cloud Messenger, Twilight of the Gods and Lament for Sita always got many calls for encore and resounding applause. But Nataraj was not just a musician. He was a visionary. The city never saw another cultural impresario like him ever.”


Natarajan with Jawaharlal Nehru.


The orchestra ran successfully for close to 20 years before being dissolved in the early 1950s. Several musicians who started their careers with it became big names on the Carnatic classical music concert scene. Among the well-known ones were Mridangam Vidwan Veerabhadrappa and Vidwan Anoor Suryanarayana, who was an expert vocalist and a veena player. He later accompanied famous dancers like Indraini Rehman and toured the world. Vidwan Srikantiah earned fame as a veena player and Vidwan Bhagalur Krishnamurthy Rao as a violinist.

After dissolving Saraswathi Orchestra, Natarajan too stopped performing in public and took on the role of becoming a cultural impresario. As a musician, scholar, writer, event manager and much more rolled into one, he was responsible for curating the Karnataka contingent at the famous Republic Day parade in Delhi in the initial years after India’s Independence. Both Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri, who did not agree on many political issues, came together in their special fondness for Natarajan. Indira Gandhi also showed great hospitality to the folk dance troupes headed by him.

Natarajan made sure he picked the choicest of musicians and dancers from remote villages across Karnataka. He researched costumes according to dance forms and designed them specifically for performances and presentations. Many folk dancer communities across Karnataka still use to the costumes designed by Natarajan.

MS Natarajan passed away in September 1997 in Bangalore. The Saraswathi Orchestra that once lit up Bangalore’s music scene is a part of forgotten history now.

Veejay Sai is a culture critic.