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Book Review
The ineffable world of classical music
LAKSHMI SUBRAMANIAN
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The story of three great musicians of whom two became India’s legendary singers and one remained unknown
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THE MUSIC ROOM: Namita Devidayal; Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd., 301-A, World Trade Tower, Barakhamba Lane, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 395.
This is a charming book. Barring the occasional lapses of self-indulgence, when the reader is told how wonderful the author’s voice was or how Dhondutai Kulkarni, the celebrated musician valued her as “her little Kesar”, the book transports us to an incredible world of modern Indian classical music with all its mysteries, magic and mythologies that never fail to elicit that sympathetic reverberations from all those who identify with the affective dimensio
ns of music that go far beyond the acoustic domain.
The book is about many things even as it attempts a personal excursus into the world of Hindustani classical music seen through the prism of individual teachers and practitioners, who remain in spite of their age and absence connected in a living present mediated through the actual practice of music and of listening, as well as through a sensitised space of affect produced and reproduced by anecdotes that remain the backbone of any social history of music and its makers. Here, Namita Devidayal makes a major contribution and shows us how much one can do with anecdotes and write a book about the troubled and troubling history of music in modern India, of its individual practitioners without ever losing either that sense of deep appreciation and affection for the art form and its eccentric artists or that critical faculty which can distinguish between flattery and conviction, myth-mania and creative imagination. This is a welcome change, for the recent crop of anecdote-based anthologies have remained who’s who of musicians, with the same cycle of stories churned out endlessly and without context.
Deeply layered
The Music Room on the other hand, is a very different kind of biography. While at a very obvious and simple level, it is the story of a specific musician cum teacher, Dhondutai Kulkarni and her very special relationship with the author who became her disciple at the tender age of 11, it reveals a more complex and compelling narrative of individual musicians and patrons, who constituted the changing world of Hindustani classical music in the 20th century. The circumstances in which the author herself came to learn music and how the experience intersected somewhat curiously with her social and socialising profile are very well drawn, and speak volumes for the changing social context of modern urban India. The cameo like impressions that we get of Dhondutai’s teacher, the legendary and mercurial Kesar Bai, are wonderful examples of the way a sensitive reading of anecdotes can help excavate what is ultimately a deeply layered and complex story of personal aspirations, disappointments and confusion enhanced by the enormous social changes that transformed the milieu of music performance in modern India. The simplicity with which she records her own teacher’s apparently ‘Hindu’ sensibilities that preferred to see her guru Alladiya Khan as a Brahmin in disguise and at the same time her utter and complete devotion to him and his family speak eloquently of the limiting nature of modern categories associated with identity politics that have erased the infinite richness and depth of old and enduring social and artistic interactions.
Patronage
What could have been drawn out with greater attention is the specific role played by important commercial elites in Bombay city in supporting musical culture. The author’s own location and her cultural inheritance as a descendant of an old and illustrious family noted for their musical appreciation and patronage could have been put to greater use. For, in contrast to the information that we have on the Marathi engagement with modern classical music in the 20th century, we know relatively little about the role played by “seths” and commercial magnates in providing support and sustenance to professional musicians and so in the nature of their aesthetic engagement with the art form.
But this is a minor complaint. The book captures so effectively in terms of style, tone and detail the magic of the world of music that it is an absolute delight to read and savour.
As a meditative reflection upon what is and remains an ineffable medium, it carries that lightness of touch which is appropriate as it is soothing.
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