Sunil Sethi: A musical fade-out in the city

AL FRESCO

Up until the 1980s one of the major pleasures that big cities like Delhi offered in the winter months was a proper musical season. There were the big annual music events such as the Sir Shankarlal festival or the ITC Sangeet Sammelan that provided an opportunity for the public to hear the great maestros of Indian classical music. Large grounds, of Modern School in Barakhamba Road for example, were commandeered to accommodate programmes that stretched over several evenings. An audience of hundreds, even thousands, pitched camp under vast tents rather than being confined in airless auditoriums or five-star banquet halls.

Concerts sometimes went on all night long. Music being one of the great social levellers, people from all walks of life came, trailing children and tiffin carriers of food. And Indian music, with its unique convention of combining the high-minded with the utterly casual, seemed barred by neither time, space or who wandered in or out during the performance. In counterpoint to the big public events, there were a number of connoisseurs who frequently arranged private baithaks at home, where smaller groups spurred on the musicians in intimate, interactive sessions in which the tiniest micro-notes, shrutis, become audible in crystalline ripples. It is the best way of hearing Indian classical music and I am grateful to a remarkable breed that included the late Naina Devi, Sheila Dhar and Reggie Kumar, or Sumitra Charat Ram (luckily still with us but in indifferent health) for initiating me. They were passionate not only about promoting music but supporting musicians. Often they passed the hat round to collect money for concerts or musical causes; frequently they dipped into their own funds.

The shrinking of musical space in the metropolis, where, after all, important private patrons are likely to be located, struck me with some force the other day at a private concert arranged by Justice Mukul Mudgal at his home to hear the vocalist Pandit Ulhas Kashalkar of the Gwalior-Jaipur gharana, who lives and teaches in Kolkata. It was a simple and moving occasion, of the kind that Justice Mudgal's forebears, who have run the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya (established in Lahore in 1901 by the great Digambar Paluskar), would have been proud of. Pandit Kashalkar sang for nearly three hours, including a sublime Raga Kedar that enraptured the audience.

But why does this sort of occasion happen less and less? Connossieurship has declined because paying attention to quality requires a degree of concentration and leisure. Potential new audiences have neither the time nor the attention span. Patronage has shifted because there is less money, private or corporate, for sponsoring the classical arts. Ticketed concerts are now difficult to sell in big cities. And in the media's current phase of dumbing-down, newspapers no longer employ serious critics to introduce or help readers. But there is also a seismic cultural shift the world over.

Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist, professor of semiotics and analyst of popular culture, who was recently in India, ascribes the change in the West to a period in the 1960s when pop art and rock music radically changed the cultural mindset. Before that there were perceptible divisions of what constituted high brow, middle brow and low brow. If you were a literary snob you read James Joyce, middling readers read of Somerset Maugham and the low brow went for James Hadley Chase. "Now there is trash on top and trash below."

After the Ulhas Kashalkar concert, there was a delicious vegetarian repast of dishes that one used to find in the old walled city of Delhi. The quotable quote was from the late musical maestro, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, a robust Punjabi who was also a great gourmand. His famous dictum was Pukka gaana aur pukka khana: "You cannot have great music without great food."

It is true: if you listen to trashy music, you will be condemned to a life of hamburgers and fries.