Before this I had my first singing lesson with Madhu, Dr Nirmal Khandelwal’s daughter. The family live in an unostentatious modern flat in a quiet residential area near Fateh Sagar. The main room extends the length of the house and incorporates a lounge area with armchairs and a sofa, a dining room with a glass-topped table and a kitchen at the far end. A marble floor, partly covered with a selection of tasteful rugs, and a number of ornaments ranging from the elegant to the kitsch complete the scene. It is a typical middle class Indian home, cluttered but tidy and a little uncosy, as if aspiration has moved faster than imagination.
Madhu herself is less girlish than I had imagined based on her brief performance the other night. In fact, her beautiful blue and purple sari, her rounded but not quite plump figure and her attractive, full face make her positively womanly. I would guess she is in her mid-twenties. She speaks highly articulate English in a clear, refined accent without the vigorous whining intonation common in upper-middle class girls of the bigger cities. We talked for a while about my previous experience of Indian vocal study and I told her about the wizened old crone who had put me through my paces four years ago with the rudiments of South Indian classical music. “She must have been a traditional teacher,” Madhu said with a smile. “You will find my approach is more modern.”
As we waited for my fellow pupils, she set up the equipment for the lesson - an electronic tanpura (drone) and tabla (drum beat). A real tanpura is a long-necked instrument which is steadily plucked throughout a performance to give that quintessentially Indian drone sound that only the most unimaginative could fail to identify with a vast, heat-hazed panorama. The tabla, of course, is the classic Indian drum which, depending on how you strike it, can make a sound like the slapping monsoon rain or an indescribable scooping. To my mild chagrin, both instruments were replaced with unromantic white cubes.
My colleagues turned out to be a brother and sister from Tamil Nadu, both bright-eyed and dark-skinned, around ten years’ old. We all sat cross-legged on a rug Madhu had laid out, and she switched on the electronic tanpura. Together we sang three long held notes - the first around Middle C, the next a fifth higher than that, and the last an octave above the first. “The lesson always starts this way,” explained Madhu in a serious voice. For the next half hour we focussed on Raag Bhairavi. To call a raag a scale or mode would be doing it an injustice, as it is something far more complex and subtle, but at the simplest level it can be treated in this way. Bhairavi does not correspond to a major or minor scale, as the second note is flattened, and the mood it conjures is, for me at least, one of desolation - a lone figure wondering round a bomb-scarred eastern city.
We started off by singing the raag straight up and down many times, but gradually Madhu introduced more complicated patterns that became surprisingly difficult, especially as we sang using the Indian note names or swaras (Saa, Re, Ga, Ma, Paa, Dha, Ni) that I found hard to get my head around, even though I had encountered them before in the South. Hardest of all, Madhu started improvising long passages of alap, freestyle strings of notes that are used explore the raag and develop a mood in the early stages of a piece before the words come in. The boy Ajay, and to a lesser extent his sister, managed to repeat these back almost flawlessly, but I generally got stuck halfway to my embarrassment and Madhu’s amusement. “I think you are not yet used to this style of music, even despite having spent time studying in South India.”
An elegant woman came in at this point and introduced herself as Madhu’s mother and offered me a cup of ginger tea. A little later Madhu’s brother and his wife, who are visiting from Bombay, came back from a shopping trip and finally Dr Nirmal Khandelwal himself came in, looking amused, but pleased to see me. We finished the lesson with a song, which Madhu called a saadra. Unfortunately I didn’t write down the words, and I can only remember the beginning, “Bhavani, dayani maha vaka vani” and on this all I can say is that Bhavani is a form of the goddess Parvati, consort of Shiva. Athough I didn’t notice him while we were singing, Madhu’s brother recorded our attempts on his phone and played it back afterwards to the great amusement of everybody.
After the cantankerous Saraswati-Miss, my teacher in South India, Madhu seems like a breath of fresh air. Granted, she is didactic in her approach, and in her efforts to make the poor European boy understand the mysteries of Indian music she comes across as a little patronising, but so far I like her. I have arranged to go back next week for another lesson, and we will take it forward from there.
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*
There has been no news about a new project today, and I deliberately haven’t yet pushed Sumita on this. I spent a long time this morning reading The Hindu, my favourite among the daily newspapers on offer in the Vikas Samiti library. For the last few days the paper has been full of debates about how to improve the lot of India’s Muslims, and a recent report by the specially-commissioned Sachar Committee shows that in almost all human development indices (such as education, health, government jobs) they are the most badly-off group in the country. Reservations are mentioned guardedly – the Sachar report talks of “multifarious measures including reservations” – although the main focus has been on direct development in the form of schools, policies regarding race-relations, special banks and other schemes.
There are always stories about Dalits, the “untouchable” communities at the bottom of the caste hierarchy, especially since the massacre of a Dalit family in Khairlanji, Maharastra. For a long time after it happened, the incident was barely investigated or reported and when it did come to light it fuelled an explosion of indignation (mainly from the upper castes) about the callous neglect of the lower castes by the media and the police. There have also been inter-caste riots in Madhya Pradesh after a statue of Bhimrao Ambedkar [15], the great Dalit lawyer and hero, was desecrated. I recently browsed a wonderful periodical called Dalit Voice, full of hellfire and brimstone and outrageous conspiracy theories. My favourite of these is a complicated mess of an argument to the effect that America is controlled by the Jews, who only care about draining its resources dry to feed Israel. America’s Jews, in turn, are under the thumb of their new found chums the “Jews of India” (not the real Jews of Bombay and Cochin, but the Brahmins) while forgetting it was these Aryan “Jews” who (apparently) gave Hitler his ideologies!
Another questionable Dalit Voice gem reveals that, “Even as the white Western racist countries led by America have been making a song and dance of ‘aiding’ Africa which actually meant devastating the Blacks by spreading the dreaded disease of AIDS, China has been silently working to save the black continent from facing slow death.”
Times are definitely exciting, economically as well as politically, and the most recent GDP figure shows a growth of 9% in the last quarter, a “mushrooming economy” as I described it in an e-mail to a friend earlier.
Footnotes
[15] Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956) was from an “untouchable” caste, but managed to gain multiple law and economics degrees, including one at LSE. He became an indefatigable campaigner against the caste doctrine of Hinduism and converted to Buddhism. Through his own example he catalysed the conversion of numerous other Dalits to Buddhism.
Next Post - Wednesday 6th December 2006: Udaipur (will be posted Tuesday 6th December 2011)
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