North Indian Classical Music in the ‘Long’ 1940s
Amlan Das Gupta Two Photographs Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early 1950s. The dates are approximate and based on internal evidence. The first photograph depicts a a fairly intimate group of male musicians and patrons: some of the figures are difficult to identify but the four musicians standing in the first row are Ustad Manji Khan and his father Ustad Alladiya Khan of Jaipur-Atrauli; Ustad Faiyaz Khan of Agra; and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana. The presence of Alladiya, Faiyaz and Abdul Karim, undoubtedly the three most influential and versatile male vocalists of the early twentieth century in the same frame makes the photograph a rarity. The first three decades of the century, as we know, constitutes a period of intense uncertainty and experimentation. Artists grappled with altered conditions of patronage and performance, the presence of new technologies of sound recording and dissemination, new norms of pedagogy, and above all, changes in taste and audience expectation impel artists to engage with new strategies of self definition and stylistic innovation. Three of the most important vocal styles to achieve prominence were clearly the Jaipur-Atrauli, the Kirana and the Agra, setting the scene for the next half century or so. Legend has it of course that the relationship among the three was sometimes stormy, and in a condition of decaying patronage, occasionally riven with rivalry and prejudice. Even at this late date, one might speculate, the photograph expresses the power of the patron, whose august presence holds together these angular and brilliant artists in a formal and grave unity. A point about habitus if one likes: five figures have walking sticks, the invaluable accessory of wealthy civility: others make do with umbrellas. The second photograph, probably dates from the early 1950s (Ustad Vilayat Khan reportedly said he thought that was taken in 1952). Rajendra Prasad, the figure in the centre of this photograph, became president of India in 1950, and it captures in essence the world of North Indian music in early independent India. Most obviously, it is marked by absences. The “long” 1940s, if I could call it that, is most significantly marked by a number of deaths. First, the figures in the earlier photograph. Abdul Karim and Manji Khan dies in 1937; Alladiya in 1946; Faiyaz Khan in 1950. Other significant deaths around the same time are that of Ramkrishnabua Vaze in 1945; Abdul Wahid Khan of Kirana in 1949; and equally significantly, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande in 1936. The dazzling array of talent surrounding the symbol of the unified source of patronage, honour and reputation, is actually an attenuated one, marked by absence and erasure. There is no significant Agra or Kirana singer in the photograph: the single representative of Jaipur-Atrauli is Kesarbai. What the photograph prophetically suggests is the ascendancy of instrumental music in the post-independence decades: consider the second line of musicians: from the fourth figure on the left we have Keramatullah Khan, tabla; Radhikamohan Maitra, sarod; Ilyas Khan, sitar; Bismillah Khan, shehnai; Kishan Maharaj, tabla; Yususf Ali, sitar; Ravi Shankar, sitar, Ali Akbar sarod; Vilayat Khan, sitar. The seated figures in the front row are appropriately an older generation of artists: Allauddin Khan and Hafiz Ali; Omkarnath, Krishnarao and Anantamanohar Joshi; Mushtaq Husain and Nisar Husain, Burhanpurkarbua, Ahmedjan Thirakwa and Kanthe Maharaj. Another aspect to reflect upon would be the uneasy memory that the photograph bears of the jagged fissure caused in the musical community by Partition: a notable absence in the photograph is the sarangi maestro, Ustad Bundu Khan: absent too is Bade Ghulam Ali, who went over to Pakistan after independence, only to return in the 1950s. The single woman in the second photograph is appropriately Kesarbai, seated cosily next to Rajendrababu. Her unparallelled reputation as the great exponent of Alladiya Khan’s gayaki and standing in the musical world, make her an appropriate inclusion, but she also appears here as a single exclusion to the general prurience of the cultural policy of new state. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest examples of a formal “group” photograph which has a woman artist in it: there are of course earlier examples of family groups, or tawayefs with their male accompanists. The significance of this inclusion is not difficult to judge. B V Keskar had famously laid down that “no one (woman) whose life was a public scandal would be patronized” by the radio and presumably in the wider world of state ceremonial. Women artists were sought to be recruited from music schools, or from “respectable” familiies. As a result the great bulk of women artists – who had kept, for instance, the gramophone industry going – were excluded from the radio. In point of fact, this system of screening was far less effective than one would have expected. Partly this was due to the general lack of interest in classical music among radio administrators: more importantly, at the local level, programme executives and station directors made and followed their own policies, with apparently little central interference. As a result, a number of woman artists were recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and some of these recordings still exist: the relatively longer formats make them a valuable supplement to the extant body of sound recordings. It would, I think, be more accurate to see this as an index of the popularity of woman artists and the popular demand for their music rather than a mark of special favour and generosity on part of the administrators. Thus though Kesarbai is silently coopted into the grand durbar of Hindustani shastriya sangeet, Mogubai, Laxmibai, Hirabai, Gangubai to say nothing of Rasoolan and Siddheswari do not figure in the photograph. It may well be that Kesarbai jibbed at their inclusion: reportedly, she gave up singing for radio because Gangubai had been given a National programme! Arrivals and Departures What I
Walking (an excerpt)
Henry David Thoreau I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the great road—follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean field into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth’s surface where a man does not stand from one year’s end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man. The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are the arms and legs–a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin villa which together with via, a way, or more anciently ved and vella, Varro derives from veho, to carry, because the villa is the place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were said vellaturam facere. Hence, too, the Latin word vilis and our vile, also villain. This suggests what kind of degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and over them, without travelling themselves. Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor therest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have seen. However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now, me- thinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two such roads in every town. THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD Where they once dug for money, But never found any; Where sometimes Martial Miles Singly files, And Elijah Wood, I fear for no good: No other man, Save Elisha Dugan– O man of wild habits, Partridges and rabbits Who hast no cares Only to set snares, Who liv’st all alone, Close to the bone And where life is sweetest Constantly eatest. When the spring stirs my blood With the instinct to travel, I can get enough gravel On the Old Marlborough Road. Nobody repairs it, For nobody wears it; It is a living way, As the Christians say. Not many there be Who enter therein, Only the guests of the Irishman Quin. What is it, what is it But a direction out there, And the bare possibility Of going somewhere? Great guide-boards of stone, But travelers none; Cenotaphs of the towns Named on their crowns. It is worth going to see Where you might be. What king Did the thing, I am still wondering; Set up how or when, By what selectmen, Gourgas or Lee, Clark or Darby? They’re a great endeavor To be something forever; Blank tablets of stone, Where a traveler might groan, And in one sentence Grave all that is known Which another might read, In his extreme need. I know one or two Lines that would do, Literature that might stand All over the land Which a man could remember Till next December, And read again in the spring, After the thawing. If with fancy unfurled You leave your abode, You may go round the world By the Old Marlborough Road. At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the PUBLIC road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I
Force and Adoration: Ambedkar’s Maitri
Aishwary Kumar In his final work The Buddha and His Dhamma, Bhimrao Ambedkar returns frequently to the concept of maitri, which he most often renders, for the first time in his essay on Marx, as “fellowship”. “Maitri or fellowship towards all must never be abandoned”, he writes in “Buddha or Karl Marx”. “One owes it even to one’s enemy.” In deploying maitri in such a fashion, translating it neither as friendship nor fraternity, and finding its possibility in the actions of the soldier, bandit, magistrate, and even the executioner, the mature Ambedkar departs from the normative rendering of the concept in two ways. Firstly, he understands maitri categorically as that which refuses the foundational distinction between friendship and hostility. Maitri is a gesture that one makes towards the enemy; as such, it militantly exceeds the moral dictates of friendship and fidelity. In his final years, immersed into formulating a rigorously non-humanist and religious critique of religion, Ambedkar deepens the concept of maitri further, including in its ambit not merely the human but also the animal. “Maitri”, he claims in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “is extending fellow feeling to all beings, not only to one who is a friend but also to one who is a foe: not only to man but to all living beings.” Indeed, creaturely life, Ambedkar argues, is most proper to maitri precisely because the normative conception of love (karuna), which human beings express only towards their own species, excludes nonhumans. Maitri, on the other hand, makes both the adversary and animal its intimate subject. It is inclusive in a way that the Christian conception of love is not. Maitri too is religious and quotidian. Yet unlike love, which harbors despite its best intentions a sacrificial hierarchy at its source¾ in a remarkable and paradoxical neologism, Ambedkar calls religious love (bhakti), and the love for religion, “life-force”¾ maitri is anti-sovereignty and non-theological. Acts of sovereignty, manifest in the sovereign’s right to take life in the precisely name of keeping life sacred and safe, whose most violent instance is the death penalty, contaminates the ethical force of maitri. Even if it is marked by an irreducible religiosity, then, maitri resists the pernicious onto-theological alliance between religion and sovereignty. It does not take life in the name of keeping life unscathed. Nor does it give life in the name of charity or pardon. Instead, maitri gives life, even to the enemy combatant, in the name of absolute equality, in the name of forgiveness that refuses to be identified as such. It is this religion without religion that Ambedkar thinks when he recovers the encounter between the Buddha and the dreaded bandit Angulimala in his masterwork. In that encounter, what converts the violent bandit is neither the sudden dawning of guilt upon him nor his momentary exposure to divine luminescence. What converts him instead is the truth manifest in the figure of the Buddha himself. Only this “love of truth” founds the empirical ground of an egalitarian faith and establishes another mode of belief and adoration, one that exceeds both the religious and humanist conceptions of love. Hence Ambedkar’s perennial dissatisfaction with love, affirmed again in The Buddha and His Dhamma, “Love is not enough. What is required is maitri.” Perhaps the proper rendering of what the mature Ambedkar calls maitri, then, is neither fraternity nor friendship, even though he alludes to both throughout the 1940s and the 1950s, but rather adoration; an immeasurable gift of belief and compassion (mudita) across the abyss of species difference. What does this radical reconceptualization of love, this forceful affirmation of life as such, gives us most to think? What might a “religion without religion”, which would, by its very name, also be a religion profoundly aware of its own ineluctable complicity with force and mastery, call forth? In trying to recover Ambedkar’s moral thinking from normative and humanist histories of equality, my intention here is to simply recall that what is living, what exists, and most ontologically, what is, for Ambedkar, is not that which is same but rather that which is wholly other, wholly unequal, and above all, wholly mortal. In this politicization of finitude, this foregrounding of the knowledge of impermanence (sunnyata), Ambedkar does not valorize death or sacrifice in the manner of a satyagrahi, even though he does not renounce the imperative of war and “general mobilization” either. Instead, he recovers in the consciousness of finitude the possibility of an unconditional and collective sacrifice of interest; a sacrifice from which equality amongst mortals might emerge. Thus, in Annihilation of Caste (1936), two decades before his masterwork, and right in the midst of his critique of the antidemocratic structure of Plato’s republic, Ambedkar had already called equality a responsibility towards the “incommensurable”; a responsibility heterogeneous to calculation, substitution, and measure. A responsibility, in other words, that mobilizes force- and what is annihilation (ucched) if not a call to force- in the name of absolute singularity, in the name of the unequal’s irreproducible and each time unique birth and death.[1] It is on this affirmation of life amidst life’s impermanence that the mature Ambedkar’s ahimsaic adoration would come to hinge. In this paper, I offer an archeology of this adoration, of Ambedkar’s radical attempt to formulate the conditions of a love proper and adequate to politics. I will not trace the infinite variations in which this excessive love appears in his itinerary, in neologisms such as “love of truth”, “love of politics”, and so on. I will only attempt, in a necessarily delimited fashion, to follow the rhythms and vicissitudes of this adoration, this egalitarian excess, that the mature Ambedkar eventually calls maitri. Mastery and Measure How does the late recovery of adoration (maitri) turn the thread of Ambedkar’s enduring thinking about force? Does the move away from sovereignty lead to its attenuation? Or is maitri itself the maturation of that militant critique of force that had begun to take shape as early as Ambedkar’s Columbia University seminars in the
Aphorisms Twelve
Abhi Choudhury 1. Actually, every pronunciation has an objective. Some kind of outlandish and beautiful objective. As and when the speaker makes an utterance, every word brings forth a definite meaning to her, since her enunciation of the language has the immediacy and directness of her experience and consciousness. The listeners do not have the onus to maintain any such connection. So, in its finer form, it is impossible to have a real congruence between what the speaker intends and what the listener considers. We speak in a manner of our own and understand in our own sweet way too—but the two may not tally. Hence, before realizing the purport of ‘love’ it is merely a garbled sonic bundle; but after our comprehension it blossoms, rainbow-hued. God knows, every utterance has a strange and beautiful objective. 2. And such is the situation when a woman says to her male companion: “I woke up to this nightmare: that when I wake up I won’t see you again ever. You have gone to your wife.” Some of us may align ourselves with this statement. Others are dumbfounded; they take a lot of time to take it in. Once in a Moscow-bound night train compartment, Mayakovsky assured a young woman travelling alone in the same coach: “I am not a human being but a fleeting cloud in trousers.” But as soon as he uttered these words, he was worried sick about whether the woman would somewhere end up using this deeply potent sonic pattern which was embedded at that point in his mind. We may not easily gather why Mayakovsky was agonizing. But those who know that often writers delve down, down, down and suck out our deepest thoughts, unbeknownst to us, and make them their own will, recognize the source of his fret. 3. To speak ahista does not just imply speaking low. The expression may also implore us not to go too fast in our speech delivery. Both meanings are inbuilt in the root, from Farsi ahista. It beckons humility and politeness. The seemingly equivalent word dhire does not have the same connotation: here, the etymology derives from dhi— a gesture to our self-controlling and rational faculties. 4. After coming across in the day’s newspaper that chewing tobacco is surely carcinogenic, this fierce health freak of a boyfriend curtly advises his partner: ‘Discontinue’. What must be discontinued: tobacco or the newspaper? Can’t be both. 5. The relationship has to work both ways and mutually, the lady wrote to the writer, especially if one is in a relationship of love. The writer concludes that the lady wishes to make the relationship work both ways, for that is what equitability demands. That is what is fair. It is only months later that he realizes that what she meant was that the relationship was not working mutually and no relationship holds firm if not worked at from both ends. 6. If I can clearly comprehend in someone’s receiving an award or a felicitation that he is an accomplished artist or a scholar, then there is nothing foggier in this world than the very word award. 7. Words are sometimes the signs of the subject matter of thought, sometimes they are the signs of that very thought process. It so happens that we are lost for words. There is a constant tug of war going on between the intensity of our emotions, intangible sense of beauty, this utterly colourful world and our existential predicament. I want to tell you this every single time when I tear off the lines that I write to you. ‘When you were not there:’ the note seems just right. Not so with, ‘when you are here.’ We are stunned by these unexpected turns in our mind. And then there are some in this world who are able to express colour and feelings—and create powerful patterns with words which would be impossible with silence. When our cosmos seemed to be engulfed by infinite full-stops and caesura or with relentless tautologies and there was no hope all around, right at that point poet Shankha Ghosh pronounced—‘It may be illusory , but keep hope that something positive will turn up in favour of life; the world cannot sink and slip in this manner.’ And the world changed after such an utterance. Some in this world know the art of fusing the minimum-symbolic hidden in signs and the fleeting, momentary ripples in our existence. 8. ‘I may not turn up’ means I may turn up. ‘Only the heart knows what it seeks’ means that the heart hardly knows what it aspires to. This is not unlike Prince William’s famous statement: ‘After spending a night in the alleyways of London have I realized how people spend nights in this city.’ This means that he is at a complete loss to figure out how people live on the streets of London. 9. ‘The songs of Tagore find a structure in the notations (swara-lipi)’: some revere the truth content in this statement and thereafter seek Tagore in the totality of form with extraordinary love, care and caution. Make it a mission of life. While others value the same statement but add that since the notations direct us to the structure and not to the songs themselves, one must work towards chiselling the notes with our imagination, experience and individual renderings. 10. Mirpur: At the Bijoya Sarani Crossing , for the first time in my life someone handed me a bouquet of flowers and asked for money. 11. ‘Afridi, please marry me!’ Does she, the one in that Dhaka stadium with this placard, know what kind of person Afridi is? Will he take her to Pakistan after the marriage? What kind of husband will he turn out to be? But is marrying Afridi the point here? ‘There is no limit to our desires/Our excitement drive us like lunatics/ No happiness greater than illicit love/No diversion more enchanting than belittling the other man,’ says Jibananada Das. 12.