A room full of memories

It takes a determined writer to not allow herself to become the focus of a personal narrative, to become nothing but the conduit for another's tale. But for debut author Namita Devidayal, it was always clear that the heart of the story belonged to Dhondutai Kulkarni, her music teacher of three decades and direct inheritor of the revered Jaipur gharana, the keeper of its secrets and enviable compositions.

The Music Room is, in fact, much more than Kulkarni's story. It is the story of three great musicians, plunging into the larger-than-life stories of the gentle, charismatic Alladiya Khan, the founder of the gharana, and the eruptive but brilliant vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar, Kulkarni's teacher. Through its graceful, expressive prose, the narrative transcends the cramped room in the disreputable Kennedy Bridge neighbourhood in which Devidayal first started learning music, to become a confluence of significant histories.

The stories move seamlessly across time and place, the thread of continuity offered by the peripheral tale of young Devidayal's coming of age. "That part of the story allowed me to create a chronology, to maintain structural unity." Through her rites of passage, Kulkarni remains her cocoon of comfort "" her first period, sartorial hits and misses and first-kiss daydreams. As she writes, "Dhondutai became the habit I could not break."

A chat over tea with Devidayal seems appropriate. The mid-lesson tea break is a ritual that runs through the stories: Kulkarni uses tea-making as an analogy for life's lessons. My tea is like a compound raga, said Dhondutai at another point, thereby alluding to the Jaipur gharana's most outstanding characteristic "" its intellectual complexity.

The story also inevitably questions the perpetuity of the gharana itself. There is a direct link, in tutelage, from Alladiya Khan to Kerkar to her lone remaining student Kulkarni. While Kulkarni, for all her devotion to the art, never really emerged from under the shadows of Kerkar, she pinned her every last hope on Devidayal, the tonality of her young bass voice a constant reminder of Kerkar's. She wanted me to be her little Bhairavi, who would take this music forward. It must not die with her...

"I don't feel the guilt," states Devidayal, "although there were moments when I wondered what if..." But, at the end of the day, it was too secluded a profession for Devidayal who is a self-confessed instant-gratification junkie. "I think my mother was starting to get worried that my passion for music would get the better of me and I would end up doing something un-Princetonian," she laughs.

Details of her life outside of her music lessons and performances are made public very sparingly. She lived two, very separate, lives that only ever ran in parallel. Her mother, who provided the initial push into music, is a "shadowy figure". "My role in the book is that of a little girl entering their big worlds and making my observations," says Devidayal. Just as she was taught that the spaces between notes are as important as striking the perfect note, she demonstrates that the spaces in the teaching of music are as important as the teaching itself. There's none of the obtrusive prying of the biographer; Devidayal's research was whatever came by way of stories, playfully coaxed out of her raconteur guru. And much later, sitting in suburban America over a keyboard, coaxed out of her own memory.

Between defining music genealogy along religious lines to describing the magic of a super fast taan, The Music Room really is a stockpile of memories "" at some times a dead weight, at other times an exhilarating force of life. So how did Devidayal avoid the pitfalls of, as she says in the book, Kulkarni's "deceptions of selective memory"? "Selective and subjective memory is the nature of nostalgia. That's why this isn't a documentary or a biography; it's a memoir," she says, in its defence.

There is a distinct feminist strain to her writing. Devidayal agrees, saying she was deeply empathetic to the social conditions surrounding the devadasi tradition, told through the social reproach endured by "entertainers" like Kerkar. "In many ways it is a story about women in the arts," she says. That said, there is no overt commentary "" Devidayal simply provides the milieu where relevant, from the erratic nature of princely patronage to the social order of the 1920s and 1930s to the divisive Maharashtra politics of the early 1990s.

And as much as she attempts to introduce the lay reader to the fundamental grammatical structure that defined Indian classical music, she also alerts them into realising that this was a world bound in mystifying tradition and irrational obsession. From the story of the evil-coloured black dupatta and other superstitions to Kerkar's obsessive guarding of compositions to the secret of the two-note taan whispered only to the most deserving student, the book is full of fascinating nuances that characterised the at times undeniably lonely and other times utterly rewarding lives of performing artistes.

Quietly respectful but in no way obsequious, The Music Room speaks equally of human frailty and worldly successes. At the end of the day, it will be remembered most for making the world of classical music accessible, because it is a human story first, and then a story about music. Some editing gaffes aside, The Music Room will charm its readers. Maybe even enough to walk up to their favourite music store and browse through the classical music section, hoping to spot a copy of Kesarbai Kerkar's three-minute renditions. The Music Room Author: Namita Devidayal Publisher: Random House Pages: 320 Price: Rs 395