CHENNAI: There is a particular kind of song that Tamil cinema of the 1950s and 60s could not do without — the one sung by the friend, the maid, the courtesan, the child, the comedienne, the woman on the swing at the temple festival. Not the heroine’s tragic solo, but the number that made the theatre sit up and grin. For nearly two decades, that song more often belonged to K Jamuna Rani.Jamuna Rani died in Bengaluru on Thursday (July 30) due to age-related ailments. She was 88. Her last rites were performed in Bengaluru on the same day.With her goes one of the last direct links to the era of G Ramanathan, K V Mahadevan and the young Viswanathan–Ramamoorthy — a singer who recorded more than 6,000 songs in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Sinhala, and who had already been a professional for six years by the time she was 13. Born on May 17, 1938 in Andhra Pradesh to K Varadarajulu and violinist K Droupathy, Jamuna Rani grew up inside music rather than beside it. Her mother’s training put her in front of a recording horn at seven, for the Telugu classic Tyagayya (1946), composed by Chittoor V Nagaiah. By 1952 she had crossed to Tamil, and the crossing was emphatic: Kalyani gave her “Success Success”, a song whose sheer cheek made her a name overnight, and Valaiyapathi, made at Modern Theatres, paired her with a then-rising T M Soundararajan. year later came a small landmark that is rarely credited to her. In Devadas (1953), she sang “O Devadhaas” for a child on screen — one of the earliest instances of a playback voice being used for a child role in Tamil cinema. In the same year, Chandirani had her performing a duet largely composed of the word “meow.” That range — from a cat’s mewling to the plaintive — is the point.Veterans recall a detail worth preserving: for a singer identified so completely with the thullal number, she never performed the accompanying dance, neither at recordings nor on stage. The energy was entirely in the throat. Jamuna Rani was a household name in Sri Lanka. She first sang in Sinhala for Sujatha (1953) under Ananda Samarakoon, the composer of that country’s national anthem, and went on to record for Warada Kageda, Seda Sulang, Mathalan, Suraya and Vana Mohini. “Jeevana Mea Gamana Sansare”, her duet with A M Rajah from Seda Sulang, remains one of the most-loved songs in Sinhala cinema — an Indian singer’s voice sitting permanently inside another nation’s musical memory. Work thinned in the early 1970s as the industry’s sound changed. In 1987, Ilaiyaraaja and Mani Ratnam went looking for a voice that carried the grain of old Madras and found her. “Naan Sirithaal Deepavali” in Nayakan — sung with M S Rajeswari and as “Naa Navve Deepavali” in the Telugu Nayakudu — introduced her to an audience that had not been born when she recorded “Success Success”. She sang once more in Tamil, in Annan Ennada Thambi Ennada (1992), alongside Jikki. Two late Telugu appearances followed: Varudu (2010) and Mithunam (2012), recorded when she was 74.
