RAAG BHAIRAVI: REALM OF DEATH

............THAT LIES BEYOND THE VAITARNI
 

 “Death is only the beginning; afterward comes the hard part.” – Jed Rubenfeld, The Death Instinct

Each raga aspires to become Bhairavi, but none can reach that point when on the mortal plains...CvB

We plan to write something on Bhimpalasi and Bhairavi…the chelli and the akka of Hindustani…this entry in the blog continuum is but a trailer intended to whet the appetite of the reader hopefully, and the writer…we shall have occasion to revisit the topic…’not wholly and in full measure, but very substantially’, he, he, he..

Bhimpalasi-…the plaintive afternoon raga which became inseparable from Kumarji’s psyche during his mortal phase at Dewas…the threadbare shade under the blazing palash  defying bravely the burning afternoon Malwa sun… and Bhairavi…the akka of the musical Universe…

Bhimpalasi resting in the Palash shade on a hot summer afternoon in Dewas. Kumarji told son Mukul that he'd never be proficient in Bhimpalasi, unless he spent a lifetime of contemplation under that shade...

Bhairavi first today: Panditji, that is BSJ has gone on record stating that though Bhairavi is the richest, it is basically meant for bhajan or thumri  or the like…He says nobody attempts to launch into a full-scale exposition or a khayal  in Bhairavi…why this cold-shoulder I sayyy...?

For the record, here is a Bhairavi in detail, blessed by none other than Menuhin-from none other than our idol Ustad AHJK…it's a bit abridged on the fore, but in a teen-tal, not dadra or kehrwa

                                                                                                                                          Anyway… when the writer’s ear was ripening as a toddler, Dad prophesied that first he’d learn to appreciate Bhairavi, being a sampoorna raga, then Darbari, then Shivranjani, then Bhimpalasi etc etc…In fact he had a thumb rule for novices to Classical trying to recognise the raag of a song: if it just insanely and unbearably beautiful it has to be Bhairavi..tat twam asi...aso…

By and by one unlearnt Dad and came around to Ashok Razdan's view that all music is great.... especially Puriya Dhanashri, Kirwani, and Madhuwanti....but Dad stuck to his position...

But the above two observations fly in the face of the first…we find it inexplicable if the Richest of the ragas is left to sit as a mendicant outside the edifices of Malkauns or Darabari…did not  Panditji sing jo bhaje hari ko sada always and always always sportingly as a consolation cherry to top the cake…?

(on bhajani theka)

The explanation IK offers is simply that láffaire Bhairavi has to be taken in the spirit of the Hindu reincarnation cycle. The mendicant Bhairavi sitting outside the life temple marking its fringes is but THE empress of Death-realm…tip-of-the iceberg of Death, which in essence is Life…what sounds like a charming thumri -the said cherry on the cake- in this world obtains its rightful place...is the staple diet of, the next world...

Vindication of this view (he, he, he...) comes from the fact that when the Golden Record containing sounds from the Earth was compiled by NASA in 1977, for being placed on the Voyager's inter-stellar journey to eternity, it was Raga Bhairavi sung by Surashri Kesarbai Kerkar that rubbed shoulders with creations of Beethoven and Mozart and Louis Armstrong ..

There are no khayals in Bhairavi in the mortal world, for Bhairavi belongs in the Other World- be it jannat or dozaqw…Ustad AHJK’s sitar recital was but a trailer conceived by an ethereal being closer to Allahtala than us. Whoever does that is a step closer to the brahman  than others. Jabrail, tells us that on judgement day, one has to relive the holy and the despicable moments of one's life and here at 1.00 we find shades of Malkauns and at Khamaj...at....When we land in the Other World one day, we shall be welcomed by the strains of Ustad Bismillah Khan’s Bhairavi…Entertained by Panditji’s Vaikunthicha Raya...hopefully he shall enthrall the writer and his dad with a night long khayal in Bhairavi...

Fulfilled by a 3-hour merukhand in Bhairavi by our compatriot Ustad Amir Khan of Indore

And put to sleep by one of the representatives of that kaleidoscopic phenomenon jo bhaje hari ko sada

(on teen-taal)

Simply put: we all feel Bhairavi is the Mount Everest of Indian Classical, but it is in fact the baton that Death will hand over to the brand new Other Life…Bhairavi is the Cuckoo call of the Universe we all shall see one day…when we have crossed the mythical river Vaitarni that runs between the two territories, Life and Death....and that is why Bhairavi is played at the end of a maifil- for that is where it belongs in the living world- and it demonstrates the shape of things to come...and hence it is a truncated version only...!

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..

BEWITCHING RAGA: SOHANI

Chabiwala Bank, Guwahati celebrates Holi 2013 copy-book style at the Bank House. The beautiful evening is adorned by a Holi full moon, which carries a reddish hue, and rises from a South-ish East, patiently keeping us company as the night progresses. A light classical mehfil carries on along the entire length of the evening, like a babbling brook of crystal-clear water, in which you could soak your hands and wet your dusty faces at will & to your heart’s content! We try to recall a little poem, not by Wordsy-tenny-percy-byro-speare, but discovered by us on the contemporary allpoetry.com, run by socialdesighhq.com as a cyber-group of 4,00,000 barefoot poets.

WATER POETRY
Stand very still, look,             
under cold waters fish cruise
slowly, silently.
                                             Gurgle, burble, splash. 
                                              Peace of mind is what I find
                                             listening to streams.
I dreamed
I was water
In the mountains
Collecting leaves and pebbles
Swiftly
                                                 Water
                                                 wavy wet
                                                 flowing tumbling rolling
                                                 rocks boulders sand silt
                                                 scouring churning eroding
                                                 rainy soaked
                                                 Catskills.

 http://allpoetry.com/poem/2103259-Burble-by-prometheoid

The evening saunters along languidly, and then suddenly we are jolted out of the reverie by a 4000 Volt lightning bolt, in the form of a drut holi bandish that crashes on our ears- ranga na dalo Shyamji, gori pe... That’s Sohani, we exclaim- how forgetful, Missus exclaims- it’s by Kalapini Komkali naaa…from the house of Kumar Gandharva, aka  Shivaputra Siddramayya Komkalimath:

being the Kumarji original.

Kumarji had been an astonishing prodigy, whose career went through tortuous twists and turns, for he lost one lung to Cancer, surviving by sheer will-power, and then went on to develop the unique style displaying trademark short staccato machine gun taans, dictated by his severely curtailed lung capacity.

As we confided in one of our earlier posts, when in Delhi, Kumarji stayed either at Gandhi Peace Foundation, Rouse Avenue, or imparted glory to our garibkhana. The great vocalist was a chum of Dad’s Mama Rahul Barpute. Once YT, then (?) a green-horn, asked him in paparazzi fashion as to how much of a handicap the absence of one lung was, he laughed heartily and said something like “अर्रे बाबा, देवाने खूप spare parts दिले आहेत आपल्याला - एक lung च खूप आहे !”. Very true- ek hi kaafi thi!

Usually the group travelled as a quartet, comprised of Kumarji, Rahulji, Guruji Chinchalkar, and Wankarbabu, the photographer. Tabalchi was on occasions, Sureshbhaiyya, a CA by profession, who had his own arrangements in Delhi, but visited Kumarji casually for practice. Needless to say, he was the warkari type of tabalchi, not the senapati type, that is, he was in the Shaikh Dawood mould, which God broke accidentally and had to enlist the Devil’s help for fashioning the new one, he,he,he…

Legend has it that (and Dad vouched for its authenticity), as a 12 year old, Kumar mimicked with utter precision Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan’s 2 hour recital, immediately after the Ustad took the bow, of course with the Ustad’s nod. Disciples were livid, but the Ustad reprimanded the followers- “what I could not drill into your heads in years, he has mastered in no time! He is the future of our Music!”

The quartet was accompanied occasionally by well known vocalist, Vidushi Suman Dandekar, for the record. The caboodle would chew betel nut and betel leaves all day, and the paad-daan happened to be a tin-box, a memorabilia of Raj Kapoor’s movie Dharam Karam, which we all saw- mince the tin-box. Now and then a cry would go up “Where is Dharam Karam ?”, “get me Dharam Karam” “haazir ho” etc. etc., as if Dharam Karam was another member of the troupe. We have tried to reproduce the iconic box below, and forwarded a copy of the picture to Guruji’s son Dileep for information and necessary action, he,he,he…!

GURUJI'S ICONIC PAAN DAAN

Both Pt. Bhimsen and Kumarji were contemporaries, but their peshkash was so different. If Pt. Bhimsen’s taans can be likened to Mount Rushmore, Kumarji’s artistry resembled the kathak danseuse seen performing in the  Dayal Bagh  in a swirling filigreed dress.

PT. BHIMSEN JOSHI'S TAANS: MONUMENTAL

KOMKALI GHARANA: AAPKI TAANON KI NAZAQAT SALAMAT RAHE

RAGA SOHANI:

You don’t find Sohani performed very frequently. Iti Ustad Shujaat Khan, the famous sitarist, son of Ustad Vilayat Khan who anchored that excellent programme on DD Bharati. The reason is that the distinction between Sohani, Puriya and Marwa is very difficult to maintain through a recital. We check up on Encyclopedia Madhulica:

Missus uwach: All the three have five swaras in the aroha and six in the avaroha. (audav shadav ragas). Rishabh (Re) is komal and Madhyam (Ma) is Tivra, while all other swaras are shuddha. Pancham (Pa) is warjit. Vaadi-Samvaadi sets are different, giving rise to different degrees of therav of different swaras:

Marwa:  Vaadi Re and Samvaadi Dha, less of Shadj ; Puriya: Vaadi Ga and Samvaadi Ni;

Sohani :Vaadi Shadja and Samvaadi Ga. Sohani is  uttaranga pradhan, with taar saptak shadj ascendant.

Thevan being so very similar, it’s like trying to paint three figures on a canvas with water colours of different hues, which due to their affinity and identical consistency are difficult to be kept from mixing, and keep on blotting the neighbour into confusing swirls.

This is the upama Parrikar (r/o California) bestows upon Sohani:

“This sprightly raga is an instant pleaser much like that buxom leotard-wrapped babe at your local gym that you lust after while pretending to work out (by way of comparison, think of Marwa as your mother-in-law: solid, ponderous and unfunny).”

Some artistes have excelled at Sohani. One can name Pandita Malini Rajurkar and Ustad Shahid Parvez- and of course the Komkalis. In cricketing parlance, they are the batsmen like Gavaskar, MAK Pataudi, or Sachin, who could negotiate the fastest ball on an Australian pitch with ease- be it from Lillie, or Halls, or Imran, or Shaun Tait-  they ‘read’ the fast incoming  vaadi Ga of Puriya and Samvaadi Ga of Sohani, dispatching them in copybook fashion. This is Malinitai:

check tarana after 8.35- it’s based on pakhawaj bols and one of the most remarkable taranas you’ll find on Youtube. You will agree it has something to do with the common heritage and pre-occupation of Amir Khusrau and Pta. Malinitai- Mathematics.

MORE ON MUSICIANS:

Missus recalls her Ram Bhawan days quite fondly. The Pathak family resided in a humble abode above the Coal Depot at Ram Bhawan, Bahadurganj. Allahabad used to be a popular destination for music concerts, inhabited as it was by cognoscenti. Prayag Sangeet Sammelan and Bhatkhandes’ were the major schools, often united in rivalry, if that means anything, he,he,he..!

When the stalwarts visited Allahabad, it was natural for the Pathaks’ of Ram Bhawan to host homely concerts.  There was a moderately large hall, with a corrugated sheet partition in the middle, which used to be dismantled for space. One such concert was planned with Manik Verma, Dad’s ‘sister by adoption’ and Pt. Ratanjankar, among others.

Maniktai stayed at her in-laws’ place next to Hindi Sahitya Sammelan, and being so close, naturally misjudged the hour, and by the time she arrived at Ram Bhawan, Pt. Ratanjankar, tired of waiting, finished his recital. Maniktai refused to follow suit, such was here reverence for Pt. Ratanjankar. He was the Gurus’ Guru! The audience however left disappointed, for they were there to listen to Maniktai’s Marathi Bhajans, in the first place!

GURUJI VISHNU CHINCHALKAR AND NACHEEZ:

Guruji was one of the most artistically inclined persons we ever met, and in his heyday was the numero dos Indore painter, numero uno being the fakir who initially had to perch himself on film-poster scaffoldings, paint-brush in hand- you guessed it right: Maqbool Fida Husain! We were fortunate to be the recipient of Guruji’s astonishing artistic insight. In this picture, Wankarkaka was instructed to bring out the contrast between a white beard and a black one, the latter adorning the visage of YT.

AT DELHI GARIBKHANA: MOM LOOKS ON

WHICH 'RANG NA DALO' SCORES: KUMARJI OR KALAPINI ?:

This has been debated on occasions by Missus and YF. Missus plumps for Kalapini. Of course Kumarji was the teacher.  Our contention is simple: the feelings are supposed to be expressed by a feminine spirit, maybe Radha. Ergo, Kalapini's should carry more conviction, touche !