My friend looked embarrassed as he handed me a card. Why, I wondered, when I saw it was a complimentary invitation to the final and climactic evening of the Dover Lane Music Conference, one of the star fixtures of Kolkata’s classical music season. Then I realised the cause of his diffidence. He had only one card to offer, something that had come his way as a bigwig at his club. How could anyone go alone to a whole night music conference? It was worse than going to see a movie alone. While one could stretch even beyond eight hours, the other seldom crossed three.
But I was undaunted. The words “Dover Lane” transported me back over four decades to the chilly January night when a similar gesture landed me plonk in the middle of the world of Hindustani classical music and created a bond that has not gone away since.
The star attraction that night was a new phenomenon: the sarod player Amjad Ali Khan, not quite 20, who had made a debut which was as powerful as it was elegant. I have never left his trail since. I managed to be at his first solo concert in the city a bit later, at Kala Mandir, where he played an unforgettable raga Durga.
The crowning glory of my early journalistic years was to be able to interview Amjad Ali for The Statesman. Apparently the music critic had been waspish about a particular performance of his and the news editor was seeking to make amends through the interview. Then when I joined the Ananda Bazar group a decade later I was happy to find that I had not lost the trail. The newspaper house was an outright fan of the maestro (the sarod player was by then acknowledged to be so).
Now the eponymous Dover Lane music conference is no longer held on that road, the huge shamiana on the large grounds having given way to a beehive of apartments. The new venue that I was heading for this cold January night was perhaps more impressive, the indoor stadium next to the Dhakuria Lakes.
As if to offer a token of appreciation to a prodigal returning after 40-odd years, the star performer for the night was Amjad Ali again! But I was worried. I did not have the stamina of my late teens. Would I be able to last out in the semi-open surroundings till he arrived? The star attraction is usually the last to perform, by when it is close to dawn and early morning ragas are rendered.
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Then a little miracle happened. The dapper, slight figure came and sat down to dominate the wide stage at 10 pm and in his introductory remarks thanked the organisers for allowing him to perform at that early hour so that he could play what he called a samarpan, a bouquet of notes from evening ragas which he dedicated to the memory of Tagore, whose 150th birth anniversary is being observed.
Then followed over two hours of mellifluous sound and powerful emotion, as he journeyed from the purist format to a medley of folk and popular melodies. I have not often seen an Indian classical musician in India get such a standing ovation (it is a western practice), and the audience was several thousand strong.
When I drove back home after taking in a bit more of the music and the cold I realised with satisfaction that the last few weeks had been hectic in a happy way. A relative by marriage was performing in a play, Sundar Bibir Pala, based on the life of Chapal Bhaduri, the last male of old-school theatre who played female roles. So there we went, to enjoy an amalgam of modern and folk theatre.
Then, a few days later, my sister-in-law told me breathlessly that she had two extra tickets for a not-so-common theatre performance at Rabindra Sadan of Shakespeare’s King Lear in Bengali, with the title role taken by that doyen of Bengali actors, Soumitra Chatterjee. It was three hours of rolling eloquence transcreated in a language that has the capacity to absorb the loftiest and lowliest of emotions.
Both at the indoor stadium and at Rabindra Sadan, that seats over a thousand, I saw a strange contradiction. Huge audiences at state-funded facilities come to enjoy what cannot by any stretch of imagination be called “popular entertainment” by today’s standards; audiences which were meticulously well-behaved. The two plays started bang on time with almost the entire audience in place.
Yet, other elements stood out, too. During the interval at Rabindra Sadan many came out to take tea and munchies from hawkers standing right at the foot of the stairs, and empty cups and plastic wrappers littered the whole driveway. It was the same empty paper cups at the grounds outside the indoor stadium. And the loo stank, with several piss-pots missing. In winter Kolkata offers a cultural feast that is truly uplifting — if you can ignore the trash and filth.