How did our music sound to visitors from other lands and cultures? This train of thought was triggered by a music recital in Thiruvananthapuram that featured a group of superb Indian musicians led by a well-versed German santoor player, Bee Seavers. The musicians enthralled the audience. Among those applauding the musicians for their superlative recital was the German Consul General Jörn Rohde.
In the past 50 years or so, Indian music has come to be understood and adopted by artistes from abroad, with many learning it and performing it with great success. If Higgins Bhagavathar was a curiosity in the seventies, today YouTube throws up dozens of American, Japanese, Chinese, German and Malaysian artistes performing Indian music. Jon B. Higgins (1939-1984) was an American musician, scholar, and teacher in Wesleyan University who learned and practised Carnatic music at a professional level. In a way, when music of a culture gets popular in another culture, it might lose some of its unique aural tones on account of the differences in the culture of the musicians and the listeners.
What did a Westerner hear as Indian music in earlier centuries when they heard it for the first time? The cultural distance would have given them an altogether different experience. We have some indication of it in the writings of foreigners who visited the capital city.
Walter Hamilton, a British officer who was present during the proclamation making the two-month old Swati Tirunal as the King of Travancore in 1813, went back to England and wrote a note on the colourful ceremony, ending it with a sarcastic reference to ‘Travancore music’.
He wrote: A proclamation notifying the succession of the young Raja was read aloud, and he was brought forward and shown to the assembled multitude…the British troops presented arms, and their band played God Save the King, while the music of Travancore made a considerable noise.
British military officer Colonel James Welsh, who led the British against the uprising of Velu Thampi, in his book Military Reminiscences narrates how he had to “ blush for the English Ladies ” while he attended an “abominable Malabar play” at ‘Trivandrum’ in 1819. “We all took our seats, and were regaled by dancing girls for about two hours, and then followed an abominable Malabar play. When the performers had wearied themselves, as well as us, by an indecent Malabar drama, called Ramnatun [possibly a reference to Ramanttam] …the same monotonous dancing, and a few more acts of the Ramnatun, still more disgusting than the former. I really blushed for two English ladies present.”
This is not peculiar to Kerala or Indian music. The sahib looked down on all that was different with contempt. Griffiths, in his Travels in Europe, Asia Minor, and Arabia (1805) says about Turkish music thus: “An ill-shaped guitar, with several wires, always out of tune, plates of brass, which jingle most discordantly,-and a sort of flute, made without any regard to the just proportion of distance between the apertures, performers on the guitar, which they continue for hours to torment with a monotony the most detestable.”
As years passed, the cultural distance gradually shortened and by the second half of the 19th century more appreciative and educated reflections began to appear. Captain C.R. Day (who notated three songs of Swati Tirunal in staff notation in 1893), Fox Strangeways (who notated the lullaby ‘Omana Thingal’) and H.A. Popley (British officer serving in Kochi) were all Britishers who had great curiosity and some admiration, even though with modest understanding, of Indian music.
Samuel Mateer, a Christian missionary who worked for decades in southern Travancore and Thiruvananthapuram, grasped ‘Travancore music’ quite well and contextualised it in the landscape of the native culture. His book on Native Life in Travancore 1883) has a chapter on music wherein he even has notated a ‘Kurathipattu’ .
Mateer seems to have diligently observed nuances of Indian music. He seems to have heard some six-speed singer in the school of the great Shatkala Govinda Marar as his references reveal: “In this [time and movement of music] the Hindu excels. The European is content with the simpler modes of time. He has double, triple, and quadruple movements, with their varieties of quick or slow; and he rarely indulges in a sextuple movement, or an occasional triplet. Doubtless quintuple and sextuple movements would be found well nigh impracticable to Europeans”.
Mateer also grasped the soul of Carnatic music, its gamaka, or aesthetic pitch bending, shaking and gliding: “He [Indian musician] indulges in an unlimited use of accidentals, and trills, and shakes, and slides. He mingles major and minor modes. He often gives to a syllable a note that includes the last part of one measure and the first part of the next”.
That Indian music is melody based compared to harmony-base of Western music seems to be the dividing line between the two.
Popley mentions: All singing and playing are in unison: harmony and part-singing seem to be almost unknown in India, which causes their music to be generally uninteresting, if not repellent, to European ears. Indian harmony, where it exists, is mostly confined to a monotonous repetition of the keynote during the flights of their instrumental or vocal melody, as in the case of the Scotch bag-pipes”.
This pales in contrast to some 19th century comments such as “Enthusiastic melody can be produced by an illiterate mind, but tolerable harmony, always supposes previous study -a plain indication that the former is natural, the latter artificial”.
A strange and rare music
A few days before the 20th century dawned, French traveler Pierrie Loti visited Trivandrum [Thiruvananthapuram] and listened to a concert. Loti was a person full of curiosity about Indian culture and does not seem to have been plagued by prejudices typical of colonial masters. His book India published in 1906 is unique and poetical.
Loti writes: Towards five o’clock in the evening, as the burning sun has commenced to sink, quantities of musicians in zebu chariots arrive, almost stealthily. They carry huge instruments with copper strings, like gigantic guitars or mandolins, whose curved handles end in monsters’ heads. Those guitars, which give out different tones, very much amongst themselves, but they all have large bodies, whilst here and there along the neck, hollow balloons, looking like fruits clustered round a stalk, are placed to increase their resonance; they are very old and precious, so withered, that they have acquired great sonority; they are painted or gilt, or inlaid with ivory, and even their quaint appearances fills me with a sense of mystery, the mystery of India.
Some are made to be stroked by the fingers; others to be played with a bow; others again are struck with a stick of pearl; and there is even one that is played by rolling a little ebony thing looking like a black egg over the strings [Gottu Vadyam ?].
It is five o’clock, all the monster-headed guitars are in readiness, and the musicians are about to commence. Can the concert have commenced? From their grave and attentive attitudes, and the way in which they watch one another, it would appear so. But there is nothing to be heard. But yes; a hardly audible high note, like that of the prelude to ‘Lohengrin’, [an 1850 opera by German composer Richard Wagner?] which is then doubled, complicated, and transformed into a murmured rhythm, without growing any louder. What a total surprise, this almost toneless music coming from such powerful instruments! One might have said the buzzing of a fly held within the hollow of one’s hand, or the brushing of the wings of a night-moth against the glass, or the death agony of a dragon-fly. Then a musician places a little steel thing in his mouth and rubs his cheek over it, so as to produce the murmurings of a fountain.
One of the largest and most complicated guitars, that the player caresses with his hand as if he feared it, says “hou, hou” all the time on nearly the same notes, like the veiled cry of the screech owl; another instrument, which is muted, makes a sound like that of the sea breaking on the shore and there are hardly audible drumming played by fingers on the edge of the tom-toms. Then suddenly come unexpected violences, furies that last for a couple of seconds, when the strings vibrate with full force, and the tom-toms struck in another way give out dull and heavy sounds like elephants walking over hollow ground, or mimic the rumblings of subterranean water, or a torrent that falls into an abyss. But this subsides quickly, and the early silent music continues.
A young Brahmin holding an instrument made of common pottery, and has pebbles inside a sort of jar with a large opening in one of its smooth and swollen sides. He plays on it with marvelously nimble fingers and sometimes the sound is light, at others deep, occasionally hard and dry like crackling of hail; then the pebbles are heard moving at the bottom [a reference to the ghatam? Was there a wrong impression that its sound was produced by pebbles inside ?].
When the voice of one of the guitars rises above the whispered silence, it is always in a melody of training sounds, a passionate and full-voiced song that plunges into agony; and the tom-toms, without drowning the trembling and plaintive notes, beat an accompaniment of mysterious import which expresses the exaltation of human suffering far more poignantly than our most supreme music.
Each of the guitars chants its despair in turn by intervals of almost voiceless harmony, the one that is struck by the hand or bow, the one that is beaten with the pearl rod, and that strangest one of all which sweeps when the little egg-shaped ebony ball is rolled over its strings.
One after the other great-eyed, slender youths, clothed in gorgeous draperies, executed trills with wonderful rapidity, but their childish voices are already broken and worn; the man in a golden turban, who conducts, first plays a weird prelude and then with lowered head looks into their eyes in the manner of a serpent fascinating a bird. I feel that he cast a spell on them, and that he could, if he wished, break the whole mechanism of their feeble throats. It seems the words which they chant to these sad rhythms are prayers to an offended goddess whom they wish to appease. Seated on the ground he seems plunged in meditation whilst his face becomes somber. Then, all at once, the voice bursts forth with the cutting tone of Eastern bagpipes, though the upper notes are possessed by a hoarse, manly quality, and an infinity of sorrow is expressed in a poignant and, to me, novel manner. The sorrow expressed in his face and the contractions of the delicate hands, is rendered with highest art.
This orchestra and these singers belong to the Maharajah. How far away the thoughts of this prince must be from ours, and how different his conceptions of the sadnesses of life and love and death! But this strange and rare music, which is part of his being, reveals a portion of his soul to me that I should never see in our short and formal interviews, so burdened with ceremony and foreign words.
Their songs have not the bewildering echoes of some far-removed sadness, as those of Mongolia or China have, for they are almost comprehensible to our senses; they betray the sad brooding of a race that is not different from our own, though long centuries have parted us; they and our gypsies use the same fevered phrases, though in a somewhat coarser way.
