S. Janaki: The Isai Arasi who established the voice of the rural, female heroine

If Bharathiraja taught people how to look at villages, then it was certainly S. Janaki who taught them to listen to the women in these villages. She was the perfect acoustic accompaniment for Bharathiraja’s vast rural landscapes. There’s no scientific way of telling how this combination dressed up folklore as a living, breathing, urgent way of life through celluloid, but it would be safe to say they pulled off something there.  

Janaki amma’s voice gave contour to the heroines, their fears, their desires, their hopes and their dreams, even as Bharathiraja wrote them lion’s space on the screen. Take the classic, much-feted 16 Vayathinile and the wonderful Sendoora Poove. A young Sridevi is footloose and fancy free; she starts with a lilt, and as the melody progresses, a mild, tender eroticism creeps in as the young girl asks the breeze to carry her message, not coyly or hesitantly, but with a confidence that Janaki’s voice lends to Mayilu’s character. Like the director, Janaki amma’s singing created a safe, legitimate space for female desire. Even if they will be punished by the real world later.  

And when she sings for the women from the rural areas, Janaki made sure her voice had a timbre and grain that sat well on Illayaraja’s earthy music and Bharathiraja’s visuals. The fullness of it gave the women the freedom that some of them on dreamt of, but a few also landed. With her incredible talent not just for singing but also performance, just as her singing partner the late S.P.Balasubrahmanyam, she would pack in a hesitation or a sob, a laugh, a longing, or joy in a way that were not alien to the rural backdrop, completely in sync with it.  

In another classic Poovarasampoo Poothachu, a song that could have only come from a village, in the film Kizhakke Pogum Rail, Janaki amma’s voice oscillates between flirtation, shyness, want, hope and also the fervent appeal to the deity to make it happen, the weight of what is to come, just as a woman-child might feel in the circumstances. In Alaigal Oivathillai, set in a beachside village, Aayiram Thamarai Mottukale, she manages to bring in that tender, tentative physical intimacy in the duet along with SPB as young Radha and Karthik discover each other.  

That plausibility she brings to the song is probably what endeared Janaki to her heroines, her fans, her stars, composers, and her directors. It was not for nothing that she was called IsaiArasi (Queen of music), so well could she lend her voice to truthfully convey what any woman would feel intensely. The richness of the rural landscape we have seen in Tamil cinema owes as much to Janaki Amma as it does to Bharathiraja, both dear departed now.