“All along the history of arts, artistes have been struggling to liberate themselves. If someone says ‘you have to sing with this many words’, I will make sure I sing with much lesser. I will try and escape from as many words as possible. If I am told ‘you have to stick to this rhythm’, I will move far away from it in an attempt to create something different. Rules and rituals get created. Centuries go by, and they keep changing. The history of arts means a never ending struggle between those make rules and those who seek to break them. It is a relentless battle. How else will one experience the sweetness of creative freedom? Rules are important. They have been devised by great scholars, and nobody intends to abandon them. It is not possible either. Moreover, an artiste cannot achieve anything by violating rules totally. His search for freedom moves in a different route. That is where the new styles blossom.” In one of his lectures on music, the eminent, but less-known Bhaskar Chandavarkar made the above observations. These, are not general observations about a tradition and how an artiste negotiates with it, it is also Chandavarkar’s own, personal negotiations. If there was something very unique to this composer, it was his deep understanding of the various systems of music, and how he, in the most inconspicuous way, found his autonomy without cutting away from it.
Chandavarkar learnt from Pt Ravi Shankar, and one sees in his music the great impact that the legendary figure made on him. He met Ritwik Ghatak fairly early in his life with whom he went to FTII, getting introduced to the best of world cinema. “I then served a longish stint as a teacher at the FTII, also learning the craft of cinema in order to teach my students better. For me, making music transcends the fundamental research demanded by every project and also involves looking at the internal structure of the film itself — the script, camera movement, editing, and so on. I feel this is where my FTII teaching experience comes in handy,” Chandavarkar had said an interview.
This is indeed true of his music. Though Chandavarkar followed the Western style of making film music – in terms of motifs and the nature of composing – he produced a sound quality that was truly Indian. There are hardly any instances of Bhaskar Chandavarkar using elaborate orchestra, in terms of the number, say 25 violins. His expression was subtle: it always worked complementary to the narrative, never literal as was the case with most background scores. Ondanondu Kaladalli , for which he made music, is remarkable. The extraordinary background score, its perfect folk idiom, the use of the folk drum and flute is mesmerizing. It is said that when Satyajit Ray watched the film, he was struck by its music and when Aparna Sen invited him to compose music for her film Paroma , Ray told her that he had found a “better music director” than him, which was Bhaskar Chandavarkar.
Listen to his music in Thodasa Roomani Ho Jaaye or Maya Darpan or Kandahar – Chandavarkar paints abstract colours. There is nothing that you can predict in his music: shorn of grandeur and embellishment, it takes a self-reflective route. A composer who was intimately connected to theatre, Bhaskar Chandavarkar believed in constructing a new music theory. “There is that mechanical path where you drag art to fit into the rasa theory. Instead, why can’t we expand rasa theory to suit different expressions of art? When you expand theory it remains contemporary. Similar to expanding the meaning of words to keep a language relevant. The only way for art and the individual to survive is to go on enlarging theoretical meanings.”
In today’s world of hybridity, Chandavarkar may sound insipid. To understand his music, one must be tuned to the silences of one’s culture.
Inner Voice is a fortnightly column on film music
