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Literary Review
Heady brew
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The Cooking of Music is a must-read for anyone who loves good writing and good raconteuring, says GOWRI RAMNARAYAN.
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ENGLISH is used with power and daring by Indians in every field, from politics to pure science. Yet, though Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Arundhati Roy have won world acclaim, any translation of the culture specific Indian experience into English is full of pitfalls, even for the expert.
Sheila Dhar is a little-known writer who has mastered this art. Herself a singer, she excels in bending English to depict the authentic setting and intimate ambience of Indian classical music. She achieves this linguistic magic with élan and impish glee. Her obvious devotion to the art and its great practitioners is no bar to her relish of their eccentricities. Her chuckles are endearing because they are devoid of malice.
Anyone who has read Dhar's Here's Someone I'd Like You to Meet (OUP, 1995) will know just how she makes those very quirks enhance the charm and mystique of her subject. Her fabulous gallery features musicians, bureaucrats, visiting dignitaries, foreign and Indian innocents, all redolent with whimsicalities. She immortalises her khadi-clad, bidi-smoking "cent per cent" Gandhian boss at the Government Publications Division, in his encounter with Sir Richard Attenborough. ("You must come to my house to eat. You really deserve it. I never invite unnecessarily. Bring all friends. We will have a good time talking about Gandhi. We will have delicious preparations from our parts. You will definitely relish. My wife makes herself.") A perfect counterpart is the haunting profile of her own gentle and ill-treated mother.
Dhar's memoirs are not for the musically savvy alone. They can be savoured by anyone with an interest in human nature. Take the temperamental geniuses Begum Akhtar and Siddheshwari Devi. Dhar takes you into their boudoirs and courtyards, melodising Persian couplets, or frying bhindi as per Lucknowi cuisine. As you inhale the perfumes and spices, you wonder why, with her obvious ability to plunge the reader into such bristling sensuousness, Dhar wrote so little.
Her posthumously published book of essays The Cooking of Music (Permanent Black, 2001) is more serious, and lacks the variety of Here's Someone. But it has the same class, aromatic piquancy, and absence of jargon in treating so specialised a theme. Can you come across a simpler or more telling explanation of the gharana system than this? "These styles of Hindustani music are called gharanas, and function like closed guilds. The personal style, musical attitudes, and predispositions of an acknowledged master give a gharana its distinctly recognisable melodic movement and dialect."
Similarly she explains how a raga allows the artiste to revel in freedom. "No two renditions (of a raga) are even faintly alike. Each is an original musical portrait though it embodies a poignancy that someone else first felt and expressed many years ago."
This elegantly bound book begins with a general introduction to music, but with the entrance of her gurus Niaz and Faiyyaz Ahmed Khan of the Kirana gharana, we are in territory lovingly mapped. We observe their diagnostic skills, division of teaching labours, generous sharing of heritage, and self-denying lifestyle. Devising new methods for individual needs, they correct "the inflection and intonation of a typical phrase in the raga Mian-ki-Malhar by telling a student to sing the mandra saptak `pa' while keeping her mind firmly on the `sa'"! Dhar's excitement over their Yaman recordings is so infectious that you almost drop the book to go in search of the cassettes.
The title essay mingles anecdotage of gourmet ustads with discussions of ripe music. After all rasa is both aesthetic joy and gustatory delight. It also indicates how quality scores over quantity, and restraint over gaudy excess.
There is rib-tickling humour in the vignette of Vicereine Lady Linlithgow's encounter with classical music in a live concert in her honour. On the eve of her departure from India, she is enthusiastically urged to stay back, with every permutation and combination of swaras, as the singer wails an English khayal in raga Adana: "Lay-di, Dee-lay!"
Finally Dhar comments on the reversal of roles in the present-day milieu. The artiste is no longer the leader for the listener to follow. Instead the musician cultivates a superstar image, and woos his audiences who want to be "teased and prodded rather than soothed and elated." Kaccha gana (raw, weak, dilute fare) of virtuousic fireworks and gimmicks replaces pakka gana (mellow music). There is little silence for the blooming of melody. "Our lives are more full of sound than ever before. But it will be many years before we can clearly hear what it is saying to us."
You sigh. Hasn't Sheila Dhar summed up all that you have long felt but did not know how to express so well?
The Cooking of Music, Sheila Dhar, Permanent Black, Rs. 195.
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