One of the things that attracts a keen but lazy enthusiast for Indian music like me is that the sounds and the elaborate ritual of an Indian classical concert never lose their mystery. I am still puzzled by such things as the disbelieving shake of the head and sigh with which proper devotees greet a particularly expressive moment. What does that actually signify? What is the role of the almost-inaudible instrumentalist who sits next to the star soloist, and why does he not play his modest little drone in time with everyone else? What makes Raga Bhairavi a “morning raga,” when to a western ear it seems just as redolent of evening melancholy as an evening raga like Durga? And what is a raga anyway?
The reason I’ve never troubled to find more than a cursory description of these things is that the mystery is part of the enjoyment. I don’t really want answers, which is why I hesitated before reading this book. But then I remembered the special pleasure of Amit Chaudhuri’s novels, where the subtle weave of relationships between people and sights and smells is gently evoked in a way that leaves their essential unknowability intact. One apprehends them like a scent, rather than a piece of discursive knowledge.
Chaudhuri achieves a similar miracle in Finding the Raga—which isn’t to say you won’t learn many specific things, such as the fact that Raga Todi has flattened second, third and sixth degrees. But this is no text book. He tells us that there are literally thousands of ragas, and many rhythmic patterns or talas, but focuses on just a few. He spends several pages on a rhythmic cycle called teentaal, a recurring pattern of 16 beats. To the western ear that simply sounds like four bars of four-four time. Chaudhuri shows how when combined with a system of faster “triplet” beats this iron regularity is overlaid with ambiguity, so to land decisively on the first beat of a cycle becomes a challenge. He leads us gently towards different a way of hearing and playing, and through them to different ways of feeling and knowing.
Chaudhuri is well placed to write such a book. He’s a performer, often leading his own group which combines Indian elements with blues and jazz idioms, and is the son of a well-known classical singer. During his teens Chaudhuri encountered rock music, and for a while seemed more in love with that than with his own heritage. He forsook the Indian accordion for a guitar, and tried to turn himself into a singer-songwriter on the lines of Joni Mitchell or Neil Young.
Then came a long spell in London as a student, where his passion for the music of his home country was rekindled as a way of fending off the coldness, literal and metaphorical, of his surroundings. The to-and-froing between London and Bombay and between Indian and western rock music forms a biographical thread running through the amiable, discursive disquisitions on music. These often digress out to the way words inflect our understanding of music. For instance, “sringaar”—one word for elaboration or ornamentation—is also used for the elaborate toilette of a Kathak dancer. This reveals a suggestive link between ideas of make-up, make-believe and improvisation. The book is full of such conceptual chains, looping off in fascinating and unexpected directions. Chaudhuri is alert to the way phrases and concepts take on different connotations in different cultures; for example, the phrase “black clouds gather,” associated with certain monsoon ragas, does not have the negative connotation in India that it has in England. Black clouds are benign in India because they are a herald of the longed-for coming of the monsoon.
Sometimes Chaudhuri extends the parallels out to western classical music, and here I don’t always see eye to eye. He imputes to western music a straightforwardly “mimetic” quality, ie this sort of musical gesture stands for that emotion—and there’s an implication this places it at a lower, less transcendental level. “Adagio isn’t just a slow movement; it has connotations of emotional heaviness,” he says, but that idea can be easily refuted by any number of Haydn’s rapt hymn-like Adagios, which are transcendental precisely because they refuse overt emotionalising and are “light” in Chaudhuri’s sense. Also he misses possible subterranean affinities between the two great traditions. The word used in Indian music for “flat”—komal—translates more accurately as “soft,” he says, suggesting that this points to the soft, microtonal bending of flattened notes in certain ragas. But this has a parallel in the west, where keys were often referred to as “hard” or “soft” for reasons associated with the microtonally-inflected tuning systems that were widespread in the era before equal temperament.
Chaudhuri suggests that Indian classical performance, far from being a manifestation of a supposedly “timeless wisdom,” is deeply influenced by modernism. The most striking evidence for this is the enormous slowing down of raga performances in the early 20th century, to the point where the raga became unrecognisable. Chaudhuri likens this to the blurrings in Monet’s waterlily paintings and the erosion of the subject in modernist novels, both of which lead to a “destruction of recognisability.” It’s one of many subtly subversive ideas, all the more striking for being woven unobtrusively into something so apparently gentle and personal. “Guns buried in flowers” is how Schumann described Chopin’s music; one could say the same of this fascinating and beautifully written book.
Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (Faber) by Amit Chaudhuri
