Abstract
As a response to the invitation to a form of global thought, this paper asks: what is the relationship between Indian classical music and everyday seasonal life? Indian classical music has been studied in the social sciences as a tradition belonging to a distinctly South-Asian past (Neuman, 1980; Mukherjee, 2006), in which newness has emerged only as a consequence of techno-auratic reconfigurations (Neuman in Asian Music, 40(2), 100–123, 2009), or as a construct of India’s post-colonial modernity (Neuman, 1980; Mukherjee, 2006). This paper departs from this literature to suggest a different route into the study of this form, which grounds it within the aesthetic labors of thinking and feeling, and the ways in which they relate to everyday variations in the earth’s tempos. It argues that a raag is not simply a sequence of notes that represents a culturally specific way of being, but an aesthetic relation that expresses and intervenes in seasonal and diurnal rhythms. By studying raag Malhar within the context of drought-prone rural West Bengal, this paper examines the life of Indian classical music outside the institutional frameworks of concert halls and academies of learning, and begins instead to explore the ways in which it forges and animates everyday life. As such, it works towards a conception of the classical that can be located within the ordinary, and asks, in relation to the concepts of raag and season, what it means for the temporal resonances of everyday life to be musically rendered.
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Notes
I use the term ‘Indian classical music’ not to signal a nationally bounded tradition, but as a route into an aesthetic logic that draws from a specific ontology of seasonal and affective life. Similarly, my use of the term ‘classical’ is not in opposition to the category of ‘folk,’ in the sense that one is an esoteric, technical form and the other a more democratic expression of ‘local’ social rhythms. Nor do I wish to suggest, by locating my study of classical music within a rural agricultural context, a historically evolved folk basis to Indian classical music. Instead, my essay considers the ways in which the ‘classical’ exists as an ordinary expression evoked by an everyday reliance on seasonal life, within a field of resonance with the earth. I conduct my study of Indian classical music amongst practitioners of its North Indian or Hindustani variant.
Unlike the fertile gangetic alluvium that characterizes the better part of West Bengal, the lateritic soil found in Bankura is notoriously ill equipped at retaining moisture. As a result of a lack of cohesion between soil particles, heavy rainfall is more likely to flood and erode lateritic earth than be absorbed by it. To make matters worse, the bedrock that underlies Bankura is particularly close to the top soil, thereby offering no substantial reservoir of ground water. In the absence of an earth that supports it, agricultural life in the region comes to rely crucially on a steady, moderate rhythm of seasonal rainfall.
I conducted surveys across six music schools in Bishnupur including both large-scale music academies and independent classes conducted out of teachers’ homes.
A swift movement along a chain of notes, usually undertaken at a last stage of a raag’s performance. Drut, or fast, taans—that sometimes feel like a series of electrical impulses—are often pointed out as markers of a musician’s skill and dexterity. An overdependence on them, however, also invites allegations of exhibitionism and shallow restlessness.
Historically, the Bishnupur gharana has focused on the Dhrupad style of Indian classical music. Dhrupad is an older, more grammatically rigid approach to raag music than the Khayal form that I received my training in.
Monsoon Feelings emerges from a lineage of contemporary scholarship at the intersection of seasonality and aesthetics in India that has focused on issues of atmospheric flux and poetic expression (Shulman, ), the tension between seasonal and ritual calendars (Nicholas, 2016), and the relation between ecology and well-being (Zimmermann, 1980, 2004).
Bhatkhande makes this statement as part of his speech at the First All-India Music Conference in Baroda, 1916.
Musicologist Sumati Mututkar (1987) argues that performing a raag at its appointed time period is ‘essential for aesthetic appreciation.’ Danielou (1969) adds that without it a raag cannot be ‘developed perfectly’ or ‘move an audience.’ In a more extreme statement that long predates Bhatkhande, Narada (in Kaufmann, 1965:276) states that ‘listeners’ of a raag outside of its time ‘will become poor, and their life durations will be shortened.’
A common reasoning provided for the ‘unscientific’ nature of the time theory is that, while ‘western’ listeners react emotionally to Indian classical music, they seem consistently incapable of sensing a raag’s particular temporal resonances.
Lath (1987: 24) says of Bhatkhande’s claim:‘ …if this basis is in any sense psychological or physiological then it must certainly be also a universal phenomenon’.
Lath uses the term ‘Hindustani Music’ here to make a distinction between Carnatic music and the North Indian classical music to which he refers. Scholarship around Indian classical music has historically debated the structural differences between its North Indian and Carnatic variants. Bhatkhande saw the two as ‘perfectly independent’ systems, primarily on the basis that the latter does not claim to ascribe to the time theory.
The notion of the ‘global’ evoked by this special issue provides a ground from which to explore the affective logic of a raag outside the purview of a ‘nationally representative tradition.’ Doing so helps reveal within the grammar of Indian classical music—otherwise considered to be the domain of upper-caste, upper-class exclusivity—the scope for democratic aspiration. The question of seasonality, via which I map this aspiration, itself exceeds a certain boundedness of landscape that a commitment to the ‘global’ might seek to discard, offering instead a territory mobilized by vocabularies of movement and repetition that can be shared by both music and material circumstance. Rather than ordering these vocabularies within a linear history of representation, an ethnographic inquiry into Indian classical music finds within raag and season a joined cyclicity—both contingent and specific—that is borne out by everyday life and aesthetic labor.
See footnote 2.
In Bengal-Vaishnavism, a vrindavan is the sacred landscape within which ‘lila’ or the divine play between gods might occur. Sarbadhikary (2015) studies how in the Bankura region, the vrindavan is conceived of as ‘gupt’ or ‘veiled,’ and always on the brink of being elicited.
The lyrical composition within which the raag is bound.
A midnight raag, very popular on concert circuits.
Second verse.
Deepak and Hemant are the names of summer and late-autumn raags, respectively.
Here, Rishi is mocking the bol or the rhythmic utterance of a percussion instrument nearing crescendo.
In what is perhaps the best-known story surrounding Malhar, the Mughal court-musician, Tansen, performed a life-saving rendition of Malhar after being sabotaged by a jealous colleague into singing the heat-producing raag Deepak. Tansen’s own rendition of Deepak was beginning to burn his skin, when he switched to Malhar in order to cool himself with rain. In a more recent anecdote, from the 1950s, the Patiala gharana exponent, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, was on his way to perform at a radio station in Bombay, when all of a sudden, he asked for the car to be stopped on Marine Drive, stepped out, sat in front of the ocean, and sang a Malhar that was able to command the waves into rising and crashing.
The weight of these anecdotes is not placed of their material facticity. And yet, the affective experiences they embody ring true to the qualities of respite and urgency that characterize rain, such that they seem connected to the monsoons as a form of life. What is it then that causes artistic renderings to become unhinged from life?
For more on these stories, see and Rizvi (1975) and Deodhar (1993), respectively.
Miyan-ki-Malhar is the variant of Malhar sung famously by Tansen. Lunn and Schofield (2018), however, have recently argued that the raag can be traced instead to the monsoon raag Gaund performed first in the court of Shah Alam in the late 18th C.
For more on the relationship between voice and gesture in Indian classical music, see Rahaim (2012).
Sur translates literally to pitch or tunefulness, but refers more generally to a musical sensibility.
See footnote 2.
The central beat of a rhythmic cycle.
In kee** with this claim, my essay does not spatially segregate ‘earth’ from a stable conception of the sky. Rather than thinking of monsoons as a ready-made atmospherics that raag Malhar might beckon towards the earth, I argue that cloud, rain, and raag are each composed of the material and affective forces of the earth.
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This article is based on dissertation research that I am currently conducting towards my PhD at the Department of Anthropology, Brown University. My fieldwork in Bankura, West Bengal, starting September 2020, has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, International Dissertation Research Fellowship. The names of the individuals and organizations mentioned in this article have been changed in order to maintain their anonymity.
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Palchoudhuri, A. An Everyday Malhar: A Raag’s Relation to the Earth. SOPHIA 62, 555–576 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00958-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-023-00958-z