Soulful musings on music
ANJANA RAJAN
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Continuing the series on accompanists, meet Sunil Kant Saxena, whose sitar strings emanate straight from the heart.
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Photo Sandeep Saxena
ART TO HEAL Sunil Kant Saxena wants to teach music his own way.
He left a government job to pursue his music, yet when he got the chance to live in Europe, earning both money and respect by performing and teaching the sitar, he gave it up since his mother did not wish him, the youngest, to stray so far from home. Contradictory? Not to Sunil Kant Saxena, because he believes no matter how good an artiste one might be, it is far more important to be a good human being.
Life is not divided into on-stage and off-stage happenings for him, and he wants to bring his principles of honesty and integrity, of the unity of all people into the practice of his music.
This Bareilly-born sitar exponent, who trained under Pandit Uma Shankar (in turn a disciple of Pandit Ravi Shankar), and is currently under the guidance of Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, is no conservative sermoniser though. For long a sitar accompanist to Odissi dancer Madhavi Mudgal, he relates with a chuckle how he came into contact with the family. "I was taking my (music) exams through the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya.
At the Visharad exam, there was no one to play the tabla for me. Madhup Mudgal (the renowned vocalist) came and chipped in. I didn't know him, so I asked him, ` Tabla bajaa lete ho ?' (Can you manage to play the tabla?) Later I met Madhavi ji too and accompanied her a lot. Also Kelu Babu (Kelucharan Mohapatra)."
Solo concerts
Saxena, who has performed solo concerts at prestigious venues even as he continued to provide accompaniment to eminent dancers like Kathak doyen Birju Maharaj, points out that the feeling accompanists are lower on the scale of achievement than solo artistes is unique to India.
"Yeh kaam chhota, yeh bada, yeh sab India ka banaya hua hai."
Palpable, even if baseless. He adds, "And an artiste is not just a player of an instrument. All of life goes together. It is like a doctor. You can't be a specialist of one part and forget about the rest of the body."
Saxena does not come from a musical family, though it was his mother, Bhagyawati Saxena, who got him started off because of her interest in music. "In Kayastha families (though I don't believe in caste at all), all the women learn music as a hobby, so there was always music in the house. Later I learnt vocal music from Professor B.N. Datta, and then switched over to the sitar."
A recipient of the National Scholarship and one from the Shri Ram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, he went on to win the Sur Mani title from Mumbai's Sur Singar Samsad. Are government schemes such as the scholarship a boon to budding artistes?
No follow-up
"Just giving the scholarship is not enough. Yes it helps financially at the time," he muses. "You get money and a certificate too, but there is no follow-up. We don't really know what happens to the recipients of the scholarships over a period of time." The medical analogy fits here too. He feels only a small part of the problem of classical music aspirants is being treated through giving scholarships.
"Even buying an instrument is so difficult. I hesitate to tell my students the price."
In every field we find unions looking after the interests of their members, but for freelance musicians, "the only union is God," says the man who hopes to have a place of his own to teach music holistically according to his view of life.
"I had gone to Brazil with Madhup Mudgal and his team. He collaborated with a celebrated artiste there, but the children chosen to perform were from slums. If such children are not given an artistic outlet, they can become goondas. That is the power of art."
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