THE SITARIST'S SITARIST [AHJK 2]

we wrote our despatch on Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan (Sitar Mehbooba Hai Kiski?) in October 2013, with a resolve to follow it up with the resident worm’s eye-view of the Ustad’s personality and his music. However we came up against too many imponderables- what Missus and Senior called mere conjectures of YT, which were open to debate. Like the writer’s view that, post the vyakhya, each sitar recital presented by the Ustad was akin to a cleverly crafted short-story- which view first saw the light of the day in the Sitar Mehbooba Hai Kiski post. Some recitals could be like the great plot-less movies of Mani Kaul, Senior said. Then: the view that  the DNA of the entire body of Hindustani Classical, be it Kirana or Maihar or Mewat- stems from a few good men, among them, Tansen, Sadarang, Inayat Khan, Bande Ali Khan..? We went through endless rounds of googling, thoroughed  every word of Pt. Ramashray Jha’s text-books, and scraped the bottoms of authoritative sites like parrikar.org and maverick ones like baithak2012.wp for succor, and a vindication of these unorthodox views, but alas it was not a path anybody had noticed in the tangled briar bushes, leave alone tread.  It was then officially declared by family that definitive views could be only firmed up after personally interviewing two of the greatest sitarists of all times, namely Ustad Shahid Parvez, and of course, the subject of our discussion mince obsession, Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan. Tall order….ehh…?! Senior, being virtually neighbour of Shahidbhai @ Kothrud Pune, accomplished his mission in a jiffy, but the von Bailiffs, residents of the North East that they were, had a distinct handicap. Moreover, Google Kaur, seemingly, had no inkling of the exact location of Ustad’s residence, which we knew was somewhere in a magic cove in Bandra.

we landed a hot and sultry Sunday early this year at Santa Cruz airport with Missus, and set off for the handsome Bandra Masjid, expecting to bump into somebody acquainted with the Ustad, but alas, the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’  key failed to work. The music stores were all closed. A speaker repairman took us to Bandra’s Banjo Master Rashidmiyan, who summarised the state of Indian Music thus: “haan haan, haan, kaun nahi jaanta unko, bus ye samajhiye ke Sitar ke Raseedbhai huzur hi hain.!” He helpfully suggested we go to Mehboob Studio and check, but we again drew a blank. The guard was a Marathi, and as we spoke in Marathi, we were chillar, ha, ha, aha [1]…. After 5 hours of leg-work, we retreated, exhausted, with the resolution that we’ll do our home-work neatly before we came next time. That took another 3 months to happen, and then it happened: the most intense, fulfilling day in the musical journey of YF and Missus, and Indayanikaathi.com: Ramnavmi day 2014 AD, that is 8^th of April 2014, when we touched reverentially Khansaheb’s feet, and then he embraced us as we had known him for ever and ever! We consciously felt the furrows of those magic hands that gave the Universe the Jafferkhani baaz. When the creases on those mubarak fingers bled from incessant riyaz, the flow was stanched with soft-stone called bilaw and the hands baked over fire lest the bleeding disturb the saadhana... In a trance we sat at his feet for 4 hours, and the dust settled on our so called conjectures about the फ़न of sitarbaazi..Bhatke hue musafir, manzil pe pahunche aakhir..

As we unshackled the elevator gate on the fifth floor on which is situated the humble abode, we heard the unexpected expected- the strains of the sitar! None else than Ustad opened the door, and instantly recognised the anxiety and eternal deewangi writ on our twin faces! We inhaled deeply, savouring the contentment in that air laden with the sheer fragrance of music and human kindness! Bataiye: jannat ke kiwad khule pade hain par zamana yeh ke kisi ko usse koi wasta nahi..! Behind the Ustad was his son, the handsome Ustad Zunain Khan - with teekhe nain-naksh. Little did he expect that we had been stalking him too..”Zunainbhai”, we said “aapka Basant Mukhari to kamal kar gaya Delhi mey…wo Mata Vaishno Devi wali mehfil mey..”. Zunainbhai was taken aback, and we muttered excuse for the stalking part, adding “ab kya batayein aisa junoon sawar huwa hai Khansaheb ka, arse se inki har cheez kai kai baar sun chuke hain aur unke taqreeban har afsaane se waqif hain..”

missus is moved at the spontaneous gestures, the refined human values of the Jaffer Khans. We detect the unspoken dram of gratitude in her eyes, and with an equal silence respond “my dear, all these things go together, intellect, genius, felicity with the sitar, the human decency…Zunain inherits it, so does his little grandson…”

first thing first- addressing the legend: how one legend should address another, he, he, he…those present address him variously. Between Ustad, Guruji and Khansaheb, we settle for the last appellation.

“khansaheb, hum bhi Malwe ke hi hain, aur mohtarma khud Gwalior gharane ki singer hain…!” we launch into an elaborate introduction. Presenting credentials…Khansaheb politely questions Missus about her gharana, fishing out the scrapbook on which he asks his guests to write by way of communication, for by now his auditory endowments have taken the back seat. “swar matra te achook olakhtaat”, says somebody from behind.  And of course the mind is as sharp as ever. Hundreds of Urdu couplets are still in place…Missus writes about her father Prof. Balaji Pathak, originally of Sagar, and Khansaheb remembers him, as also having played at their Ram Mandir at Sagar. He remembers popular disciple Pt. Ram Hershe of Sagar. Normally Pathaks will be Hindis and Phataks Maharashtrians, Khansaheb observes, and she is exceptional everybody says in chorus, led by nacheez…

As if on design, our phone rings. The ring tone is the recurrent 'sthaayi' swara samooh sa re ga ma ga re sa ga re from the 2003 Zilla Kafi, that makes a determined assault at around 15.05 mins. into the masterpiece..(5.05 or so in part 2 of alap). What happens at 6.28 for 7 seconds leaves the gunijan open-mouthed. The fantastic illusion created by the merging of a number of strokes, sounding like one long 'Parvezkhani'  meend !  Everybody gets hooked to the mesmerising strains and Ustad asks us to respond to the caller bhaiya.. “Saheb, Chabiwala Bank ka ek babu hai, apne aap ko Deputy Managing Director kehta hai, apne matlab ka nahi”…we say cockily and launch into the Ustad’s penchant for creating such swar samoohs, which in our view are often fictitious swashbuckling characters in  his narrative. Then we play the 6.47 cut of Kirwani on youtube and write on Ustad’s scrapbook- “iske pachcheeswe second se teeswe second me faisla ho jata hai ke sitar ka malik kaun hai…”. Ustad asks us to elaborate, and we say, “aap teenon, yane ke huzoor, Pt. Ravi Shankar aur Ustad Vilayat Khan ke beech.. chhota muh badi baat muaff karen..”. Ustad has a huge laughter, and evidently enjoys the comment, for he says “ye sab yahan likho barkhwurdar, padhne wale ko samajh aana chahiye…”

the Tansen of sitar!  He is teaching one of his old disciples, a dedicated lady of around 50. Accompanying him in teaching is Pt. Varman, moderator of the day, an accomplished sitarist…Khansaheb firmly takes the reins of the evening in his hands, addressing us by our first names, ordering us to first take our seats. Then he remembers: “Sawkar, inhe Ramnavmi ka prasad khilao- ye lo, Mahim ki mashhoor firni- Sawkar hamesha lekar aata hai..”

“Aur ab itminan se poocho kya samajhne aaye ho…sab batayenge, aur sath me sitar bajayenge hamare  shagird…ye koi jaldi khatam hone wala kissa nahi hai…”. “To fir baaki kissa muqwammal karne hamare ghar aaiyega.?” we scribble, and Khansahab observes sagely: ”bhai Sanjiv..tumhari likhawat padhne se to mai tumhe behtar sun loon…haan haan inshallaah, zaroor ayenge, basharte ke mohtarma Guru Purnima par apna gaana sunayen…”

the exchanges between us dabblers and the practitioners- Khansaheb, Pandit Varman and Missus are the stuff of revelation. Why for instance is the Ustad not heard playing glamorous ragas like Puriya or Darbari…or what constitutes the excellence of a sitar recital… Unfortunately, these revelations are not little shampoo sachets which can be marketed and sold for profit, hence zamana inke liye kyun waqt apna barbaad kare…?. The best things in life under today’s ‘life-model’ are destined to languish in the earnest, hospitable bosoms of irregulars like Gopal, Carl von bailiff, Senior, Junior, Missus, Mugdha, Jawahar Reddy and some deewane readers…

the discourse that followed is best cocooned into another passage. Just let us regain our orientation. So long..! Inshallaah see you behind the break!

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[1] Not as trivial as it seems- big-big guys do that! Happened with Indrayanikaathi—once it was known to professionals that Carl von bailiff was not a Khasi but a khalis Maharashtrian, the blog was dropped like a hot potato, readership plummeted, and its market-cap turned negative, he, he, he- Meghalaya is as far as the spirit of holy curiosity goes, not beyond…Now you know why Shobhaa De speaks excellent Marathi, but without concession to pronunciation…!- 

Sitar Mehbooba Hai Kiski? [AHJK 1]

We have always felt that the tradition of critiquing in Hindustani is superficial, person-centric or individual bound- ad hominem- and therefore, immature...yet to come of age....strong words, ehh...? Missus by and large agrees with this assessment of ours. By way of criticism Gunijan will normally say…So and So vs. the Other, or vice versa, he, he…! For instance, as we recalled on an earlier occasion, HT’s much-archived music critic Raghava R. Menon, the Kumarji aficionado, while reviewing a musical innovation by Pt. BSJ condescendingly remarked that the latter had at last taken a leaf out of Kumar’s book….whew…Something like that. In his book on Kumar Gandharva, Menon says “It was like a meteor that he passed across the Indian sky and cut in his wake the body of Hindustani classical music into two neat halves; one half before Kumar Gandharva and one half after him, a kind of a B.C. and an A.D. in Indian music.” That, even to a Kumar enthusiast like YT, is a grosss exaggeration, hero-worship, plain and simple. Unless someone does critiquing on basis of tools we discuss below, we can't claim that we are putting our heart and soul into the appreciation of our music..

Of course there are researchers who have made a break from the past, and have turned the gaze of new technologies on the subject of Indian Classical. Our own efforts, and those of Senior have been chronicled ha, ha..,in these columns from time to time. Recall the post where Senior analyses a taan from Vad jawu kunala sharana ga by Ashabai Khadilkar, presenting it in a visual that is, graphic, form. Witness also the fear expressed half-seriously by the writer that our music, being amenable to reduction in mathematical formats, could face extinction, if the mechanisation of music carried forward excessively (our Southern brethren A.R.Rahman and Ilayaraja were arraigned). We have also highlighted the efforts of the Kiwi researcher Gregory Booth in studying Indian Classical and Film Music.

The sort of threadbare study we are looking at has been carried on by the NCPA working with scholars of University of Amsterdam since early 1980s. Working on their project called AUTRIM (Automated Transcription for Indian Music), these dedicated musicologists have adapted a Dutch freeware called the PRAAT (Phonetic Research and Analysis Tool, which also means 'talk' in Dutch) into an instrument that automatically converts a recital into a beautiful moving graph. You can read swaras off the moving tracks, interpret taans etc. Let us take a statement 'in Bhimpalasi there is an andolan on flat ni' . The software will report the track location where this andolan can be heard in a recital and seen graphically.

Some of the eminent artistes who have lent their voices to the project are Pta. Ashwini Bhide, Pta. Veena Sahasrabuddhe, Pt. Uday Bhawalkar and Pt. Jayateerth Mevundi. Recently we witnessed Jabbar Patel's movie on Kumar Gandharva 'Hans Akela', in which one sees grandson Bhuvanesh Komkali analysing a Kumar bandish with the PRAAT. It's not clear whether or how the voice graphic can be seen as distinct from that of accompanying instruments?

Then there have been inquiries into certain features of Indian Classical from the point of view of the ubiquitous ‘consumer’. Look at the following line from the excellent paper “Audio Metadata Extraction: The Case for Hindustani Classical Music” by Preeti Rao of IIT, Mumbai (Proc. Of SPCOM 2012, IISc, Bangalore).

“To make the desired music easily accessible to the consumer, it is important to have meaningful and robust descriptions of music that are amenable to search.”

‘Metadata’ is simply the data or information or dimensions like a frequency value which are not tangible in the music. Thus the raga and the tala is not metadata, as it is mentioned on the CD jacket, whereas the graphical sketch of a taan which is extracted through a technique, is metadata.

These young researchers themselves are either artistes, or have deeper knowledge, which can come, say, by marrying to someone like Missus, ha, ha, ha…Preeti Rao’s paper contains many insights. See for example the following lines:

“In Western music, with its emphasis on discrete pitches and absolute tuning and relatively limited forms of ornamentation, the continuous pitch contour corresponds closely to a sequence of stable notes….The musical score in symbolic notation is thus a near equivalent of the melodic contour and music retrieval tasks can operate at the level of symbolic string matching. In Indian classical music, on the other hand, symbolic notation proves inadequate to deal with tuning variations and complex ornamentation that are fundamentally linked to raga characteristics. Being an oral tradition, this aspect has not seriously hampered music education. However for the music retrieval task, there is a need for more complete data representations to be derived from the continuous pitch contour.”

Basically what she says is that representation of a raga in Western notation like this:

has limited utility, given the surfeit of alankars like meends and murkis in the Indian Melodies. To reach those, you need to do the sort of research Senior does. Preeti Rao has done a lot of work on those lines, some of which you’ll see in the paper. You’ll now appreciate the odds against which Pt. Bhatkhande or Pt. Ratanjankar worked in their efforts at documentation. Dr. Rao believes that since our music is transmitted to pupils by oral means, no one acutely felt the need for metadata extraction (till an army of listeners emerged, who rely on secondary media like CDs or computer files for access to the music, and whose resources only can be the guarantee of the survival of our music.)

We shall return later to some other interesting sidelights of Preeti Rao’s paper, but let’s briefly return to our starting point, namely critiquing of Indian Classical, which in turn will chukao the namak of Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan, or to put it in plain English, justify the title of this Post and the next.

The point is that if meaningful and enriching lessons are to be drawn from an exploration of Classical compositions, one must go behind the rhetoric. For instance the profession of ‘gayaki ang’ is what we called the rhetoric, but if you really want to hear the human side of Sitar, there is no one like Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan or Shahidbhai, who never made any hoo-haa about his exalted status. And mind you, this not to say that Halim is the greatest, though that is in the realm of possibility…

All songs are great, Ashok Razdan, the hero of our post Remembering Nobody  said,…All Sitar is Great,  we declare now, and no odious comparisons…but for a real appreciation of the art, it’s essential to step into the artiste’s persona, and to possess lot of curiosity, and imagination with a touch of madness. If Nikhilda specialises in producing yards and yards of silken sitar fabric, Pt. Ravi Shankar is the Creator, Ustad Halim Jaffer is the raconteur and poet of Sitar, par excellence, and Ustad Shahid Parvez, the reigning Narrative Authority. The jury is stillll out on the merits of Ustad Vilayat Khan…Imrat Khan is talking to the jury...

We must have heard a 1000 GB of Sitar since our ear ripened, and always wondered what that Beautiful Lady, the Sitar, wanted to say or utter or articulate, passing from the hand of one Ustad to the other Pandit. What she wanted to say ever since Amir Khusro fathered her, is contained in half a byte of music, in the first 30 seconds of the following Kirwani by Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan, do listen:

And what she says is this, make no mistake: sitar mehbooba hai to bas Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan ki ! Listen two minutes, and you'll know of the whole affair between the two...two minutes of sitar one can and must die for, he, he, he...saare deewan ek taraf, ye chhabees lamhe ek taraf..Uffff...the things he does to her, she reciprocates and surrenders abjectly...she's made for only one man, the rest are mere hangers on, wasting their time and the listeners' time...she's  a wafadar dulhan.... وفادار بیوی میں, hope Mir is asleep...

In the next despatch we discuss Ustad’s personality and his music from the Worm’s perspective, aspects like creation of sthayi like motifs which Preeti Rao cites as the hallmark of a khayal, the Jafferkhani baz…. To us a recital by the affable Ustad sometimes is like a ghazal from Mirza Ghalib and on another occasion, a well-crafted short-story, having a beginning and an ending, like this pictorial illustration they use for the genre.

Somerset Maugham was supposedly the greatest raconteur amongst modern English fiction writers, and this house believes Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan possesses the same felicity with the Sitar. Of course we always felt that Ravi Shankar was economical and played to-the-point, while Halimbhai loves playing a bit about the bush...and boy does IK loves thaaaat... 

More on Ustad Halim Jaffer Khan and the art of story-telling on the other side of the break..

BEAUTY OF THE SITAR:

IF THE SITAR WERE A WOMAN:

After much research and introspection, we made the startling discovery that upon the face of this earth, only one woman can be likened to the Sitar (apart from Missus, that is):

 30 seconds..