Friday 15th December: Udaipur and Delwara

Amir is unfathomable! He came back unexpectedly from the field today – whenever he comes, whatever he does, it is unexpected! – and on my return from Delwara the two of us went for a stroll towards Fateh Sagar. First we took chai with some casual acquaintances of mine whose names I always forget but who always depart with an insincere “I love you”. Then we left them and strolled along the lake, while Amir deconstructed the social gathering we had just come from telling me everything he, Amir the master psychologist had observed and deduced.
   “I must tell you truthfully, Jon, that I was watching these people and they are not interested in your friendship. They are just passing time.”
   “But I know that!” I answered defensively. “That’s all we were doing anyway!”
  “Come on, man! I was previously a student of psychology - I can see beyond the surface. I was watching you also. You were being duped basically.”
   “What do you mean? Why are you so sure I was being duped?”
   “You believe these are your friends...”
   “...but I don’t!”
   “...come on, yaar! You think they are friends, but actually they don’t feel in this way.”
  “But Amir, Amir, Amir! Listen to me! I hardly know them! I just - they’re just... people I bump into sometimes. Acquaintances, not friends.”
  “Exactly right!”
  Both convinced we had won different arguments, the conversation ground to moody halt. There are some people who seem to enjoy making others feel uncomfortable, and I think Amir breaches this zone at times. After much debate we then decided to gatecrash a jolly looking wedding party in a large public garden just next to the lake. We entered under the false pretext that I had never been to an Indian wedding before, and were able to have some good food and meet a few people, although given our illegitimate presence and rather shabby dress this wasn’t the ideal social forum.
  Amir told me off for saying “Namaste” to a girl who was with her family, worrying that her father or brothers might want to beat me up. I rubbished this as absurdly over-cautious, but he reminded me that I didn't understand India. On the way back I began to believe him when he made the following extraordinary statement: “Whenever I go back to Delhi – for a week, or a day or even just for a few hours – I always receive at least one proposal from a girl”. I thought he meant marriage at first, but I believe what he really meant was a more a “proposal of love”. Something like being asked out, but with the thrust more on the love than on the dating. What I find hard to understand is how Amir – awkward introspective and not especially good-looking – comes by all these proposals, especially given his peculiar attitudes towards women and friendship! And more seriously it underlines his point that there are still so many things about Indian culture that I don’t understand. I have great difficulty picturing these proposals, far more so the situation Amir described with one of his admirers, who “started to do some physical activities in the rickshaw which I hate”. Yes, I realise plenty of unmarried Indians are sexually active, but having seen Indian boy-girl interactions I find it hard to imagine how it all starts!

*

In Delwara, I have met another of the Nagrik Vikas Manch crew. Kit, from England, has been with Vikas Samiti for the last three years, making the transition from volunteer to worker as, in fact, Mohan has done. He has only recently joined the Delwara project and his role, as he put it to me, is to “piece together a vision” for the place. He seems to be concerned with the nuts and bolts of the NGO and improving its communication and efficiency. From what I can tell, he is breathing new life into Vikas Samiti and, through extensive internet research, is bringing a lot of new ideas in.
   As for my own role, it has been frustratingly limited so far. I felt down about this yesterday, as there are few things more disheartening than wanting to work and not being able to, but still having a feeling that there probably is something one ought to be doing. I did not allow myself to blame Vikas Samiti, because it is not and should not be a priority of an organisation to make sure its volunteers are provided with nice projects designed to make you feel like you’re making a grand contribution, especially if these projects aren’t very useful to the NGO. On the other hand, as Vikas Samiti takes volunteers from overseas, I think it ought to try and manage its human resources more efficiently. Indeed, as I have already discussed, this problem doesn’t apply solely to foreign volunteers!

*

Meanwhile singing lessons are creeping up ever-higher on my agenda. I returned to the Khandelwal household for a second lesson on Monday, and after an hour’s out-raag-ing by the precocious Tamil siblings on Monday Madhu agreeably informed me that I would be better off joining a new class with a 20-year old beginner called Priyanka. We shared our first lesson yesterday - she is pretty, shy and not overburdened by any obvious musical talent. Madhu stuck firmly to the easiest raag, called Bilawal, which sounds to the occidental ear like a major scale.
   No, I am guilty of an over-simplification. Raags are the poster-children of Indian classical music, but I shouldn’t bend the truth in deference to familiarity. A raag is actually a rather complicated, undulating affair, and the simple up-down scale-analogues are called thaats. What Priyanka and I studied together should therefore be referred to as Thaat Bilawal.
   Since the lesson it has occurred to me to wonder whether it is a coincidence that the “easiest” Indian thaat should be the one most closely resembling a European scale. By wondering whether it  is a coincidence, I suppose what I am really asking is whether there is something fundamentally “normal” about the major scale that appeals to more than one musical culture. The alternative, which I suspect is the more likely answer, is that at some stage in its history, the organisation and teaching of Indian classical music was influenced by that of Europe. It is the notes themselves that make me suspect European influence on India rather than the other way round. The use of the harmonium is widespread in Indian music, and I vaguely suspect a Portuguese hand here. Whatever the truth of this, the harmonium has certainly influenced Indian musical notation. The basic notes that make up the thaat are called swaras, and the names given to them - Saa, Re, Ga, Ma, Paa, Dha, Ni - are relative, rather than absolute. The first note, Saa, therefore, does not correspond to any specific pitch and thus needs to be set to an agreed pitch frame. This, revealingly, is named after the chosen position of Saa on the harmonium. Middle C is pehli safed (“first white”), C sharp is pehli kali (“first black”) and D is dusri safed (“second white”).
   The ten principle thaats vary, like scales and modes, in the relative pitching of the swaras. In Thaat Bilawal all seven swaras assume their “default” or shuddh form - that is, they would all correspond to white notes on the keyboard if Saa is pitched to pehli safed, another clear consequence of the use of the harmonium. In other thaats, different combinations of the swaras Re, Ga, Dha and Ni are flattened: all  of them in the case of the devastating Thaat Bhairavi I sang in my first lesson, but only on the Re (third) and the Dha (sixth) in a thaat confusingly called Bhairav, which has a distinctly Arabic quality. In some thaats, the fourth note, Ma, is sharpened, which can create a lightheaded, Debussy-esque mood.
   Madhu told me that in the old days, vocalists would use quarter- and eighth-tones as a matter of course (she didn’t use these terms, but her meaning was clear) but that now these are becoming rarer, and the preserve of the highly skilled, although still required in certain raags.
   We spent a long time singing alankars, various formulations of the thaat, starting from the simple up-down scale and then moving onto a series of doubled and then trebled swaras and more complicated forms. At first it seemed like mindless repetition, but now I begin to understand why Madhu is making us sing these – to become familiar with the swaras, to develop confidence, to sing in time with the taal, the underlying beat and also to concentrate on making a beautiful sound. In my case there is an additional complication - I have trouble pronouncing the names of the swaras correctly, and Madhu is adamant that we conquer this, otherwise, “You will be exposed as foreigner straightaway!”
   To my relief, at the end of our lesson, Madhu announced that we would add some richness to our diet of thaats and learn a song, written by none other than Dr Nirmal Khandelwal. It is beautiful and upbeat and the first verse, all we have studied so far starts with the words:

“Ye mosam hasta hasta,
Ye rasta khulta khulta,
Utho, satiyo! Chale safar ko –
Vahte nahin hai rukta!”

(Translating loosely as –
“The weather is smiling,
The road lies open,
Get up, friend! Let’s go on a journey –
Time waits for nobody…”)

I can say with more confidence now that, amongst other things, it is the use of Ni, the seventh, that makes Indian classical music so unique. Rather than always “resolving” to Saa, in a subcontinental form of the perfect cadence, Ni can be followed by any note, which alters its meaning to something rarely experienced in the European classical canon.
   As for Madhu herself, I must admit to the mildest of crushes. She is attractive and elegant and we have a talkative, jokey sort of relationship. I am her first non-Indian pupil and she seems to have developed her own way of dealing with that, accepting the fact that I will talk and argue more than her obedient Indian pupils who touch her feet at the beginning and end of the lesson, and understanding that I have a long experience of music, albeit of a different sort.