This Saturday, Indroneil Mukerjee and his wife Puja Wadhwa will bring to fruition a dream they have nurtured for many years — launch an effort to preserve Indian music in its truest form, encourage its performance without dilution and train a new generation to take up the mantle and carry the musical tradition forward. This is the core philosophy behind Swaratma, which Mukerjee describes as a “cause which is committed to preserving, protecting and promoting the ethos of Indian music.”
He elaborates, “This is a response to the increasing degradation of the quality of how Indian music is being presented due to dilution from other music. Indian music by its very nature has a strong component of soulfulness without which it loses its character. Swaratmik music cannot be performed, it is a confluence of melody and mindfulness where the performer gets lost in the music, there is no performer. That presentation is what we aim to preserve.”
In order to achieve this goal, Mukerjee and team, which comprises Wadhwa and an assortment of entrepreneurs, well-wishers, educationists and musicians, have conducted concerts and music appreciation workshops, often in schools and communities made up of people from less privileged backgrounds. “These people could be great musicians tomorrow,” Mukerjee explains, “We are there to groom them as professional musicians whereby they can earn their livelihood.”
Explaining his position on the dilution of music, Mukerjee says that it is a bit of a chicken and egg situation, with some attributing it to the changing tastes of the audience, a sentiment he does not completely agree with. “At the end of the day, it is about the musician too. Currently, a lot of people want to make the gallery happy, but that is not always a necessity to earn a livelihood, as there are many successful musicians who have never played to the gallery. To some extent, it is about re-educating the audience to appreciate music in its pure form, as that has a lingering effect. But this will take time.”
Swaratma’s plan for achieving this is many-layered. At the moment, Mukerjee and team are focussing on organising curated concerts across the country, particularly in Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Lucknow, Varanasi and Kolkata, besides Bengaluru, where Swaratma is based. The concerts will be curated to ensure a true ‘Swaratmik’ performance, and one performer at each one will be an aspiring musician with potential for this level of performance, trained at one of the learning centres Mukerjee plans to set up with the help of his network in the aforementioned cities.
But the final goal of Swaratma is to start a gurukul, which Mukerjee hopes to have in operation by 2020. Despite his seemingly strict views on the true nature of Indian music, Mukerjee says that the gurukul will encourage organic, holistic learning. “The gurukul will have three elements — environment, engagement and enablement, through which we teach students the basics of Swaratmik performance. We are moving out of the rigidity of grammar of music, as that often does more harm than good.
Of course, the teaching will still be based on Classical music, but students have the freedom to discuss with the teacher what genre they would like to pursue.”
Swaratma will be officially launched with a concert and launch presentation on October 14 at Jus Trufs, Jakkur where Mukerjee will perform with his signature Indra veena along with vocal accompaniment and autumn-themed recitations by a performer from Varanasi.
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