Sadanand Menon: The magic of musical transmission

CRITICALLY INCLINED

Last fortnight I spent a magical day with the Gundecha Brothers, at their Dhrupad Sansthan in Bhopal. The occasion was a homage to their guru Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar, legendary singer and teacher, on the occasion of his 75th birthday.

Of course the event itself, at Bharat Bhavan, was conventional. Madhya Pradesh Governor Balram Jhakhar presided. The Culture Secretary and the Director of Bharat Bhavan felicitated. The businessman-musician Arvind Parekh (of Lee and Muirhead), who also heads ITC's Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata, spoke with insight about the Ustad in his three roles as a musician, as teacher and as a person who produces social value.

After invocatory ragas by students of Umakant and Ramakant Gundecha, the Ustad himself took the floor, accompanied by his nephew, the young Bahauddin Dagar, who is beginning to earn fame as an outstanding rudra-veena player, and the mercurial pakhawaj artist Shrikant Mishra from Varanasi.

Despite a heavily congested chest and an even more damaged throat, Dagar-saab sang for over two-and-half hours, in what turned out to be a master class in the nuances of the swara-predominant identity of raga delineation. He chose for the evening Rageshwari and a hauntingly beautiful composition in Sahana. Almost four-hundred people, including musicians and musicologists from across the country and cultural icons like theatre-person Habib Tanvir, sat in rapt attention. Such was the power of the music that even though the Ustad was struggling to make his voice work, the audience had no difficulty in hearing pure, distilled music.

This brings me to the core of my argument here "" what is it that musicians sing and what is it that the shrotas hear? The realm of musical transmission is, I believe, an area of pure magic where sounds and phrases transform into aspects of aesthetic energy, which are as palpable and experienced as when a magician transforms a handkerchief into a bird in front of our eyes. It's a moment when we experience either a sudden rush of blood through our system or feel our body slipping into uncontrollable lassitude and find our skin melting into the flow of the sound. It is a moment of obliteration of inside-outside boundaries; a moment when solids liquefy into fluid space; a moment when a molecular transformation takes place in our physical system. It is a moment known in the Indian musical systems as 'chamatkar'.

The chamatkar is at two levels. One is at the primary level of transmission between the guru and the shishya. What is it about musical training that the initiated are able to co-habit or aspire to almost the same zone of experience that the teacher occupies? How come modern means of education have not found a parallel system, which can convert learning, skill and technical knowledge into 'experience'? Why is it that the average school and university education remains an un-masticated, un-tasted, undigested lump in our system, illumining neither mind nor body?

It was ironical these thoughts were generating in Bhopal. Because Bhopal, for me, is the site of some of the most painful moments in my own education. I did my last year in school and first year in college (studying mathematics) in this nawabi city. It was like, at the age of sixteen, nothing was filtering through my mind or body. The whole education system seemed to have transformed me into a dense, opaque object that only bounced back whatever came at it.

By a strange coincidence, I found myself staying this time in a guesthouse almost touching the compound wall of the college hostel where I had lived in the mid-1960s. So, early morning, I strolled across the play-fields where I had won many trophies and ambled through the classrooms where one had spent so many useless hours learning nothing, absorbing nothing, transforming nothing; classrooms that killed your young spirit and converted you into a confused, mixed-up, apolitical citizen.

And then, after this amble through a forgettable past, I went to the Dhrupad Sansthan, set up by the Gundecha Brothers in 1999. Hardly a kilometre away from the terribly intimidating looking National Judicial Academy, in Bhadbhada, on the outskirts of Bhopal, the Dhrupad Sansthan is the very opposite of the soulless general education system. Here every moment, every lesson, every interaction matters and daily transforms the teachers and the taught.

In no time I was pulled into the core of a poem by Mahadevi Varma, the leading metaphysical poet of Hindi which had been composed and set to raga Shri. You could see every student was singing it in her own individual temperament, without getting flattened and homogenised into a brand or a 'school'. It was so remarkable a feeling that, at the end of every phrase, Arvind Parekh could not but help exclaim, 'adbhut'!

Years ago, Devi Prasad, the octogenarian Gandhian potter and ceramist, had written the perceptive book, Art, The Basis of Education, in which he had pointed out the experiential nature of education through an arts discourse, as opposed to the normative learning-by-rote. This is most evident when you encounter the pedagogical transmissions in musical training. And it gets even more pronounced when you see what happens to the aesthetic transmission during a musical performance.

That evening, what Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar sang was quite distinct from what the audience heard. And somewhere in between, music, beauty and chamatkar happened.