Meeta Pandit, noted young Hindustani vocalist of the Gwalior gharana, has been busy over the past few years with a project of archiving living maestros representing different genres and gharanas of Hindustani music. Working under the umbrella of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) in new Delhi, she has collected large amounts of material in the form of recorded music, interviews, as well as photographic and written documentation.
In the next stage of the project, some of this material is now being made available to the pubic as DVDs in the series “Masters of Hindustani Classical Music”, being sold through IGNCA. In April, a DVD of Pandit Arvind Parikh was formally released at an event in Mumbai, and earlier, the art and thoughts of the harmonium legend Purushottam Walwalakar was also made available for marketing. This week marked the first such launch event in the Capital, when the DVD of Pandit Laxman Krishnarao Pandit, doyen of the Gwalior gharana and Meeta’s father and guru, was unveiled.
The DVD features an interview of the veteran conducted by well known music critic Manjari Sinha. “All the DVDs have four parts,” explains Meeta. “One performance, the bandishes, archival photographs and the lyrics.” The performance features a concert recording, while in the section on bandishes (compositions), the vocalist has sung bits of each to exemplify the genres. No doubt the albums are packed with information that would be a windfall for students of music, researchers and also interested rasikas .
Among the list of compositions are rarely heard terms like ‘Khayaal Numa Tarana’ and ‘Khayaal Numa Tappa’. While the former uses tarana syllables but treats the music like a Khayal composition, the latter is described in the accompanying booklet as a “tappa composition treated in the khayaal style, while retaining the intricacies of a tappa.”
These compositions are characteristic of Gwalior, points out Meeta. “And there is ashtapadi,” she continues, referring to the 12th Century poet Jayadeva’s eight-couplet poems on the love of Radha and Krishna which take the story of “Gita Govindam” forward.
“Pitaji’s great grandfather, Vishnu Panditji, suggested to Haddu Khan sahib to get ashtapadis composed as vilambit and madhya laya (slow and medium tempo) khayals.” Thus with his disciples, Haddu Khan took the ashtapadis and set them to the asthayi and antara format of the chhota and bada khayal.
This must have been around the 1800s, says Meeta. “They have been passed down over the generations and that shows the quality and the popularity of these compositions.”
The archiving and DVD project includes a range of artists, says Meeta. While different artists of the same gharana may be recorded, according to seniority, she points out, “I have taken care no composition is repeated.”
As audiovisual technology increases its potential by the month — or so it would seem, judging by the constant buzz in tech marketing circles — it is heartening to know some are harnessing its power to help propagate the hoary classical music traditions of India. Government funded institutions like Doordarshan and All India Radio, the Sangeet Natak Akademi and the IGNCA are naturally in a position to take the lead in such ventures and do possess hours and hours of archival recordings of maestros past and present, both in performance and in interview format. From time to time some of these recordings are shared with the public, either as albums for sale or as invited audience screenings — as SNA has taken to doing with its films.
Projects such as the one being spearheaded by Meeta are important in that the enthusiasm she brings as a performer herself, a representative of an important gharana and, significantly, a knowledgeable researcher, would unlikely be replicated if the work were relegated to those with merely administrative or technical knowledge.
