AN ELABORATE RESPONSE TO DEBKANTI MOITRA'S POST
Debkanti Moitra's post is actually unwittingly trying to emphasise the universal aspect of instrumental music or lyric-free swarsangeet (music of the notes) as it is not constrained by language and its cultural connotations. In vocal music language enters in the form of lyrics and lends its cultural imports which can then not be called strictly universal for they are local and highly regionally flavoured quite often. Debkanti Moitra's implication about music here is just the same as it would be about the other human actions of love, laughter, tears, inspiration, depression and so on which are all universal and common to all of humanity. Maestros like Pandit Ravi Shankar have repeatedly stressed upon this universal aspect of music which cuts across cultural barriers and reaches the hearts of all.
Whether music is pure or not depends upon the composition, its intent and exposition, style and rendition and upon the personality of the performer in terms of his or her depth of being and purity of perception. The same song sung by different people assumes different musical proportions in terns of aesthetics and the quality of delight it lends to the listener. This is highly subjective but perfectly pertinent and the response of the audience is invariably varied to the same rendition in the very same order of its culturally and spiritually differentiated distribution.
The word 'secular' has been beaten badly out of its parentage in Europe and rendered an orphan in India which has then magnanimously adopted the bruised child, nursed it and renamed it, but the connotation thus brought into vogue has strangely miscarried and the foster-child still suffers from all sorts of abuses at the hands of its newfound relations by virtue of adoption. Hence, the saga continues as men keep at their dialogic dispensation and use the word 'secular' to suit all sorts of originally unintended implications.
Whether music is secular or not in its European and the linguistically correct sense depends entirely on its content and spirit. If it is church music, it is highly religious in content and cannot be deemed secular by any stretch of imagination. In the Indian incorrect sense of the word 'secular' whether music is secular or not just does not matter for one simply cannot rationalise on inherently incorrect propositions.
It has been the experience of great musicians like Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan that Indian instrumental music transcends national and cultural barriers. These musical maestros have performed in the five continents and have drawn nearly the same appreciative response from their varied audiences before they arrived at their experiential inferences thereof. The same must be true of western instrumental music as well. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and the blessed composers are universally adored save in theocracies like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the like where public sensibility is perforce contained within the bounds of archaic scriptural injunctions which hold their absolutist ground even today, though.
Music is a powerful means of cross-cultural communication, true, but how far it helps to overcome cultural barriers beyond lending superficial interface is debatable. Union of human hearts may be achieved only through depth spiritual enlightenment, as Swami Sampurnananda has rightly pointed out, and may not be so easily achieved by musical performance of any and every kind. Only sublime music with a spiritual undercurrent has the capacity to bring about this depth union of souls when it has settled into a non-sectarian cultural tradition as in India where the universal principles of the Vedas creates the platform and the base for such flourishing of impregnating universal barrier-breaking music. Else, music remains only to entertain the surface personality and to infatuate minds into submission to the senses. The Indian bhakti tradition bears ample testimony to the power of music to uplift and elevate the spirit to come closer to God and all this may not be termed secular for they are patently spiritual which is its diametric opposite in meaning. It is in this context that the Islamic proscription on music of all kinds as 'haraam' (forbidden) has to be seen.
Islam arose out of the deserts of Arabia with a tribal medieval culture setting out the codes of conduct, the life-rules and the acceptable norms of ethics. The strictness of Islam in regard to music must be understood in terms of its violent beginnings in inter-tribe war and inter-religious war when the Prophet and his successors thought it best to eliminate music and its moorings from the fold to instil the martial spirit so very necessary for sheer survival then as a people and as a proselytising faith that needed adherents at any cost through the waging of holy war or jihaad. All cultural softness was thought as proper to be eschewed out of the exigencies of the times and these, once codified, as the word of God or the Prophet remained inviolable, unalterable and sacrosanct for all time and for all climes. But the spirit of man rooted in fundamental freedom refuses to abide by the stringency of scripture and as time has rolled on even within the fold of Islam such rich musical-spiritual tradition as that of Sufism has come into being which has released the musically thwarted Muslim into the realm of divine delight through the free and spontaneous expression of his soul in soulful melodic connection to the Lord.
The Indian Islamic experience with music is vastly at variance with the classical Arabic experience which forbids music as diabolical, the temptation of the Shaitaan or the anti-God principle. Islam came into India and while it proselytised and converted hordes of Hindus to its fold through the sword and through other coercive means and through its offer to raise the oppressed low-caste Hindu to a semblance of human dignity, it also got culturally converted by the powerful Hindu traditions. What resulted was the fusion of Hinduism and Islam and this became the foundational principle for Indian Sufism with its rich incorporation of music in it. Amir Khusrau brought certain musical instruments from Afghanistan and while there is debate about the origin of the sitar and the sarod as Indian or Afghani, it is universally accepted that Amir Khusrau did significantly contribute to the North Indian musical tradition. This contact with Islamic musical influence from Iran and Afghanistan impacted North Indian music and dance in a very big way and what resulted was the Hindustani style of music and dance which was essentially Hindu-Islamic a style. Hindu raga music was strictly rendered in the style of the dhrupad for a full millenuim after the beginnings of the Islamic invasion of India in Sindh in the eighth century and it was only in the eighteenth century that the style of the khayal became prominent and was popularised by exponents. Thereafter, tappa, thumri, dadra, kaajri, chaiti, ghazal, qawali, kirtan, bhajan and a host of other classical, semi-classical and popular forms of music have formed the mosaic of the Indian musical tradition.
Even in the dance tradition we see in the Kathak dance style the fusion of Hindu and Islamic influences seamless merged. The very languages Hindustani and Urdu are also the products of this fusion. The same goes for art and architecture where the cultural cross-links unified into a cohesive Hindu-Islamic style and gave birth to some of the most beautiful structures on earth. Thus, in every sphere of North Indian life we see the merger of Hindu and Islamic influences.
Man is fundamentally free and, despite the injunctions of scriptures, strikes out a cultural path for himself that releases his soul from such strictures. Were he to abide by each and every archaic prohibition on his natural self-expression, humanity would have been a far worse hell of a fanatic's nightmare. But man revolts and does so in myriad ways, often in open defiance of outdated prohibitions and more often than not in quiet self-expression along natural modes which necessarily violate the strictures formally binding him in a theocratic sense. It is this element of freedom which is universal in man that music caters to and forges cultural cross-links, affinities and love-bonds to reaffirm the oneness of the whole human family. This is what Debkanti Moitra has been has attempted to express, although, not in so many terms but in emphatic oneness of spirit with the whole of humanity. It seems Vedanta is opening vistas before his enlarging vision and revealing to him the fundamental oneness of the human species which has impelled him to explore through this post the musical possibility of breaking barriers and forging union in a world of desperate divisions.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : Ustad Amir Khan
Debkanti Moitra's post is actually unwittingly trying to emphasise the universal aspect of instrumental music or lyric-free swarsangeet (music of the notes) as it is not constrained by language and its cultural connotations. In vocal music language enters in the form of lyrics and lends its cultural imports which can then not be called strictly universal for they are local and highly regionally flavoured quite often. Debkanti Moitra's implication about music here is just the same as it would be about the other human actions of love, laughter, tears, inspiration, depression and so on which are all universal and common to all of humanity. Maestros like Pandit Ravi Shankar have repeatedly stressed upon this universal aspect of music which cuts across cultural barriers and reaches the hearts of all.
Whether music is pure or not depends upon the composition, its intent and exposition, style and rendition and upon the personality of the performer in terms of his or her depth of being and purity of perception. The same song sung by different people assumes different musical proportions in terns of aesthetics and the quality of delight it lends to the listener. This is highly subjective but perfectly pertinent and the response of the audience is invariably varied to the same rendition in the very same order of its culturally and spiritually differentiated distribution.
The word 'secular' has been beaten badly out of its parentage in Europe and rendered an orphan in India which has then magnanimously adopted the bruised child, nursed it and renamed it, but the connotation thus brought into vogue has strangely miscarried and the foster-child still suffers from all sorts of abuses at the hands of its newfound relations by virtue of adoption. Hence, the saga continues as men keep at their dialogic dispensation and use the word 'secular' to suit all sorts of originally unintended implications.
Whether music is secular or not in its European and the linguistically correct sense depends entirely on its content and spirit. If it is church music, it is highly religious in content and cannot be deemed secular by any stretch of imagination. In the Indian incorrect sense of the word 'secular' whether music is secular or not just does not matter for one simply cannot rationalise on inherently incorrect propositions.
It has been the experience of great musicians like Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan that Indian instrumental music transcends national and cultural barriers. These musical maestros have performed in the five continents and have drawn nearly the same appreciative response from their varied audiences before they arrived at their experiential inferences thereof. The same must be true of western instrumental music as well. Mozart, Beethoven, Bach and the blessed composers are universally adored save in theocracies like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and the like where public sensibility is perforce contained within the bounds of archaic scriptural injunctions which hold their absolutist ground even today, though.
Music is a powerful means of cross-cultural communication, true, but how far it helps to overcome cultural barriers beyond lending superficial interface is debatable. Union of human hearts may be achieved only through depth spiritual enlightenment, as Swami Sampurnananda has rightly pointed out, and may not be so easily achieved by musical performance of any and every kind. Only sublime music with a spiritual undercurrent has the capacity to bring about this depth union of souls when it has settled into a non-sectarian cultural tradition as in India where the universal principles of the Vedas creates the platform and the base for such flourishing of impregnating universal barrier-breaking music. Else, music remains only to entertain the surface personality and to infatuate minds into submission to the senses. The Indian bhakti tradition bears ample testimony to the power of music to uplift and elevate the spirit to come closer to God and all this may not be termed secular for they are patently spiritual which is its diametric opposite in meaning. It is in this context that the Islamic proscription on music of all kinds as 'haraam' (forbidden) has to be seen.
Islam arose out of the deserts of Arabia with a tribal medieval culture setting out the codes of conduct, the life-rules and the acceptable norms of ethics. The strictness of Islam in regard to music must be understood in terms of its violent beginnings in inter-tribe war and inter-religious war when the Prophet and his successors thought it best to eliminate music and its moorings from the fold to instil the martial spirit so very necessary for sheer survival then as a people and as a proselytising faith that needed adherents at any cost through the waging of holy war or jihaad. All cultural softness was thought as proper to be eschewed out of the exigencies of the times and these, once codified, as the word of God or the Prophet remained inviolable, unalterable and sacrosanct for all time and for all climes. But the spirit of man rooted in fundamental freedom refuses to abide by the stringency of scripture and as time has rolled on even within the fold of Islam such rich musical-spiritual tradition as that of Sufism has come into being which has released the musically thwarted Muslim into the realm of divine delight through the free and spontaneous expression of his soul in soulful melodic connection to the Lord.
The Indian Islamic experience with music is vastly at variance with the classical Arabic experience which forbids music as diabolical, the temptation of the Shaitaan or the anti-God principle. Islam came into India and while it proselytised and converted hordes of Hindus to its fold through the sword and through other coercive means and through its offer to raise the oppressed low-caste Hindu to a semblance of human dignity, it also got culturally converted by the powerful Hindu traditions. What resulted was the fusion of Hinduism and Islam and this became the foundational principle for Indian Sufism with its rich incorporation of music in it. Amir Khusrau brought certain musical instruments from Afghanistan and while there is debate about the origin of the sitar and the sarod as Indian or Afghani, it is universally accepted that Amir Khusrau did significantly contribute to the North Indian musical tradition. This contact with Islamic musical influence from Iran and Afghanistan impacted North Indian music and dance in a very big way and what resulted was the Hindustani style of music and dance which was essentially Hindu-Islamic a style. Hindu raga music was strictly rendered in the style of the dhrupad for a full millenuim after the beginnings of the Islamic invasion of India in Sindh in the eighth century and it was only in the eighteenth century that the style of the khayal became prominent and was popularised by exponents. Thereafter, tappa, thumri, dadra, kaajri, chaiti, ghazal, qawali, kirtan, bhajan and a host of other classical, semi-classical and popular forms of music have formed the mosaic of the Indian musical tradition.
Even in the dance tradition we see in the Kathak dance style the fusion of Hindu and Islamic influences seamless merged. The very languages Hindustani and Urdu are also the products of this fusion. The same goes for art and architecture where the cultural cross-links unified into a cohesive Hindu-Islamic style and gave birth to some of the most beautiful structures on earth. Thus, in every sphere of North Indian life we see the merger of Hindu and Islamic influences.
Man is fundamentally free and, despite the injunctions of scriptures, strikes out a cultural path for himself that releases his soul from such strictures. Were he to abide by each and every archaic prohibition on his natural self-expression, humanity would have been a far worse hell of a fanatic's nightmare. But man revolts and does so in myriad ways, often in open defiance of outdated prohibitions and more often than not in quiet self-expression along natural modes which necessarily violate the strictures formally binding him in a theocratic sense. It is this element of freedom which is universal in man that music caters to and forges cultural cross-links, affinities and love-bonds to reaffirm the oneness of the whole human family. This is what Debkanti Moitra has been has attempted to express, although, not in so many terms but in emphatic oneness of spirit with the whole of humanity. It seems Vedanta is opening vistas before his enlarging vision and revealing to him the fundamental oneness of the human species which has impelled him to explore through this post the musical possibility of breaking barriers and forging union in a world of desperate divisions.
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : Ustad Amir Khan
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