The last episode of the first season of the web series Bandish Bandits climaxes in a music competition for the title of the King of the Jodhpur gharana of classical music, long held by Panditji, played by the great Naseeruddin Shah.
Digvijay, his son (by his first wife), and Radhe, his disciple-grandson, are the two contestants who are required to choose, in the second round of the competition, a particular emotion to show off their musical talents. Digvijay chooses Viraha to bare his separation from and longing for the father who had abandoned him decades earlier and his old love, now Radhe’s mother.
The Viraha composition sung by Shankar Mahadevan – Ai Ree Sakhi Main Ang Ang – rends the air with both poignancy and melodrama as the camera moves between the singer, rival, old love and guru. As the singing ends, the judges declare Digvijay as the winner, invoking the stunned silence of the audience as proof of musical excellence, more compelling than any thunderous applause that might have followed.
The music, of course, thrilled. But it both provoked Proustian remembrance and jarred. The Viraha composition is set to Raag Marwa, which I recognised because of its clear musical similarity to the first piece of Hindustani music I had heard some 50 years ago: Piya More Anat Des by the legendary khayal singer Amir Khan.
As the smoke of weed and cigarettes swirled around a hostel room in St Stephens College in the late 1970s, four friends over sessions of mediocre bridge would listen to a cassette player alternate between early Bob Dylan and four studio recordings of what was then the only publicly available Amir Khan oeuvre.
Scarcity forced repetition and over the next two years, I had probably heard the eight raags scores of times – Marwa, Hamsadhwani, Darbari Kannada, Bilaskhani Todi, Lalit, Megh, Malkauns, Bageshwari Kannada.
All hearts have many rooms, Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said. My listening heart would over time make room for many genres, musicians, raag and compositions but it was Amir Khan’s Marwa that I would circle back to. Or to switch metaphors, having savoured all the cuisines of the world, the Marwa was the thair shaadam (curd rice) of my childhood, lovingly ladled out by hand by my grandmother – comfort food and solace.
Being smitten by Amir Khan I realised served two purposes: the intrinsic one of sparking a genuine and lifelong passion, and something more instrumental. In his classic Beyond a Boundary, CLR James, the Trinidadian Marxist historian, writes of how a black middle-class family in the colonial West Indies always dressed well to attend Sunday church because respectability “was not an ideal but an armour”.
In the St Stephens of the time, there were clear markers of “coolness”: fluency in Oxbridge-inflected English, flaunting familiarity with PG Wodehouse, doing weed to the accompaniment of acid rock and hailing from the Doon School or Mayo College. To be seen as liking Hindustani classical music, especially for someone who lacked the other markers, was the Jamesian armour, averting consignment to the netherworld of the St Stephens social hierarchy.
A few years later, at a Hariprasad Chaurasia concert in London and on a whim, I went up to ask whether he would be willing to come to perform at Oxford where I was grinding out my doctorate thesis. He readily accepted with the only request, expressed with touching embarrassment, that he be paid whatever modest amounts were collected so that he could in turn meet the expenses of his accompanying artists.
Over dinner, partly to show off my musical sensibility but also to get the verdict of a celebrated artist, I played the Amir Khan Marwa. After a few minutes, his eyes moistened: “Aisa tho Marwa kabhi nahin hua hai,” he pronounced. There has never been a Marwa like this.
I was reassured about my taste in music, something I craved because all listeners, especially those who have never formally learnt music and whose singing announces a total absence of musical sense, have an insecurity about their judgments. You are confident in your enjoyment, sort of confident in the authenticity of your aesthetic response but, as in all things in life, the external validation seems important to solidifying one’s perennially shaky self-belief.
(Many years later my musical insecurities re-surfaced. I was in a room with two famous writers and, as it turned out, gifted musicians. They were discussing the merits of a raag and trying out different sargams [note combinations] on each other. Feeling ignored was bad enough but the slight was made worse by the fact that I knew the raag reasonably well as a listener but was unable to engage in that exchange as a proper connoisseur.)
A close friend soon introduced me to MD Ramanathan or MDR, the Carnatic vocalist, as well as to Ramana Maharishi, probably the last of the authentic, spiritual masters. He probably thought me worthy of the two only because he was witness to my love of Amir Khan and the Marwa.
Around the same time, my listening companion and music guru Shanker Satyanath lent me some cassettes of MDR and Nikhil Banerjee, the Hindustani sitarist.
Those two musical introductions were not coincidental because there is an iron law of my music that a love of Amir Khan has to go with a similar love for Nikhil Banerjee and MDR, and partial proof is that all three have a niche but cult following. MDR’s Sagarasayana Vibho in Bageshri and Nikhil Banerjee’s Purabi Kalyan had almost the same initial impact as Amir Khan’s Marwa.
Music set to a deliberate and unhurried pace, all of them create an aura of meditativeness and stillness (better described by the Hindi sthirtha) and a sense that one is outside time. For all three, music is more self-communion than performance, more interior than outward evidenced not so much by any deliberate disregard for the audience but an unshowy obliviousness to it.
It is the exact inversion of social media, which is based on the proposition that others see me therefore I am, or even, I have to make sure that others see me to make sure to myself that I am. The loss is less of privacy than of the more precious interiority.
Why did I so love the Amir Khan Marwa? Why one likes any piece of music is, of course, subjective and probably unknowable. But I often wonder whether it is in fact a particular moment – a melodic phrase or a sequence of phrases – that one wants to keep coming back to that is the root of all listening and liking.
In the Amir Khan Marwa, those two moments come at the very opening and then at the end of the vilambit. In both instances, the tabla elevates the aesthetic appeal. The first moment occurs a few seconds into the vilambit when the tabla arrives, beating languorously and infrequently to elongate and accentuate the silence, and enhances the meditative mood.
The second occurs at the transition between the slow and fast-paced phases where the tabla has the quality of a drum roll, escorting out the vilambit and shepherding in the faster paced dhrut to the words “guru bin gyaan gyaan na paave”, no learning without a teacher. It is possible that the pleasure comes as much from the anticipation of these treasured moments as from their arrival.
While I could intuit the interiority of Amir Khan, Shankar Satyanath helped me understand it musically. If one listens in particular to the sargams of his Yaman, Mian ki Malhar or Hamsadhwani, Amir Khan spends an exceptional amount of time systematically exploring the lower notes of the octave, tracing more unusual note combinations, and bringing out something different, even unconventional, in the raag.
Something appealing about the entire Hindustani tradition is best exemplified in the Amir Khan Malkauns composition Jin ke Man Raam Biraje (In Those Hearts where Lord Rama is lodged). It is immemorable not just for the music but for highlighting the syncretic, uniting nature of the tradition: a devout Muslim steeped in Persian poetry and invoking a Hindu god in such prayer-like tones as to render Sufism and Bhakti indistinguishable.
A few years later, in Geneva at the house of an Indian Foreign Service officer, I chanced upon my first live recording of Amir Khan. This was the famous Farsi composition in Yaman which I spent months listening to. Ustad Amir Khan’s typical rendition of a khayal often contains a slow sargam that is as elaborately developed as the vilambit composition itself.
That was a boon for this untrained listener. In a bout of defiant arrogance, I decided that I would become a self-taught musician by just listening to Amir Khan’s sargams. Amir Khan I foolishly thought held the key to becoming a musical autodidact. Slowly, copies of other live concerts became available: Miyan ki Malhar, Puriya, Abhogi, Yaman Kalyan, Rageshri, Bageshri and Bageshri Kaanada, Jaijaiwanti, Behag, Nand. For the next 10 years, I listened, self-trained and believed that I was well on my way to cracking the entire Hindustani canon.
While living in the United States, I discovered that someone possessed the (then) rare recording of a live performance of the Marwa of Amir Khan. A kind of madness (the Tamil word “veri” better captures my state) consumed me. I had to acquire it, my first love and (as I saw it) the pinnacle of Khayal music. I didn’t know this Marwa-possessing person but I started stalking him. At social events, I would go across and ask him about the Marwa. He would avoid and evade. I would not relent. I felt that this Marwa was a public good that he should take pleasure in sharing with the world and not be proprietorial about.
Roused by the injustice of the situation, I crossed the boundaries of decorous behaviour. My cumulative assault finally undid him. He agreed to loan me the cassette but resentfully and even discourteously. He couldn’t bear to give it to me in person. Over the phone he said, “The cassette will be outside my house. You can collect it but you will have to return it within xx days.” When the cassette was in hand, I felt I had summitted Everest because the even better version of what I already deemed the greatest piece of music was in my hands.
I played the live Marwa over the next few days, each time convincing myself that my life’s ambition had been fulfilled. Deep down I knew that wasn’t true because alas the Marwa did not live up to my expectation and clearly fell short of the recorded, studio version. Heartbroken but unwilling to acknowledge the letdown, I sent the cassette across to Shanker Satyanath.
He quickly identified the problem: the recording was off speed by about 5% just enough to escape anything but the most trained ear. Hope resurfaced: perhaps the correction would make it the best piece of music after all.
Around this time (the 1990s), the world of listening to Hindustani music changed because of the internet and the explosion in access to almost every concert that had been sung and recorded since the 1950s. A decade later, YouTube accelerated that trend. I scoured the web and came across and heard many versions of the Marwa, all live recordings. The itch had been scratched. I was sated. Or so I thought until I watched that Viraha scene in Bandish Bandits.
As I said, the music also jarred. For two reasons. Its overt mood – of drama, pain and resentment – was so different from the austere Amir Khan equivalent and yet it was able to spark the retrospective musical journey. Perhaps the commonality of the underlying musical structure (just the fact of being the same raag) was the reason. But I cannot be sure.
The jarring had another source. I discovered that I liked both the abbreviated (less than three minutes), “dumbed-down” version almost as much as the classical one sung over an hour. Had my musical sensibilities been “diluted” to the point where the two ranked the same?
Then, epiphany struck. Instead of listening to the many live Marwas, I went back to my first love, the studio recording that I had heard 50 years ago in smoky St Stephens but had rarely heard since.
It was a tribute to Amir Khan the artist that sitting in what was probably the artificial environment of a noisy, messy studio he had managed to produce the most meditative, soulful piece of music, affirming that great music was self-directed.
However, the realisation also dawned that to recognise the worth of that Marwa required the journey of acquiring and listening to the other Marwas, including the Viraha of Bandish Bandits.
In perhaps the most dramatic scene of the second season of Bandish Bandits, Panditji’s other son, also a classical musician (and also neglected by the patriarch), touches the feet of a much younger, electric-sitar playing character named Mahi, to penitentially acknowledge the debt that tradition owed to the commercial and popular.
Mahi had earlier been at the receiving end of the condescension of the classicists and retaliates. If tradition doesn’t adapt and regenerate and even draw upon the popular, it risks ossification and irrelevance, he thunders to Radhe, tradition’s flag-bearer. As he puts it: my adaptation of classical music draws the thronging, swaying multitudes, while your “pure” performances will at best be greeted with the applause of your total audience of four empty, wooden chairs.
This exchange rebuked my views that live, long versions of classical music are always superior to the studio recorded versions, and that “pure” classical music is also always superior to its popularisations.
On the former, I was reminded of Ravi Shankar expressing awe at Abdul Karim Khan’s ability to capture the entire beauty of a raag in the seven minutes of a 78 RPM disc, and his rendition of raag Patdeep is a wonderful illustration. On the latter, I had forgotten that the best commercial music of pre-1990s Bollywood – drawing heavily from Indian classical music – is no less worthy of attention as any form of music.
Indeed, for music lovers, a key message of the second season of Bandish Bandits – richer even than season one in theme and plot – is an admonition against creating hierarchies of appreciation, to not replicate in music the casteism of Indian society.
It was a reproach to the encrusted musical hauteur in me and a plea that the listening heart must be capacious enough to allow the Marwa of Shankar Mahadevan’s Ai Ree Sakhi Mein Rang Rang and Amir Khan’s Piya More Anat Des, and indeed others, to reverberate in all its chambers.
The author is former chief economic adviser, government of India.
