I liked the book. But the parts where he describes technicalities of specific ragas themselves was hard to follow. I couldn’t relate the text of the notes with the sound or even the progression he was describing. I need to hear those ragas before I re-read those parts from the book.
Chaudhuri says “A raga is not a scale. Its notes ascend and descend, but not in the linear manner in which a scale’s does.” Elsewhere he describes how unlike west classical music, Indian classical / ragas don’t try to describe a mood. They’re not mimetic. Instead the ragas evoke the mood. In this sense they’re equivalent to the impressionistic paintings. He uses this reference later on in the chapter in Khayal, which is its own genre influenced by Dhrupad, where he compares modernist paintings such as JMW Turner’s painting “Rain, Steam and Speed”.
Q: What is that bliss? A: If you now ask me what ananda is, I won’t be able to tell you. It’s something you experience.
singer of what are called ‘light classical’ forms in India would reply – Because pure classical music relegates tone and beauty to secondary status, or gives them no status at all, and privileges mastery of grammar. This is not quite true, but has enough truth to explain why people with voices that aren’t musical sing khayal with authority.
He sang softly, without insistence, and almost never sang the same phrase twice. His aim, achieved with modesty, was to surprise and be surprised.
The alaap corresponds with my need for narrative not to be a story, but a series of opening paragraphs, where life hasn’t already ‘happened’, ready for recounting, but is about to happen, or is happening, and, as a result, can’t be domesticated into a perfect retelling.
Something spiritual happens when a voice departs its accepted register, which is often determined by gender. This was true of Balgandharva. His singing had a bodiless freedom and pliability. The songs he sang from the natya sangeet repertoire were Marathi offshoots of classical compositions, executed with an almost guileless virtuosity, with Balgandharva clearing his throat before he plunged into a new taan. I had no idea who he was. The programme was Marathi; besides, the channel behaved as if it was radio. The song’s name appeared on a wavering caption, and was played from a 78 rpm record.
I should distinguish these equivalents of sightings from J. M. Coetzee’s account of overhearing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier in a neighbour’s house in suburban Cape Town: ‘As long as the music lasted, I was frozen, I dared not breathe.’
‘We Indians live in that kingdom of night’: it’s the non-representational tendency of the raga that Tagore is referring to – its abjuring of portrayal. Tagore’s words make me think of the singer Kishori Amonkar saying to an interviewer in 1991, in the context of Indian classical music, that, in a music that explores notes alone, outside the framework of song or rhythm, you sing blind, as it were. You can neither see nor touch notes, she reminds her interlocutor.
This constant embrace of language is how we elect to live in the world.
Ferdinand de Saussure’s claim that language is a social fabric marked by ‘difference’ is especially true of ragas. There’s nothing about the word ‘bat’, for example, that makes it intrinsically refer to that animal. ‘Bat’ – as is the case with other words – is not an absolute; it’s a sign and a sound that’s related to all the similar sounds and signs it is not: like ‘bed’, or ‘bud’, or ‘but’. This is what Saussure means by ‘difference’: the way language and its meanings are formed by negative differentiations. Similarly, ‘evening’ means what it does not because it has an automatic link with that time of day, but because its sound distinguishes itself from other sounds that have different meanings: ‘avenue’ and ‘awning’, for instance. Derrida, in recognition of Saussure’s insight that the word isn’t born with an eternal, fixed identity, poetically calls this lack of fixity, this residue of one sound in another, a ‘trace’.
A raga is not a scale. Its notes ascend and descend, but not in the linear manner in which a scale’s does.
For now, I wish to note my memory of reading, in a biography of Khusro, of how he was struck by a tune a Yemeni merchant visiting Delhi was humming to himself. The tune appealed to Khusro; he memorised it, calling it ‘Yaman’, after the country the merchant came from.
Besides being composers or writers, many of the artists who determine the direction traditions take are, like Khusro, collectors. Tagore was another; he collected tunes, then transformed them. I recall my wife drawing my attention to passages in Jibaner Jhara Pata (‘Life’s Fallen Leaves’), a memoir by Tagore’s niece Sarala Debi Chaudhurani, in which she describes the state of receptivity and excitement in which the Tagore family gathered tunes from passers-by and itinerants and hawkers, melodies later turned by Tagore into songs. Yaman too is very possibly the result of a similar transformation.
Note: The musician Pharrell has mentioned how when he comes across a new music he likes he dissects it to understand what created the feeling he identified with and then tries to recreate that feeling in his own compositions.
Bharata also lists the seven notes or svaras, ascribing provenances to them. The names of the svaras in full are shadja (sa), which means ‘that which gives birth to six’ – that is, the other six notes; rishab (ri or re); gandhar (ga); madhyam (ma; from the same root as ‘medium’ or ‘median’); pancham (or pa; from ‘panch’ or ‘five’); dhaivat (dha); and nishad (ni). Bharata proposes the theory that each note is borrowed from an animal sound. So, sa came from the peacock’s cry (I hear the upper tonic when I imagine this); rishab from the ox’s lowing (this is a plausible and beautiful analogy for the second note; once the inner ear hears it, the other comparisons become audible); ‘ga’ from the goat’s bleating; ‘ma’ from the krauncha bird or the demoiselle crane; pa from the cuckoo; dha from the horse’s neigh; ni from the elephant’s trumpeting.
My problem was that I grew bored of, and soon distanced myself from, what others admired in me. I lose faith very quickly. As a result, my life is full of fresh starts. I have few admirers, and the fault is partly mine: I can’t be with my admirers for very long. I must change.
A highly accomplished sitar player can produce four: that is, he or she can play, say, sa re ga ma by pulling a single string sideways rather than climbing the frets. This is difficult, but – as Indian musicians have demonstrated repeatedly – the impossible can be made possible. What drives one to an impossibility has to do with being possessed by desire – in this case, the desire is related to the sitar’s ambition of replicating the human voice, its longing to sing. This is why schools of sitar-playing in the mid-twentieth century, in which complex bent notes dominated, came to be called the ‘gayaki ang’, or the ‘singing style’. The singer has access neither to frets nor the pianist’s keys: he produces the most difficult tonal effects, including the sapat, the fast up-and-down, not by coercion, but by pulling the string in his throat, by bending and stretching the sa significantly; as Govindji was, when he showed me in a leisurely way how the scale should be sung.
Anyone partaking of the arts must partake of riyaaz. Art is an acquired taste: our first experience of it is foreign, our approach to it sceptical. Over time, we may begin to take pleasure in it. This process – of outgrowing resistance and beginning to savour – is a kind of riyaaz.
The raga and the Avadhi language were my points of contact with a ‘previous life’. I could be there only for a short while. Then I’d be back again, in Cuffe Parade, on the twenty-fifth storey.
Note: If I understand this correctly by “short while” Chaudhari is referring to his riyaaz when as if he’s in a dream state as in Tagore’s poem. What a great way to think of practice. However I’m confused by connection - he doesn’t understand Avadhi? And so while he utters the words it’s still a one way communication?
Poetry, for him, meant compression: a kind of inner pressure, shaping the sound of words, which he found in Tulsidas but not in Meera.
‘Wanting’ something creates its own reality; it makes the rules of what we ordinarily think plausible irrelevant.