Maestro Ilaiyaraja New Albums 2011 - Hello Jaihind / Sri Rama Rajyam

[Plum]

More thoughts on Sri Rama Rajyam. I actually subscribe to what inetk posted - that was how I imagined the reaction would be from middle-aged(and over) Telugu people.
It is not devotional, in the harmless, mediocre way that Annamayya and Ramadasu by MM Keervani were.
As someone said, fat chance of this being played in temples. It is just out of place for that.

OTOH, you compare it to the original Lava-Kusa, and this one lacks the heavy classicism, too.

The way I look at it is this - and I think this is the correct way to look at this album:

Basically, what if Ramayanam weren't a divine epic? What if it was just a timeless classic that you can adapt to your milieu as a writer? Heck, that's what Kamban et al did, right?

What do you think of when you think of Bapu, the telugu director. I dont know about others, and what his popular reputation is, but I tend to think of what we can call "Teluguthanam". I see that also from rare conversations with in-laws(who are for all practical purposes, Telugu, although Tamil by birth and language spoken at home).

Combining the above two, and the feel of the audio of this album, my take is that this is simply Rama's story adapted to a telugu milieu. They might still call the Kingdom Ayodhya in the movie, and nominally talk about locations right now in UP/Uttaranchal. But I feel that we are going to view Rama as a chakkanaina telugu abbaayi in this movie. I take that back because I cant imagine NBK being chakkanaina. Let's just say telugu abbaayi.

We are watching a version where we are going to follow the story of a telugu abbaayi, much loved by people, exiled and returing in triumph. He is not the divine Rama in Hindu epics. He is merely protagonist of this Telugu epic.

The teluguthanam of the protagonist has been placed above His language-agnostic Hindu divineness is my take.

The audio most aptly reflects that, if that was the intention.