Music without boundaries

Last week, I attended a production called 100 Charmers. Director Roysten Abel had gathered five score saperas (snake charmers) from in and around Delhi to perform in an ensemble that was mostly music but presented with fine, dramatic flair. Set against the medieval Taramati Baradari on the outskirts of Hyderabad, the musicians lifted their beens to play an impressive repertoire.

This contained a few pieces that had me pondering the cross-currents of music, the interplay of different streams, and how riffs and even musical influences may travel from the grassroots of folk, up to the rarefied realms of the classical, and then be reinterpreted as accessible film music. Naturally, they performed Hemant Kumar’s interpretation of the sapera’s tune from Nagin (1954) — a reading so sublime and inevitable, it was in turn adopted by the snake charmer community as its anthem. The tune has stayed with India as the quintessential aural prompt for snakes. The musicians then played Kajrare from Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy’s Bunty aur Babli and the hymn Amazing Grace. The saperas had reinvented themselves — and extended their survival. In rendering Kajrare with their plaintive, rustic strains, they also owned the song in a delightfully new way. Purists may purse their lips but surely such borrowings can only enrich a musical system.

Film music is not given sufficient credit for its role in channelling music that lies outside its ambit. If the general public has heard Bade Ghulam Ali Khan at all, it’s probably the snatch he sang for Mughal-e-Azam. Many heard of Ustad Rashid Khan for the first time because he sang Aaoge jab tum in Jab We Met. I attended a concert of his in Delhi a couple of years ago and not even his elaborate Kirwani elicited as many cheers as when he started on Aaoge… For a man feted by the world of classical music, he was absurdly pleased.

Film music has depicted folk tunes in innumerable instances. It has included Kabir, Tulsidas, Meera, Khusrau, Rahim and Bulle Shah. It has used folk narrative genres, too. I have a particular favourite from recent years. Punjabi folk has employed jugni, a peripatetic female narrator who observes the world and provides her commentary, for almost a century now. I was particularly pleased to hear it in Oye Lucky, Lucky Oye, Sneha Khanwalkar’s sharply authentic 2008 album.

It hasn’t all been one-way though. Classical music too has dipped from time to time into the lower orders or into parallel streams to pick up skeins that are now woven into their own fabric. Pandit Kumar Gandharva coopted folk renditions of Kabir into his own style of Nirguni bhajan and Carnatic music has taken the Marathi Varkari tradition of abhangs into its fold.

But, to my mind, there is one very certain level of success — when you trickle down to the lowest common denominator. As the snake charmers have reclaimed their tunes, so have others made some songs their own. Train singers favour a certain high-pitched type of song that allows them to be heard above the din of trains, and ones that fall into the chugging rhythm; Mela dilon ka… they like, and also, Pardesi, pardesi jaana nahin…

One other community has been revitalised these past years: wedding band players. Their repertoire used to comprise the decades-old Raja ki aayegi baraat and Mera yaar bana hai dulha. But now, thanks to Amit Trivedi’s Emosanal Atyachar, a song made for the trumpets of the baraat, the band is fashionable again. I wouldn’t be surprised to find the lively title song of Band Baja Baraat blaring out at the next wedding I attend. 

Those happy old New Years

The world stepped out to welcome the New Year last week while I sought refuge in my quilt, nursing a miserable cold over a glass of rasam. Even television — a friend on most occasions — let me down. Brittle hype was lined up on channel after channel, attempts at humour on one, spectacle on the other. It was so unsatisfactory I turned it off without waiting for the countdown to midnight and, perversely, went to sleep.

New Year's Eve, as TV channels conceive it, is the most manufactured of celebrations; similar ensembles are put together routinely for Holi, Diwali and other festivals but somehow work better than they do here. On the subject of New Year’s Eve, my mind runs no doubt out of sheer sentimentality, to the good old days. Those years in the 1980s and ’90s when Doordarshan, our one window to the world, kept us company in the hours leading to midnight.

I remember the comedian Jaspal Bhatti entertaining us; the short comedy skits that were, I’m now certain, only mildly funny. There was Gurdas Maan singing his trademark ‘Dil da mamla hai’, pausing playfully at ‘Dil…’ and all of us rushing in to prompt him. I remember Penaaz Masani, Falguni Pathak, Sharon Prabhakar, Javed Jaffrey and Usha Uthup. I cannot honestly say they sang or danced or performed better than anyone on the stage today — certainly, nostalgia plays a large part in giving that age its patina of being special.

That nostalgia isn’t restricted to the New Year’s Eve specials, it envelops the entire Doordarshan era. Bring it up and you’re essentially calling for a whole lot of people to wistfully remember their own favourites. Chitrahaar, someone will invariably say. Hum Log and Buniyaad will get a few mentions. Then the Sunday morning line-up, the Saturday afternoon specials, the weekend movies we waited all week for. There is something vivid about these recollections — it isn’t just about what they saw, it is about what they felt. Curiously, people talk often of staring at the colour bars before Doordarshan’s slowly spiralling logo came on the screen.

There is a sea change from our worlds then and now. Our minds and sensitivities were clean three decades ago — tabula rasas waiting to be imprinted on. We weren’t assaulted by images, sounds, media, opinions. We were able to focus on whatever we looked at, an attitude that seems almost zen in comparison to how we are now.

What does our fondness for the Doordarshan years mean? Does the advent of TV only bookmark a time when our impressions were at their freshest? Is it also due in part to the fact that TV viewing used to be so communal? In the early days, the entire neighbourhood would pour into the one home that housed the TV set. Later, even when every home acquired its own, we would gather to discuss what we watched. This collective experience is quite incommunicable to the spoilt-for-choice cable-&-satellite TV generation. It is impossible to convey to someone who wasn’t there what it meant. It was, quite simply, an age of innocence. Perhaps it boils down to the fact that we — all of India with access to TV sets — were on the same page, looking at exactly the same thing. DD’s much used placard that said ‘Rukavat ke liye khed hai’ signified an entire nation in limbo — sighing in frustration at a frame that might leap into animation any minute now. Never again will we know that kind of unity.