In the north-eastern corner of Andhra Pradesh, close to the Odisha border, lies Priyagraharam, a settlement in Srikakulam district. It was there, on 3 August 1913, that Sripada Pinakapani was born. He would live for very nearly a century, and in that span he built two full careers, either of which would have been enough for one lifetime. He became a professor of medicine and the head of a medical department, and he became one of the most respected Carnatic vocalists and music teachers India produced in the twentieth century. The Telugu country came to know him affectionately as the doctor who sang.

Two Vocations, Held Together

Music reached him early. As a boy he spent a short period, only a few months, at the school run by the great violinist Dwaram Venkataswamy Naidu in Visakhapatnam, and he took vocal lessons from a teacher named Lakshmana Rao. He never underwent the long, unbroken residential apprenticeship under a single master that was the conventional route into Carnatic performance. Much of what he came to know he worked out himself, by listening intensely, by analysing what he heard, and by a lifetime of disciplined practice. This partly explains the character of his later teaching: because he had reasoned his way to his own understanding of the tradition, he could explain it, and he insisted that his students understand rather than merely imitate.

Medicine took him along a parallel path. He entered the MBBS course in 1932 at Andhra Medical College in Visakhapatnam, then part of Andhra University, and completed a doctorate in general medicine at the same institution in December 1945. He was an assistant professor at Madras Medical College from 1944 to 1949 and afterwards taught at Andhra Medical College. He was appointed Professor of Medicine in May 1954 and moved to Kurnool Medical College in January 1957, where he served until his retirement in August 1968. Kurnool became his home for the rest of his long life, and the town's association with him is why he was so often called the singing physician of Kurnool.

He did not treat the two callings as rivals. Colleagues remembered a man who taught clinical medicine in the morning and sat down to his tanpura in the evening with equal seriousness, applying to each the same habits of precision, patience and repeated verification.

The Singer

As a performer he was active across an extraordinarily long span, appearing at major festivals and concert platforms from the early 1930s onward and continuing to sing into the twenty-first century. His singing was admired less for display than for its architecture. He was known for the clarity with which he built a raga, for the exactness of his phrasing, and for a refusal to let ornament obscure structure. Listeners spoke of an intellectual quality in his music, but also of its warmth; he sang as a scholar might teach, but never coldly.

He gave particular attention to the Telugu compositional tradition and to the correct rendering of the great classical compositions, a concern that led directly to his work as a documenter of music.

Teacher and Author

His influence on Carnatic music finally rests less on his own concerts than on those he taught. His disciples include some of the most significant Carnatic vocalists of the later twentieth century: Nedunuri Krishnamurthy, Nookala Chinna Satyanarayana, Voleti Venkateswarlu, Srirangam Gopalaratnam and the Malladi Brothers, among many others. Through them his approach to raga and to compositional accuracy passed into the mainstream of the tradition, which is why he is frequently described as a teacher of teachers.

Alongside teaching he undertook a monumental task of notation and scholarship. His multi-volume work Gaanakalasarvasvamu set down the classical repertoire in exhaustive detail, recording the fine points of each composition so that they would not be lost or distorted in transmission. He wrote several other books on Carnatic music as well, among them Sangeetha Sourabhamu, Sangeetha Yatra, Mela Raga Malika, Manodharma Sangeetham and Pallavi Gana Sudha. Taken together these volumes form one of the most substantial bodies of written Carnatic musicology by a practising musician, and they have served generations of students who never met him.

Honours and Long Life

Recognition came steadily. He was given the title Sangeetha Kalasikhamani in 1970 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the national academy's highest honour for performing artists, in 1977. Andhra University conferred its Kala Prapoorna on him in 1978. In 1983 he received the Sangita Kalanidhi, the most coveted distinction in Carnatic music. The Government of India awarded him the Padma Bhushan in 1984. Much later, in 2011, the Sangeet Natak Akademi named him a Tagore Ratna, and in August 2012, on his ninety-ninth birthday, the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams honoured him.

He died in Kurnool on 11 March 2013, a few months short of his hundredth birthday. His musical family line continued: the playback singer Chinmayi Sripaada is his granddaughter.

For Priyagraharam and for Srikakulam district, Sripada Pinakapani stands as a figure of rare completeness. He healed and he taught medicine; he sang and he taught music; and he wrote down what he knew so that others could have it after him. Few lives so thoroughly refuse the idea that a person must choose between science and art.