Each of them came on stage bearing and embodying within themselves years of a lived tradition. At the recently concluded 15 edition of ‘Ruhaniyat’, the annual mystic music festival organised by The Banyan tree, whether it was Vesabhai Bhopa and his team from Gujarat, steeped in the Gorakhnath philosophy or Parvathy Baul, whose voice and body are immersed in the Baul music milieu, what became apparent was that their tradition was everything to these artistes. In its practise, they live and through them, the tradition lives.
The format of the festival was such that the task before these artistes was ambitious: to sift through years of their practise, select some gems and showcase them for a few minutes. So, just as Vesabhai Bhopa and his ensemble began to delve into the tenets of the Gorakhnath philosophy, it was time for a rendition of Kabir by Mukhtiyar Ali. And soon after, it was time for Baul music (Parvathy Baul) which had to make way quickly for Qawwali (The Nizami Brothers). However brief and truncated, ‘Ruhaniyat’ invited its audience to travel along the different routes to the sublime as laid out by the various artistes. Further, there could not have been a better venue for such a concert. Above the near magical gardens of the Jayamahal Palace, the dark sky, poised safely on the threshold between evening and night, offered the best setting for music of and from the mystics. After all, there is something ethereal about poetry just when the night sets in.
But, as I sat in the audience, I wondered : is the proscenium is indeed the ideal space for concerts of this kind? Watching and listening to the artistes perform- for they sing both through their voice and body- one felt like one was intruding on someone else’s prayer or more specifically a private, musical communion with the divine. A telling moment, for instance, was when a member of Vesabhai’s troupe had to be nudged out of his meditative state as he evocatively and musically narrated the story of Jesal and Toral. The Gujarati story which focussed on the temporariness of the physical body as one of its themes, voiced its dialogue with the sublime through the story of a dacoit and a queen. Interestingly, in Vesabhai’s case, the concert seemed to have interrupted a private musical conversation. By placing such meditative singing on an elevated platform, one wondered if prayer looked through the lens of a performance, acquired new meanings.
Then, the proscenium drew boundaries that were difficult to transcend even as one was eager to get up and dance along with Parvathy Baul as she sang Bina Das’ compositions. Clad in a cream saree and with dreadlocks reaching up to her thighs, when she came on stage, one watched and listened to her in awe as her voice reached powerfully towards the skies and her body swayed in tune with the ektara in her hands. In Monua Vepari… she said how truth is within oneself. Her engagement with the sublime too, like Vesabhai’s, was a personal and meditative one.
It was only when the Nizami Brothers and Mukhtiar Ali came on stage that the meditative turned into the celebratory. Immersed in wit and word play, the Nizami Brothers built the lines of the compositions on top of each other, only to reach the climax with the perfect punchline of a refrain, eliciting immediate applause or ‘wah wah’ from the audience. As the night progressed, it became clear, that this was not a regular music concert. These are living traditions that are dependent on reciprocity between the singer and the listener, they function on the core ritual of give and take, of singing, watching and listening both on the part of the performer as well as the audience. What then does the stage do to such living traditions? The microphone and the stage, I realised, puts the spotlight on the various textures of voices that have come to us from across the different traditions. In the experienced, slightly coarse, yet musical voice of Vesabhai and troupe, the refined voice of Mukhtiar Ali, the strong, sure, poignant and almost magical voice of Parvathy and the dynamic and vibrant voices of the Nizami Brothers, there was not just a journey, but also the layered textures of the individual traditions.
