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Piping hot music

If you think bagpipers are men in kilts found mostly in military bands and on whisky bottles, be ready for a big surprise. BHUMIKA K. stumbled upon some in colourful Rajasthani attire

PHOTO: K. GOPINATHAN

BEEN THERE, DONE THAT While Om Prakash Nayak loves to play his own native music, he doesn't mind when people ask him for Hindi film music.

The sound and sight of bagpipes in the middle of Bangalore surely grabs your eyeballs and eardrums too. Especially when the exotic instrument hangs on the shoulder not of a Scotsman in a kilt, but on that of a colourful Rajasthani pagadi and dhoti-clad man. Soulful tunes with dhol beats for accompaniment, and a long string of colourful woollen pom-poms hanging from the bagpipes reassure you it's straight out of the desert's soul.

Bagpipes in Rajasthan? One wonders and marvels. But sadly we don't seem to know of the myriad traditions of our own land. Apparently bagpipes are part of recorded Indian history, and are often considered to have existed in India in parallel to Greek and Roman civilisations.

Drawing crowds

"We call it the been, what you call bagpipe in English... you know, the one you see on the whisky bottles," says Om Prakash Nayak, introducing the instrument to me with a warm smile. I can't miss the hairpin that keeps his long curling moustache in place. His sangeet party was at the Dastkar nature bazaar (which concludes today at the Chitrakala Parishat) and the team garnered quite a bit of curiosity and an audience on its walk-by music performances.

Om Prakash Nayak, a Bhil from Bikaner, comes from a family of traditional players of the instrument. He snaps out his multi-coloured business card, complete with his cell phone number and his picture on it. Later in the course of his conversation, he tells me he has electricity and a phone connection in his home (on which rich people call and ask him to perform at their weddings), but no water supply; one just can't miss the irony of the lives of many Indian folk artists.

"During the time of the maharajas in Rajasthan, our families played the been and the dhol only in the royal courts. Abhi sab chalta hai. We play at weddings, at melas and functions, at craft exhibitions like this and for foreigners who come to stay in these same palaces that have become hotels," he explains. Apparently there are around 150 families concentrated in the three districts of Bikaner, Ganganagar and Hanumangarh that can play the been.

Just as the artiste himself has undergone a dramatic transformation from being royal musician to public performer and a "music party", so has his instrument. Beens were earlier obtained from Sialkot, now in Pakistan. "Now that we don't have access to this route, we buy the instruments in Meerut. But the quality is not the same anymore. In a bid to make money, the instrument makers use immature wood and that definitely alters the very sound of the been. Just as a raw fruit that does not have the sweetness of a ripe one, so is the sound... " Nayak proffers in all folk wisdom. The instruments cost up to Rs. 4,000, and are made of a combination of goat's hide and wood from the mango, sheesham and tul trees. Nayak has, with all his ingenuity, named the main bag/body as the "control room" to make his audience understand how it works! The melody pipe with the finger holes is called the "chanter" and there are three other drones that provide a sustained tone to keep the tune company. Nayak says they're called the draan in Rajasthani and I'm not surprised by the similarity in language; proof perhaps of an instrument that has cut across cultures.

"It feels good to play our traditional Rajasthani ghoomar folk tunes... because that's our dil ki baat. But we don't really take offence when people ask us to play Hindi film song tunes at weddings."

Nayak, who took eight years to learn the instrument, never went to school, but his kids are studying both English and Hindi at school. "Of course, they want to learn to play the been and see the world through their musical journeys. But we felt we were denied a lot of things because we didn't know English and didn't have an education. See, I can't communicate with you easily now."

He can play the been three hours at a stretch, and that's really impressive considering the kind of lung power one needs for it. The process exerts a lot of pressure on various nerves in the body and one also needs to watch what he eats — no oil, no sweets and, significantly, "we also take a little bit of tonic". I listen in rapt attention to his diet list... and then the "tonic" bit hits me!

A young visitor at the fair comes up to Nayak and asks him: "Who copied whom? The Scots with their bagpipe or you?" As we struggle to get the idea across in our broken Hindi, Nayak assumes we are talking about the bagpiper on the whisky bottle. He reckons that the bagpipes on the "tonic bottle" available in the market these days has copied them. "Like you get mast drinking the tonic, you get mast playing the been."

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