In Finding the Raga, Amit Chaudhuri reflects on his experiences with the learning, practice and thinking of Khayal

Amit Chaudhuri’s book Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music is a set of essays with meandering autobiographical notes studded with poetic contemplations about Indian music, Khayal in particular.

Accounts of Chaudhuri’s journey from Mumbai with its varied soundscapes to the unnerving quiet of a London apartment (where the horn sounded thrice during his two years’ stay), run parallel with accounts of his short stints as Canadian song writer and Avadhi poet and finally finding Khayal as “his mainstay”. The journey is told with intense seriousness as he reflects on his experiences with the learning, practice and thinking of Khayal while drawing from an impressive diversity of literary worlds.

In these ruminations, Chaudhuri looks at things anew — familiar things glow with a different hue as when a ray of light from an unanticipated direction falls on a familiar object.  Rather than argue, he poesies — that Khayal is modernist, that the principal act of creation in Khayal alaap is evasion, that the world of Bhakti is one without tragedy….  And, he arrives at these through a crisscrossing of ideas drawn from myriad worlds — Khayal of course, Natyasastra, Hindi film music, dance, film, Tagore, Ray, Meera, Tulsi, Kalidasa, Bob Dylan, DH Lawrence and many others.

In the splicing together of unlikely worlds, these essays could well be seen as capricious or indulgent. But what poetry escapes forever and from everyone the charge of being indulgent? Indeed, what art does?

For instance, he writes about the simultaneous presence and non-statement of the tonic, the sa, in ascending phrases of the Raga Yaman — it is always ni re ga and not _ni sa re g_a — “Yaman deals as much with evasion as with expression. In fact, evasion, in an exposition, is a recurrent form of expression.” But isn’t this true of much else? Painting, novel writing — what is deliberately not said is equally critical as what is said. But as it emerges in the book, it offers a moment of a quiet “aha”.

The subtitle — An Improvisation on Indian Music — suggests that the book itself is an alaap.  There are no chapter headings or numberings and the book flows almost seamlessly with new chapters beginning quietly, without any announcement. On the right-side pages is inscribed “Finding the Raga” and on the left “Amit Chaudhuri”. In a flight of imagination — not unlike many we come across in the book — one might liken these to the names of the raga and tala. A raga offers endless possibilities for music and the tala both constrains and organises it; and one might explore the idea of Raga in many ways but this particular exploration of a book is simultaneously constrained and enabled by the life experiences and sensibilities of Amit Chaudhuri. This suggestion is a khayal, an idea born of imagination, like much that the book offers.

The essays are autobiography, poetry, history, musicology flitting in and out, drawing from each other. His essay on raga associations with time and seasons is poetic and delightful as are his reflections on the artistry of Ray. His accounts of his experience of the soundscapes of the many places he lived — in Mumbai and London — are lovely, pensive reflections about what sounds around you can do to your sensibilities.

And there are others that are not so convincing.  Such as his take on the thaats to contrast them with ragas. While the contrasts are lovingly explored and we have some beautiful articulation here, some remarks betray a lack of clarity about what thaat as a musicological concept is. Chaudhuri goes through Bhatkhande’s ten thaats or parent scales under which known ragas are classified for the notes that occur in them. And that is what the thaat system is — a method of classification, not, as Chaudhuri writes, an account of how ragas are derived. He takes issue with Bhatkhande who “suggests that Malkauns derives from Bhairavi thaat” arguing that it seems doubtful that a minor pentatonic, found the world over, evolved from a seven-note melody. Historically and aesthetically, the thaat system is a tool of classification, not a theory of origin of ragas. The same confusion underlies his remark that pentatonic scales too should comprise parent scales since some of the “oldest melodies known to man” are indeed pentatonic — like “Durga, Megh, Dhani.”

Other bumps in the experience of the book are careless remarks like “alaap” means introduction not only in Bangla but “presumably in all north Indian languages” — surely it was not so hard to check this out!

The essay on shruti or microtones conflates it with gamaka, a generic term for ornamentation including the all-important meend or glissando.  After a rather arbitrary remark that in the song “Do-Re-Mi” Julie Andrews calls Ti, the last note, ‘a drink with jam and bread’, because it is “a makeshift meal before dinner at day’s end”, Chaudhuri observes that the note Ti or the swara ni engenders a state of incompleteness. “Shruti has to do with the note’s anticipation of the next note and its refusal to be immediately transformed into it. It’s a … state of becoming”.  To illuminate his thoughts on shruti, Chaudhuri quotes Cavafy’s Ithaka about “getting there”.

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind …. But don’t hurry the journey at all.”

This is not shruti but the idea of gamaka which has in fact been described as the shadow of one note in another: “The confluence of two notes should be like the confluence of shade and sun” — so goes an ancient text about gamaka. Shrutis are not lit up except through gamakas but the two are different concepts and musical entities.

If there is a centre to the book, it is his argument that Khayal is modernist.  He argues that the fact that Khayal performers frequently clear the phlegm from their throats during performance suggests that it is process art — which is modernist! This is at best a stretch!

But the more important argument is from his take that “modernist means destruction of recognisability” and his exposition of the dismantling of the composition as a recognisable entity in Khayal especially after Abdul Wahid Khan and Amir Khan.

Chaudhuri claims that by reducing the pace of the composition to a very leisurely vilambit time cycle and “frequent indifference to the meanings of the words” these two masters initiated the “dismantling of the recognisability of the composition”.  While one agrees that Khayal has struck its own path in engagement with tala and the composition, Amir Khan’s is not the only way. “Modernism” can be affected in other ways too as in the music of Kumar Gandharva who too engaged with the bandish in a radically new manner but was not indifferent to the meaning of the words of the compositions and who had no use for the ati vilambit laya of Amir Khan. Although, when Chaudhuri says “Modernism … has spiritual timbre that arises not from meaning, but from sound,” that is equally applicable to Kumarji’s music.

In these essays Chaudhuri very much has one style of Khayal in mind and does a disservice to the multitudinous worlds of Khayal by extrapolating from this one style to the entire universe of Khayal.

What also strikes me is the profound absence of the South in his journey. Sure, there are a couple of academic remarks about Carnatic music to contrast Khayal with, but there is no account of an experience of Carnatic music in the way he recounts his experience of Beethoven or of Julie Andrews in My Fair Lady. Or of anything Southern for that matter.

Beethoven was part of his parents’ records collection and he listens to the symphonies as a boy, but even the older Chaudhuri has not let in any music from the South. He records no encounter with the brilliance of a Mali or a Rajaratnam Pillai, the uncontainable creativity of a GNB or the sinuous tunefulness of a T Brinda.

Writing about his mother’s visit during his stay in London he writes: “My mother…studied Boy George and his cohort — we often watched TV together — not with animosity or stoicism but with a sweet suspension of disbelief.” Carnatic music does not get even this engagement.

Meera, Tulasi, Bob Dylan, Tagore and Ray again and again, Wordsworth, Yeats, Turner and Monet, Khusro, Amir Khan, Kishori Amonkar, other Khayaliyas, and many others rub shoulders in Chaudhuri’s languid explorations. Nothing Southern — Andal, Bharatiyar, Akka Mahadevi, Tyagaraja, Vallathol, Girish Karnad even — seems to have touched him and shaped his experience in any way. I find a lone Raghava Menon quoted in the discussion of the raga time association. Quite astonishing! To be fair to Chaudhuri, it is not unusual for a northerner to steadfastly ignore the South.

The book offers an uneven experience — moments of delight are many, but sprinkled amongst these are those of bewilderment and dissatisfaction.

Dr Lakshmi Sreeram is a Carnatic and Hindustani musician. Write to her at larasriram14@gmail.com