i have read somewhere, the esence of hindustani music is intact, over time, through the passage of muslim india and beyond.
the mughals, and other muslim rulers, got to like the music, but sans its hindu devotional aspect. so the music was stripped of its bhakti, and in a way, made purely secular. hence we have morning raga, evening raga, and such in hindustani music.
on the other hand, we have thyagaraja here, quoted as 'no music is worth its salt, if it does not tend towards divinity', and which is the soul of carnatic music. the 50s 60s music of certain film directors, blended modernity with carnatic tunes, but these to have been felled by today's kuthu and rap oriented tamil pop.
personally, i felt, mainly due to its exclusivity and (in chennai atleast) a snob appeal, i shunned it. though my sister, who used to play the violin pretty well, used to say, that in times of trouble, playing carnatic tunes, was a great source of solace.
today, singers like bombay jayashree, and sudha raghunathan, have made great efforts to step off the pedestal of sanskrit/telugu domination of CM and i welcome this. if more of this happens, and 'tamil isai' itself is made a full concert concept, there is hope, that CM can become more populistic.
i doubt that would happen. even in the west, classical music has patronage of only a few, and there, the gulf between pop and classical, is even wider than the policies of iran and israel.
i have always wondered if thyagayya, who was equally adept in tamil, had chosen tamil as his medium of writing the music. what would have happened?