One of the great draws of a daytime Hindustani classical concert, and that too on a Sunday morning, is that one can reach the venue relatively unscathed by traffic. But more importantly, it is the promise of morning or late morning or afternoon ragas. And if the recital is inside the thick-walled, cool dark interiors of a temple, minus the paraphernalia of electronics, then all the better.
Sometimes, one of the biggest takeaways of a recital of this kind is that you get to hear ragas that you knew, but had kind of forgotten. They are the ragas that do not have the exalted status accorded to the Big Ones. They are unassuming, almost modest ragas, rendered even more modest by the fact that they are not popular anymore on the performance circuit. As the tanpura or swaramandal tunes up, it is as if a searchlight has been trained on the inner recesses of your memory, and with that, various forgotten gems are awoken.
It is something like playing the word game Taboo, which I do in a creative writing class that I teach — it leads people to not so much learn new and bombastic or ‘big’ words as to remember and revisit existing ones in their vocabulary, which have fallen into disuse. It turns the Taboo player back to the riches that reside inside us, which have gone into some kind of blind spot, while we overuse just a handful of words. When words fall into disuse, our vocabularies shrink, and with that, our repertoire.
Whether you are a writer, speaker, reader, performer or listener, everyone loses, when words, phrases, swara combinations and ragas are simply left by the wayside. Sometimes, we under-employ our vocabulary or our engagement with ragas out of sheer laziness, taking the path of least resistance, presenting as well as listening to the familiar, the popular, the easily accessible. There are about 150 ragas that are more commonly sung now, from the 500 or so existing ones in Hindustani classical music. But most performers will present from an even smaller bandwidth of 30 or so ragas, letting dust gather on hundreds of other gems.
Guaranteed nods
Now whether this is because it is safer to pander to the popular and easily accessible, or because even the artists have begun to forget or have not been trained in the lesser-performed ragas that lie outside this tight circle of 30, is a bit of a chicken-and-egg question. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, in his later years, would say in a tired and ironic tone, upon hearing the standard request for Puriya Kalyan from the audience, “Yes of course, I will sing it, and exactly as I sung it in the long-playing record that you have at home.” The irony was lost on most of the audience. Not just performers, even music programme organisers sometimes insist on the performer singing the familiar. They want guaranteed nods and waah waahs , and will not risk a ticket-paying audience being challenged to listen to something new.
There are a slew of ragas that are considered aprachalit or anwat — less heard, uncommon, difficult, sometimes combining two ragas and creating an unusual synthesis. However, there is a whole lot that is not exactly uncommon, but has been relegated to waiting patiently in the wings, over just the last few decades.
At a recent recital by Agra gharana singer Pt. Ram Deshpande in one of the small halls of the 18th century Omkareshwar Mandir in Pune (organised by The Baithak Foundation and the Sakal Group of Publications), some of us were delighted to catch up with just such a raga. Even the name of the raga — Devgiri Bilawal — when announced, seemed to come from far away. It was like meeting someone from very long ago — you need a few seconds to place the person, but once their features, their voice, their mannerisms become apparent, you are infused with a rush of affection and warmth.
When a performer presents a less performed raga, you are grateful that a light shower has fallen beyond the usual circle, and places farther afield have been re-greened in the performance space as well as in the listener’s mind.
The novelist, counsellor and music lover takes readers on a ramble through the Aladdin’s cave of Indian music.
