by Shashi Kadapa
Dharwad, a town in South India, is famous for a number of eminent Hindustani classical musicians. I modestly claim to be a guitarist of some repute. My amplified, distorted riffs offend some snobs. The elitists defame and slander them as noise with no creativity.
There are also singers and proponents of Hindustani classical music, or shastriya sangeet. Among the arch singers are my mother and aunts. I dare not criticize this musical form, but I must narrate a horrendous event that was unleashed.
A ‘Guru’, a Hindustani classical singer of some notoriety, died. So his disciples decided to have a ‘Sangeet Samelan’ or an evening of music. Cohorts of singers would descend on our house and raucously sing in his memory. I was press-ganged into ‘volunteering.’
In your childhood days, you may have heard of Aesop’s fables, where some animals decide to form a band to scare thieves, etc. Neither man nor beast were spared. This happened to me.
The bouts were to start at 7 p.m., but the invitees arrived much earlier, drooling for snacks and tea. A shifty-eyed lot they were. I was very busy arranging for hot water and herbal remedies to ‘settle’ their voices, bowing to them, etc. My sister collared me, and to ensure that a ‘sense of culture was instilled’, I was forced to squat in a ringside seat.
The Gayaks or singers looked like a bunch of petty criminals, straight from the police records under ‘Petty Larceny’ charges. They were sniffing the kitchen aroma and furtively taking in the prospective ‘loot’. These singers are an abusive and quarrelsome lot, riven with petty jealousy, and they cannot stand the sight of each other. The star perpetrators were in the center of the circle. The rest of the audience was spread in circles. The further you are from the center, the lower your social standing.
The bout started as a group song to invoke the goddess Saraswati. In any given group, people have an ungiven range of voices. A very liberal bandwidth tolerance in areas of pitch, timbre, frequency, cadence, and beat was assumed. The leaders took off at a furious pace. In just a few bars, they managed a substantial lead over the stragglers, who tried to keep up by skipping a few lines. The infuriated leaders set up an even more furious lead, with individual side duels going on between the leaders. Ditto with the instrument players.
The result was total chaos, and I had the ‘Bose Surround effect’ thrust on me. Some time back, there was a spate of karate movies, and the singing acts resembled them. Both have ‘eastern origins’, calling for vigorous movement of the limbs accompanied by loud vocals. Overall intent: maim. Shastriya sangeet had diverse styles: fly swatter, hen catcher, grimace, roll on the ground, etc.
The fly-swatter style called for sudden, jerky motions of the arms. The hen-catcher style called for slowly raising your arms and lunging forward. The grimace style called for twisting the face in horrific grimaces. Roll on the ground must have originated in the wrestling pits. It calls for clutching an imaginary opponent and grappling with him by rolling to and fro, all the while wailing in agony.
Their origins are in some ‘Gharanas’, in Jaipur, Gwalior of kings who lived in troubled times long back. They patronized such singers, assured that the unleashed cacophony would quell the enemy, making them run in terror.
Two babies started shrieking when a hefty, potbellied proponent chose to display grimace style. Their mothers whisked them away to safety, and I envied them for escaping this assault.
An endless wave of issues from these Gayaks, called a ‘Taan’. The longer you keep it up with lots of sudden vocal twists and jerks, the greater your prowess. Frankly, it sounded as if a pig was having its throat slit with a very blunt knife by an inexperienced butcher who was not in any hurry.
The singing called for endurance from the singers and the audience. The music had a lingering quality. It resounded in your ears long after the main music had stopped, and it had a carrying quality. It broke a few panes in our house and roused the livestock of our neighbors, who are about a mile away. Livestock roused from their slumber set up a terrific bellow, imagining butchery.
A tea break was announced. There is a hierarchy when serving tea. The inner circle members are given tea made from leaves used for the first time. For the next circle, the same leaves were re-boiled, and so on. Fringe members wondered whether to drink or shave.
The loud speakers, already strained beyond limits, decided to pack up. No problem for the ‘Roll on the ground’ gayak. Breathing deeply, he built volume and set off with a loud blast. He sang at country fairs, and a lack of mikes and erratic electric supply did not hinder him.
He rolled on the ground, smashing the tambori and taking the tabla players with him and the impervious fellow went on. If it is credible, he sounded much mellower without the accompanying instruments. My brother prevented me from escaping, glaring and grimacing threateningly to utter ‘wah, wah’ now and then.
My sister, mother, and aunts closed the event in the form of a chorus. It would not be healthy to comment about their efforts. The herbal drinks they had swigged to settle their voices worked so well that the voices would not come out clearly. They sounded like a gaggle of hoarse hens being throttled slowly.
Dawn announced an end to this jamboree. As I sat on the steps, nursing a throbbing head, my mother announced that since this function was a grand success, she would make it an annual affair.
Bio: Based in Pune, and Dharwad India, Shashi Kadapa is the managing editor of ActiveMuse, a journal of literature. His stories across multiple genres are published in more than 45 US and UK anthologies. Winner of IHRAF, NY
short story prize, he is nominated thrice for the Pushcart award. His works: http://www.activemuse.org/Shashi/Shashi_Pubs.html