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Coming full circle
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Critics have accused Ravi Shankar of having sold out to the West. The recent award of a Grammy to the maestro cannot be equated to the Booker or a million dollar advance, but the fact remains that Indian writing in English has yet to produce its Ravi Shankar, says PARTHO DATTA.
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Pandit Ravi Shankar ... helping the East meet the West.
BEING at Home in the World at Delhi post-Neemrana, and all the carping and soul-searching about Indian Writing in English (IWE) may exemplify the peculiar love-hate relationship that Indians have with the West.
For music lovers, the debates in the press had a sense of deja vu. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ravi Shankar's success in the art houses of Europe and America, followed by his brief flirtation with the Beatles, his appearance at Monterey Festival (which led to one of the most outstanding recordings of the raga Bhimpalasi) and his subsequent enterprise at organising a charity concert for Bangladesh with western pop musicians (notably his disciple George Harrison) has a familiar ring to some of the careers of Indian writers in English today. For even then critics were accusing Ravi Shankar of having sold out to the West. The recent award of a Grammy to the maestro cannot be equated to the Booker or a million dollar advance, but the fact remains that so far Indian writing in English has yet to produce its Ravi Shankar.
Many years ago, in a fine essay, the music critic Chetan Karnani commented that of all Indian musicians Shankar alone had managed to resolve the tension between the West and the East in creative ways. In his autobiography My Music My Life, published in English in the 1960s, he had spoken of liberating ragas from the limitations of time theory, enthusiastically espoused the interpretation of different rasas unfamiliar to the traditional ragas and envisioned a different format for concerts. Perhaps more than any other musician, he presciently sensed the changing nature of patronage. Having straddled two worlds in his long performing career — the declining world of the feudal gentry, and the impatient one of urban middle class audiences in post-independence India and the West — his music tried to address all that was modern and new in contemporary times. Shankar's ustad the great Allaudin Khan had once to leave his patron's court in hurt anger because he had been asked to play a sleep-inducing raga for his master! Shankar himself broke away from the stranglehold of feudal culture where the patron's command was total. Even though he has often had to admonish the pot-smoking fringe at large gatherings, his own innovation at presenting a raga in a wholesome manner without making the recital long and meandering certainly helped build a dynamic new community of listeners.
Interestingly, some of these modern values Shankar had imbibed from the West, when as a child he toured Europe in the 1930s with his elder brother Uday Shankar's dance troupe. Here he heard great Western masters like Chaliapin, Toscanini, Casals, Kriesler, Hiefitz and the young Menuhin. From these instrumentalists he learnt the importance of tone. The sound of Shankar's sitar is uniquely his own. It is perhaps for this reason that instrumental music has reached such incredible heights today, competing with the human voice, which in classical theory has supreme status.
Similarly Shankar's experiments with orchestration spring directly from his interaction with Western harmonic forms. He has himself spoken of adding weight and volume to Indian sounds and of liberating Indian melodic forms from the closed world of the chamber to the freedom of the large concert hall.
Paradoxically in his endeavours to make classical music modern, Shankar has drawn on his rigorous training in the guru-shishya parampara. He has always insisted that the roots of classical music in India are to be found in Indian religion and spiritualism. His resonant use of the bass string to render the notes of a raga in the lower octave has lent gravity and depth to his recitals. Drawing on ancient dhrupad he has invented a tradition of presenting the alap the graduated and structured form of which has now come to stand in for — ironically enough — what is seen as timeless in Indian music. In addition, his superb compositional skills and his command over rhythm has ensured that in the hallowed pantheon he has come to be known — in the words of the music critic S. Kalidas — as the Tansen of modern Indian music.
Ravi Shankar's success in the West has had a long history. His music for Indian art films won awards in international film festivals like Venice and Cannes in the 1950s. His score for the Canadian short film "The Chairy Tale" and Arne Sucksdorlf's "The Flute and the Bow" was a critical success. In 1958 he was invited to the UNESCO Music Festival in Paris along with David Oistrakh and Yehudi Menuhin indicating that the West was willing to give equal place to musicians from the Orient. The Asia Society in New York and the active promotion of Menuhin ensured that Shankar was received by sophisticated audiences in his tour of the United States in these years. Unwittingly perhaps, Ravi Shankar's success promoted and popularised yoga, spiritualism and counter-culture in the 1960s. His precedent made way for other Indians to follow suit.
Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar, Ram Narayan and Nikhil Bannerjee and countless others also found second homes in the U.S.. The Grammy to Ravi Shankar this year is for his album "Full Circle/Carnegie Hall 2000", a live recording of raga Kausi Kanada/Mishra Gara (EMI/Virgin) to mark his 80th birthday. As the title indicates, with this latest honour his career has indeed come full circle in the West.
The writer teaches modern Indian history at a Delhi college.
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