Review: Uma Vasudev, Hariprasad Chaurasia: Romance of the Bamboo Reed (2005)

[Given the latest controversy concerning Hariprasad Chaurasia, I thought it might be a good idea to repost here this review I had written back in 2005.]

Uma Vasudev, Hariprasad Chaurasia: Romance of the Bamboo Reed (Gurgaon: Shubhi Publications, 2005) 350 pages

Review by Abhik Majumdar

(an edited version of this article originally appeared in 'The Book Review', May 2005)

Uma Vasudev’s biography of Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia, the renowned flautist, comes across as a mixed bag. At one level, there is little to distinguish it from most run-of-the-mill hagiographical accounts of musicians and their lives. Other reviewers hold that it reads more like an autobiography. I feel compelled to agree; to my mind it comes across exactly like a ghosted autobiography written for some reason in the third person. And yet the book contains several strongly redeeming features. Hagiographical or not, it is a sensitively rendered portrayal of the maestro’s life. More importantly, it manages to shed light on a crucial period in the history of Hindustani music.

The narrative starts on a rather drab note. It frequently tends towards the overblown and sentimental, which is underscored by the extensive use it makes of the active voice. In an autobiographical account, such a device comes across as perfectly normal. However, in a work rendered from a third-person perspective, it only serves to test our credibility. How, for example, is the author so sure about the exact words young Hariprasad’s father employs when telling him of his mother’s death?

Be that as it may, the maestro’s early life was every bit as eventful as his later years. Born into a thoroughly unmusical family, the son of a renowned wrestler, he sustained his passion under the most harrowing of conditions. His father dreamt of making his son a champion wrestler, and would fly into a rage at any mention of music beyond votive bhajans. A kindly dhrupad singer who lived in the neighbourhood agreed to give him lessons on the sly. Young Hariprasad would leave the house on the pretext of going to the temple, and spend time with his mentor instead. As he grew older, he began to learn typing, and even secured a job as stenographer. This phase of his life ended with his getting radio assignments, and finally a job as staff artist.

The post-independence era marked the end of princely states and the zamindari system, the traditional sources of benefaction for musicians. In their place, four new institutions of patronage began to assume significance, namely the radio (and other government agencies), cinema, the concert circuit and, eventually, record companies. Chaurasia’s career also began from around that time. In successive stages, he drew sustenance from each of them. Through the maestro’s eyes, the text provides us a unique first-hand account of these bodies and their evolution. The first is singled out for especial attention, since the maestro owes considerably to his tenure with All India Radio, initially at Cuttack and then at Bombay. Interestingly, from this point on, even the narrative quality improves perceptibly. One finds a tautness hitherto absent; even the active voice is used in a more restrained manner, and also feels much more appropriate than it did earlier.

It stands to the credit of the author that she handles Chaurasia’s knotty personal life with refreshing candour. While stationed in Cuttack, he met and fell in love with a young singer called Angurbala. At around the same time, his father fixed his marriage without even informing him. Unable to either defy his father or forsake his beloved, he ended up marrying twice, the second one (to Angurbala, renamed Anuradha) admittedly being invalid in the eyes of law. Kamala, the first wife, looked after his father in Allahabad, while Anuradha ended up moving with him to Bombay.

This shift marked another epoch in Chaurasia’s life. His work with the radio continued unabated, but he also began gaining recognition in other circles. He earned frequent concert engagements. Moreover, he even made a name for himself in the film industry as a provider of incidental music. His circle of friends increased; many, like the santoor exponent Shiv Kumar Sharma have remained close to this day. However, professional and financial success spawned in its wake a growing sense of detachment, a feeling that his tutelage was somehow incomplete. He resolved to seek guidance from Annapurna Devi, the reclusive daughter of Baba Allauddin Khan and a musical colossus in her own right. Chaurasia took more than a year to persuade her to accept him as a disciple. He even switched to a left-handed playing style to demonstrate his dedication. But once he succeeded in convincing her, he was made privy to her innermost worlds as very, very few were.

The book attains remarkable heights in documenting Chaurasia’s training under Annapurna Devi. Her peculiar timings (lessons from ten at night to one or two in the morning), volatile temperament, exacting requirements from her students, even her unique teaching methods - it recounts in sensitive detail all that he experienced at first hand, and provides unparalleled insights into the personality of that most enigmatic of musicians. It also sheds light on her son Shubho, who somehow couldn’t live up to his early promise and was destined to die a tragically unfulfilled artist at the age of fifty. Chaurasia and he were of the same age, and inevitably became close friends and confidantes.

This period also witnessed upheavals in the maestro’s personal life. His first wife and her children also moved to Bombay. The potentially catastrophic situation was saved by an almost unbelievable stroke of luck – the two wives warmed up to each other and soon became close friends. Professionally, he began to flower in earnest. Film offers, foreign tours and domestic concert engagements began flooding in. Even record company executives, initially reluctant to venture into flute albums, began to pursue him. He and Shivkumar Sharma teamed up to compose film music with great success. Ultimately, he set up his own gurukul in a Bombay suburb. Gradually, the uncertainty of his early life came to be replaced by a stodgy stability befitting an acclaimed classical musician. Here onwards, the narrative lapses into hagiography. It does little more than recount the maestro’s successful career and family life exclusively from his point of view. One chapter is devoted to his students and how they have fared in the professional circuit. Another discusses for some obscure reason his prominent women admirers and his relations with them – in my opinion, completely superfluous!

In general, I feel where the book really succeeds is in its treatment of the maestro’s interchanges with the musical world. Through its portrayal of radio-station politics, Annapurna Devi’s warm-hearted eccentricities, record executives’ misgivings about classical albums, the venerable flautist Pannalal Ghosh’s reluctance to teach and so on, it documents vital chunks of the post-independence history of classical music. When it comes to the man himself, it does not tell us anything more than what he himself wishes to reveal. (This, of course, contributes to the book’s strongly autobiographical flavour.)

Even regarding Chaurasia’s musical innovations, the narrative fails to satisfy. For example, it recounts how he derived his technique from the tantrakari ang, or the performative idiom associated with stringed instruments. Special reference was made of the jhala movement. Now, jhala as played on stringed instruments makes extensive use of the chikari or drone strings. This is naturally not possible on the flute. Chaurasia’s technique actually resembles that employed by dhrupad singers, which consists of individual notes produced in very quick succession three or four times. More crucially, the narrative altogether leaves out how he adapted to the flute the gat-toda form, which involves systematic Raga-expansion on the basis of compositions and note-patterns set to rhythm-cycles. This comprises the most significant departure from the gayaki-ang or vocal-idiom so far followed by flautists. Consequently, its omission becomes all the more inexplicable.

However, the positive features of the book are so compelling that these lacunae can be ignored to a decent extent. In conclusion, therefore, this book may be recommended to laypersons and scholars alike, with the caveat that the insights it provides into 20th century developments in music, rather than the main narrative about the man himself, are what really make it worthwhile.

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Review: Deepak Raja, Hindustani Music: A Tradition in Transition (2005)

Deepak Raja, Hindustani Music: A Tradition in Transition (Delhi: DK Printworld, 2005) 432 + xxiii pages

Review by Abhik Majumdar

(an edited version of this article originally appeared in 'The Book Review', August 2007)

Deepak Raja’s book is a very interesting, somewhat idiosyncratic compilation of articles. Reviewing it poses a challenge, as it escapes the usual taxonomic classification for writings on the subject. It is clearly not a scholarly work in the formal sense. As is the case with most compilations, the various topics it encompasses cover too broad a spectrum to merit the cohesiveness one associates with academic treatises. Moreover, though some footnotes and other references have been provided, they are sparse and infrequent.

On the other hand, characterising it as a compilation of journalistic essays will be inaccurate. It bears a depth of perception and analysis seldom found in such works, or indeed anywhere else. Moreover, unlike usual collections of short essays, this book seems to have been compiled with a definite, clear-cut objective in mind.

Indeed, so intriguing is Raja’s perspective that it makes more sense to focus on this than to chart out a conventional review. The author makes use of the rather provocative phrase ‘connoisseur activism’ to describe his agenda, which is very apt. Another approach is to treat the book as a response, a quintessentially Indian response, to certain (may I suggest, Western-inspired?) scholarly practices.

The discipline of ethnomusicology is traditionally anchored to a ‘cultural outsider’ approach. Its discourses begin with the assumption that the author has no specialist knowledge as such, and conducts his research using objectively verifiable methods and processes accessible to everyone.

Raja’s methods effectively amount to an inversion of this. In the introduction, he sets out his conception of the writer’s role: ‘A writer is, after all, nothing but a connoisseur who has decided to share his understanding with other connoisseurs. And, as such, he is part of the watchdog mechanism, which keeps art faithful to its elevating (sic) ideals.’

Thus he locates the author firmly within the cultural tradition on which the book bases itself. He assumes both author and audience to be ‘insiders’ to the tradition; indeed, the book is not likely to make sense to someone unfamiliar to it. Furthermore, Raja ascribes to the author the specialist knowledge reserved for initiates within the tradition.

Often, his pronouncements seem to be bare assertions unverified and unsubstantiated by external corroboration. Such an appraisal is misleading. His views are intended to make sense to only those who possess a familiarity with the subject-matter, and often it happens that this ‘making sense’ constitutes substantiation enough for ‘insider’ audiences, a fact that those unfamiliar with the milieu may fail to appreciate.

An example may bear this out. In the essay entitled ‘Archival Music and the Cultural Process’, he discusses the impact of sound recording on our musical tradition. In the course of this, he makes the startling pronouncement, ‘The guru sisya parampara was not very different from a reliance on pre-recorded music in its explicit intent.’ He goes on to point out that this pedagogical tradition invested considerable time and effort to ensure that the disciple emerged as a faithful clone of the mentor.

Fortunately, three human failings prevented this from being successful: imperfect perception, imperfect retention, and imperfect reproduction. As a result of these three, gaps in the disciple’s learning emerged over time, gaps which he was obliged to fill by interpolating his own ideas within the framework of the mentor’s tutelage. And in this manner, a modicum of originality was infused within the tradition. As Raja himself puts it, ‘Because of these imperfections, the traditional system became an effective instrument of continuity within change.’

I cannot imagine how such an insight can be empirically verified. Indeed, seeking objectively substantiate it approximates an exercise in futility. And yet the history or our music is filled with instances of talented musicians being denied recognition as artistes of the first rank, simply because they sounded too close to a Gharana forbearer. Hence, to those familiar with this background, Raja’s assertions make perfect sense; moreover, for them, substantiation in the conventional academic manner is neither necessary nor even useful.

The book is divided into five parts: viz. Culture, Terminology and Economics; Form, Idiom and Format; The World of Ragas; The Major Genres; and The Major Instruments. While all the parts conform to a uniformly high standard of exposition, to me personally, the first chapter is of especial value. Here the author deals with how our music relates to various social, economic and technical developments. In the chapter entitled ‘If Peanuts is What You Pay’, he even uses his background in finance to analyse how market forces have actually promoted a deterioration in musical quality:

The sums add up because of the role of the two dominant intermediaries in the music market: the recording companies, and concert sponsors. They are both playing a progressively larger financial role in the music market – without having either the need or the desire to promote quality music.

In the second part, the author examines musical practices such as Jugalbandis and the use of the Tihai (a threefold repetition of a short musical phrase designed to fill a specific number of beats). As it is, his opinions are forcefully expressed; in this part they tend towards the subjective at times.

The third part is also very interesting. Here, Raja examines certain aspects of the concept of Raga. In ‘Raga Chemistry and Beyond’, he draws parallels between Ragas and concepts of hemistry. Surely an original approach, though how far the parallels are borne out is a pertinent question. On the other hand, ‘Kedara at Sunrise’, where he debunks many commonly-held myths about the time theory of Ragas, is unquestionably a piece of analysis of the highest order.

The last two parts are keyed to more functional objectives. The inside flap describes them as respectively presenting ‘comprehensive backgrounders on the four major genres of vocal music’ and featuring ‘detailed factsheets on eight major melodic instruments of the Hindustani tradition.’

Here, more than his analytical insights it is his familiarity with the nuances of the subject matter that is manifest. In the chapter on the Rudra Veena, for example, he touches upon an astonishing range of topics, including mythical lore; historical antecedents; organology; instrument design; ergonomics; acoustics; and recent performers. These chapters surely constitute valuable resource material, notwithstanding the paucity of external references.

Another thing that stands out is his integrity. For example, he himself belongs to the school of Vilayat Khan the Sitar maestro. However, when discussing the origins of the Surbahar, whose creation has been variously ascribed to Sahebdad Khan (the maestro’s great-grandfather) and Ghulam Mohammed of Lucknow, he freely admits, ‘The latest research favours the latter attribution.’

All in all, it cannot be denied that the book marks an exciting new approach to writing on Hindustani music. To be honest, it is not without its drawbacks. At certain times the forcefulness and candour of Raja’s expression might give the impression of being opinionated. But when one attempts such a strongly individualistic work, I suppose this is only inevitable. In any case, it does not mar the overall excellence of the book.

However, I feel compelled to end with a caveat: A significant part of the book, especially the earlier chapters, presumes a prior familiarity with the subject matter on the part of the audience. For this reason, despite the author’s easy writing style, some parts of the work may not be accessible to laypersons.

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Review: Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music (2005)

Janaki Bakhle, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2005) 338 + xvi pages

Review by James Stevenson

(an edited version of this article is scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the 'Journal of Indian Musicology')

This book had been recommended to me and i was eager to read it. It was though a disappointment and following are the reasons why. I believe this review is coming out in the coming issue of the Journal of Indian Musicology. I don't know about the rest of you but I object to recent history being hijacked by high-flying American academics like the author of this book. I do not belong to their club and do not speak their impenetrable p.c. lingo. I suppose we ignorants do not understand the post-modernist construct or whatever it is called. I made an effort to be generous and appreciative too of the good things in the book.

At the turn of the twentieth century fundamental changes were taking place in the patronage and performance of North Indian classical music. Two Men and Music by Janaki Bakhle provides a critical view of the recent musical past, with a focus on the modernizing work of Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande (1860-1936) and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872-1931).

This unpopular musicologist and popular vocalist were responsible for giving “Indian classical music, as we understand and recognize it today, its distinct shape, form, and identity”, according to the author (5). “Bhatkhande tried to classify, categorize, and classicize music, whereas Paluskar worked to cleanse and sacralize it” (8). However, the two men are set up as adversaries whom the author adjudges respectively a failure and a success.

The shift from a declining system of court patronage to one of public performance, and from the control of hereditary Muslim ustads to that of the Hindu elite, is engagingly told in Bakhle’s book. Beginning with the Baroda court of Sayajirao Gaekwad, she provides a fascinating insight into the musicians’ roles in this court, particularly of the pioneering music reformer Maula Baksh (1833-96). The picture presented contradicts a commonly held view on the exalted position of musicians in princely states.

Bakhle follows this up with a chapter on colonial writers, late-nineteenth-century music appreciation societies, and the Marathi theatre. The themes developed in the first two chapters – modernity, colonialism, nationalism, religiosity, communalism, and institutionalized teaching – are pursued in the following chapters on V.N. Bhatkhande and V.D. Paluskar. Biographies of two musicians, Abdul Karim Khan and his daughter Hirabai Barodekar, conclude this social history of North Indian classical music.

Bakhle deserves praise for making a new body of literature available to scholars, for asking critical and sometimes uncomfortable questions, and for demonstrating that Hindu nationalist sentiments and the “cleansing” of music played an important role in the modernization process. While the appropriation of music by the Hindu bourgeoisie is convincingly documented in Two Men and Music, I feel that it is built on shaky historical foundations and some wrong assumptions. Let me give three examples.

1. With today’s knowledge it is hard to maintain that North Indian music was an unmarked practice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (4). Although Bakhle complains about a paucity of sources (16), there exist numerous treatises and books on Hindustani music that tell us a great deal about musicians, musical practices and repertoire. Using such Persian, Urdu and Hindi sources, Allyn Miner and other scholars have demonstrated that major changes took place took place in the world of music during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Indeed, it was not the period of colonial rule that marked the beginnings of music’s transformation, but the late Mughal period. It was then that courtesan singers dominated the musical scene, the vocal genres khayal and thumri rose to prominence, and instruments such as the sitar, sarod and tabla emerged. In other words, it was not a new “classical music [that] emerged in a period of colonial modernity” as Bakhle claims (15), but a new social context with new patrons and audiences to support it.

2. Was Captain N. Augustus Willard – an early-nineteenth-century authority on Hindustani music – a Christian ideologist with a missionary zeal (55-62)? Willard was neither a typical colonial writer, nor a captain in the British army as Bakhle takes for granted. He was an officer in the service of the music-loving ruler of Banda, Nawab Zulfiqar Ali Bahadur. As a Eurasian who had probably spent most of his life in India, and as “disciple” of the music scholar Hakim Salamat Ali Khan from Benares he should be considered a native writer, not a colonial writer.

Willard and his famous precursor William Jones were responsible for the notion that Indian music had declined, and there is no doubt that Bhatkhande used their thoughts for his own agenda. The mid-nineteenth-century Muslim scholar Hakim Muhammad Karim Imam shared the opinion of Willard that “most native performers of this noble science are the most immoral set of men on earth”.

In Karam Imam’s view, the musicians who taught or accompanied dancing girls were “crazy idiots” who put “even the devil to shame”. Bakhle singles out a few passages and speculates that colonial religiosity played a constitutive role in the making of Indian music’s modernity (95-95, 257). This says more about Bakhle’s own agenda (and her selective reading) than Willard’s “Christian moral outrage”. In my reading, Willard was a positivist and a staunch secularist, like Bhatkhande.

3. Bakhle avoids the topic of baijis and tawaif. She wrongly assumes that these courtesan singers and dancers were low-caste, disrespectable prostitutes who played a peripheral role in the music world. According to her, and thanks to Bhatkhande and Paluskar, “a space was created that women were able to use to enter the public cultural sphere” (11-12, 258). In fact, courtesan singers had always been in the forefront.

As classical and light-classical singers they were far more visible (and audible) than their ustads, not only in the courts but also at public ceremonies and celebrations. At the turn of the twentieth century, Gauharjan was perhaps the most famous North Indian vocalist. The enormous volume of recordings of courtesans produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, and the continued prevalence of their music reaching its zenith of popularity in the 1950’s and 1960’s with Siddheshwari Devi and Begum Akhtar, suggests a failure of the forces of “cleansing” despite the concurrent striving for respectability.

A far more complex and nuanced picture of Hindustani music in the last three centuries has emerged in recent years. But like many autodidacts, Bakhle seems disinclined to build on the work of others, particularly the work of Charles Capwell and Micheal Rosse who deal with the same period and similar topics. Instead, she presents her own, rather straightforward picture of North Indian classical music reclaimed by Hindu nationalists from Muslims through a process of sacralization.

On the one hand, she overlooks the continuity of traditions with Hindu religious connotations comfortably continued by Muslim musicians at the Mughal and other North Indian courts – most obviously in the repertoire, dominated throughout by sacred inspiration and themes. On the other hand, Muslim musicians – male and female – continue to participate comfortably in the public classical music domain. Contrary to the impression given by Bakhle, bhakti-oriented music in the form of bhajans (sometimes seen as a virtuous alternative to thumris) has had no significant impact on the modern classical repertoire.

Writing on Bhatkhande, she calls him “one of Indian music’s most contentious, arrogant, polemical, contradictory, troubled, and troubling characters” making him sound like one of India’s Most Wanted (99). I don’t find her summary of his life and work to support her provocative judgment, and even the negative portrait she presents does not show a “tragic figure”, “flawed secularist” and “failed modernist” (97) – heroic visionary would be more appropriate.

Certainly Bhatkhande’s notation system ingenious in its simplicity has rendered any others, like Paluskar’s, obsolete. His that system of raga classification and his standardization of ragas are some other contributions that have gained common currency in music circles. His Kramik Pustak Malika, the six volumes of 1800 collected vocal compositions, is a work monumental in scope unchallenged as the reference book of North Indian vocal music. Bakhle’s familiarity with the subject is open to question as she states erroneously that the songs were originally composed in Marathi and translated into Hindi (126).

In advancing the communal angle of modernization and attributing motives to Bhatkhande’s modernizing agenda, Bakhle has relied on selectively chosen private correspondence and inferences that are unlikely to withstand scrutiny of a much broader polemic, which involved many eminent musicians and musicologists – arguments not presented by the author but continuing in the present-day.

Bakhle has not given credit to the musicological contributions and success in pedagogy of Bhatkhande’s followers. Many important singers and composers of the last century spent time at the Marris College under S.N. Ratanjankar’s guidance in the two decades of its heyday; among them Kumar Gandharva, Balasaheb Poochwale, D.T. Joshi, Chinmoy Lahiri, Dinkar Kaikini, Sumati Mutatkar, V.G. Jog, K.G. Ginde, and S.C.R. Bhat. Some of these have been well-known authorities and teachers who have taught thousands of students.

Outside this circle acknowledging their debt to Bhatkhande have been musicologists like Thakur Jaidev Singh. The curriculum developed by Bhatkhande and Ratanjankar has been adopted by all the universities with departments of North Indian music. Even now in any discussion of music, Bhatkhande’s name inevitably appears. Clearly, his legacy does not seem a failure, except for the hoarding of important resource material concerning Bhatkande by some of his followers. This is unfortunate, and perhaps the author’s highlighting her difficulties in obtaining this material will result in some re-thinking by those people.

Bakhle also seems to regret that Bhatkhande did not accept the possibility of an Indo-Persian hybrid origin of North Indian music (214), or that he did not include South Indian music (133) or do more to help Muslim musicians participate in his modernizing agenda. In other words, he was not politically correct in conformity with today’s post-modernist and post-colonial theorizing. These are among the author’s most contentious conjectures unlikely to be taken seriously by musicologists.

The polemical portrait painted by Bakhle of Bhatkhande is far removed from the usual hagiography, and thanks to her book his prickly, arrogant personality will not soon be whitewashed from history. While the importance of Bhatkhande and Paluskar is undeniable, presenting them as arbiters of modernism in the national context is overstated and leaves the musicians on the sidelines of history. To put it bluntly, Two Men and Music is another Great Men history, in spite of the fact that the two men are framed in a nationalist context and their weaknesses are exposed. For this and other reasons, Bakhle’s book is likely to provoke much debate and criticism, although many may find the cumbersome academic prose difficult to digest.

Notes:

1 Whether the situation in Baroda can be used to generalize on the concurrent situation of musicians in other courts is debatable, considering a wide variety of experiences in dozens of princely states and zamindaris.

2 Allyn Miner, Sitar and Sarod in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Wilhelmshaven: Florian Noetzel Verlag, 1993; rpt. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1997.

3 Bakhle thinks that khayal rose to prominence in the twentieth century (6).

4 And he did not publish his work in 1793 but in 1834.

5 Joep Bor, “The Rise of Ethnomusicology: Sources on Indian Music c.1780 - c.1890”, Yearbook for Traditional Music 20, 1988: 51-73; “Three Important Essays on Hindustani Music”, Journal of the Indian Musicological Society 36-37, 2006: 5-14.

6 N. Augustus Willard, A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan: Comprising a detail of the ancient theory and modern practice, Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1834; rpt. in S.M. Tagore, ed., Hindu Music from Various Authors, Varanasi: Chowkhamba, 1965: 29.

7 Govind Vidyarthi, trans., “Melody Through the Centuries”, Sangeet Natak Akademi Bulletin 11-12, April 1959: 14, 19.

8 Suresh Chandvankar, ed., “My Name is Gauhar Jan”, 2002.

9 Charles Capwell, “Musical Life in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta as a Component in the History of a Secondary Urban Center”, Asian Music 18 (1), 1986: 139-63; “Sourindro Mohun Tagore and the National Anthem Project”, Ethnomusicology 31 (3), 1987: 407-30; “Marginality and Musicology in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta”, in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology

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