We are working on a chhota khayal, a small song. Khayal is one of the main styles of North Indian classical music and contains a short lyric that is sung over and over again, interwoven with alap and tan (slower and faster moving passages of swaras). Our khayal is called Laadli lal, about a little girl blossoming like a flower, and is in Raag Alahiya Bilawal. This raag is based on Thaat Bilawal, and sounds similar to a European major key, although contains a flattened seventh (komal-Ni) in its descending section which imparts a peculiar flavour, almost like a slight feeling of strain.
Although I find Madhu’s teaching style far easier to understand and appreciate than that of Saraswati-Miss (my elderly singing teacher in Kovilpatti four years ago) there are still some peculiar differences between her method and the British approach I have been brought up with, most obviously the focus on endless repetition. There is also a sort of tacit assumption that if you sing the name of the swara right, you will pitch the note right, so that while Madhu does try to point out to the kids if they are wildly off-pitch, she doesn’t pounce on poor tuning in the same way that any European teacher would. For this reason, it is considered more advanced to sing akar (singing to “ah”) than singing the names of the swaras, which I actually find far more difficult!
Madhu even discouraged us from practising at first, saying that we would just get things wrong, or confuse ourselves. After some serious pleading on my part - the irony of the pupil begging the teacher to allow him to practice was not lost on either of us - she eventually yielded and let us practice a limited amount of what we had been studying. Once I joked that I would go home and practise Raag Marwa – a far more complicated raag – which horrified her until she realised, with relief, that it had been a joke. I think she trusts me more than she did at first. I am certainly less rebellious than I was initially, and socially we get along well.
The Khandelwal family: L-R Mrs Khandelwal, Dr Nirmal Khandelwal, Madhu
I had a brief chat with Dr Khandelwal after the lesson. In the comfort of his own home is he is relaxed, benevolent and a little shy. He confirmed something I have suspected for a while: in Indian classical music, it is the performer, not the composer, who goes down in history and has a name. The composer is often not known, which is perhaps not surprising in a culture where music tends to be passed down, rather than written down, and improvisation forms the mainstay of any performance. Possibly composers are more highly regarded in the south, where there is a famous trilogy of Thyagaraaja, Dikshitar and Shyama Shastri, who are sometimes called the Bach, Mozart and Beethoven of Carnatic (southern) music.
In the afternoon I visited Dinesh, a friend who runs a bookshop on my least favourite road in Udaipur, leading away from the Jagdish temple towards Gulab Bagh. The last time I met him he had told me about his daughter, Rani, who is mentally retarded and cannot speak. She goes to a “special school” and Dinesh is very dissatisfied with the way it is run. The teachers don’t seem to teach anything, and often strap pupils to chairs to prevent them running around. He asked me whether Vikas Samiti might be able to help solve the school’s problems, and I promised him I’d at least look into the matter. He said he knew he was being selfish trying to solve this problem rather than any other social problem in Udaipur, and that impressed me.
Well, this time round I didn’t have much for him, except to tell him that I had sent an e-mail to the Vidya Bhavan Society, the educational establishment set up by Vikas Samiti’s founder and that Chandrika had also given me a child helpline number that he could ring. Apart from that, I could only give the common sense advice that if he wanted to change anything, he would have to enlist the support of other parents. I will keep going back to see what progress he has made and whether there is anything I can do.
Interestingly, he is of Baluchi origins – Baluchistan being a region that straddles southwest Pakistan and the neighbouring portions of Iran and Afghanistan – as are the owners of the bookshop next to Hari’s shop, who are actually related to Dinesh. There are apparently a number of Baluchi families in Udaipur, and they are closely associated with the Sindhis, Hindus who would have come over after Partition from Sindh in what is now Pakistan.
I took a long walk back through my favourite part of old Udaipur between tourist-ville and Delhi Gate. There is a wonderful warren of streets off Bara Bazaar, mostly narrow and dank with a cool, quiet, almost southern Italian feel to them. A whole street is devoted to selling handis (metal cooking pots), while a portion of Bara Bazaar itself sells nothing but shoes and others specialise in gaudy sari material and wedding turbans. Closer to Delhi Gate is a colourful gem of a fruit and vegetable market with a group of beautiful basket-makers in one corner, and a spice market that Carol first discovered.
Moving away, at the northern end of Lake Pichola is a tapering extension called Swaroop Sagar (after Maharana Swaroop Singh), onto which Lal Ghat abuts. It baffles me, as it protrudes in various directions and crops up in unexpected places. Much of the area round here has the feeling of a rather respectable and quite old planned town. It must be one of the oldest parts of the modern town and presents a totally different face of Udaipur from the narrow streets and markets of the old town. Kids playing in the street prevent it from seeming at all soulless.
Swaroop Sagar
Nearer to home, Fateh Sagar was in top form in today’s slightly cloudy evening light. The blue-grey hills on the other side, with the island Nehru Park in the foreground, all cupolas, fountains and bougainvilleas, is a beautiful sight in all weather conditions. This view, combined with fast-food stalls and coffee stalls and walls packed with pretty girls and boys “roaming” on the near side, make it one of my favourite spots in Udaipur. This opinion is shared by all my disparate local friends – Shiv, Prakash, Dilip, Madhu, Hari – indicating that the lake has a universal appeal.
I went out again in the early evening in a group to a concert of ghazals in the Town Hall by Sunil Mehta, a pupil of Dr Khandelwal. He has a pleasant, slightly fuzzy voice, and he warmed up throughout the evening with evident enjoyment. The guest of honour, sitting on a throne just a few metres away from me was the Maharana himself! He is portly and rather bear-like and does not conform in the smallest degree to my romantic image of an Indian Prince. He didn’t stay long, and I think Sunil relaxed and opened up more after he left. However, the whole evening was permeated with that atmosphere of disorganised formality and haphazard deference that India excels in. Lots of local bigwigs were in attendance and there was consequently lots of touching-of-feet, lots of “No, no – you first, please, I absolutely insist”-ing and constant rushing in and out on the part of officialdom who would confer anxiously amongst itself about things, pre-eminently the Maharana’s comfort. The big M himself excelled at the little displays of humility that are probably expected of a modern Maharana, including a degree of physical force required to ensure that the other guest of honour – Rajasthan’s High Court Judge – be garlanded before him. He didn’t, however, turn down the tea that was brought round for him and his chums (the rest of us had to be content with individual glasses of water, no mean feat considering there were about 500 of us!). Nor did he bat an eyelid when Priya’s friend Mithun ran round in front of him and took a photo of him as if he were some kind of attraction or amusement. Priya and Mithun didn’t understand why us Brits found this so hilarious.
Next Post - Monday 8th January 2007: Udaipur (will be posted Sunday 8th January 2012)
No comments:
Post a Comment