From a Six-Year-Old Prodigy to the First Eelam Artist at an NBA Game
How a Scarborough drummer carried Tamil classical music from the temple to Scotiabank Arena — and a national audience.
When Yanchan Rajmohan walked out onto the floor at Scotiabank Arena for the Toronto Raptors' South Asian Heritage Night, he became the first artist of Eelam origin to perform at an NBA game. For a kid who started on the mridangam at six and became the youngest person in Canada to complete a Mridangam Arangetram, it was a full-circle moment — the temple discipline and the diaspora dream meeting under stadium lights.
The Canadian-Tamil producer has made a career of these crossings. He's performed a CBC set alongside Anjulie at the Glenn Gould Theatre, headlined sold-out shows across Toronto, and shared stages from Mumbai's DY Patil Stadium to arenas in Malaysia and Taipei.
“My grandparents carried this rhythm across an ocean. The least I can do is carry it across a city, across a country, and put it somewhere people don't expect it.”
What sets the performances apart is that the mridangam is never decorative. It's the engine. Audiences who arrive for the hip-hop leave talking about the drum; audiences who arrive for the classical tradition leave surprised at how naturally it sits inside a modern beat.
For Yanchan, the mission is explicit: build the future of the South Indian music community, and bring Tamil culture to a global stage. The NBA floor was one stop. He's already planning the next.
Originally featured in CBC
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