Sketches of life

Published : May 06, 2011 00:00 IST

Three books that make interesting reading for the scholar and the layperson.

THREE interesting books were brought out recently by Promila and Company in association with Bibliophile South Asia. The first among these, Sketches and Conversations Recalled by Margaret Chatterjee, is a model of grace, clarity and brevity. Her mastery over the short essay form is unquestioned. She is of English origin and after marriage came to settle in this country sometime during the Second World War. She read Modern Greats at Somerville College, Oxford. Her training in philosophy, politics and economics and her rootedness in history lend authenticity to her writing. She has done thorough research on M.K. Gandhi's life and philosophy and has published eight books on it. She has travelled widely and taught in many countries, an experience that has enriched her thinking. She is an accomplished pianist in Western classical music.

An example of her empathy, wit and perception can be found in this little vignette from the essay titled On Professional Choirs: No doubt there is something very appealing about young voices echoing in a vast cathedral, and the very sight of the little angels in their short-lived years of glory before their voices break carries a certain pathos. I call them professionals of a kind, with perks in the form of excellent musical training in a cathedral school where this is fitted into the syllabus. At Christmas time they come into their own and to a certain extent it is their contribution to the liturgy that does the most to send the congregation into devotional ecstasy.

Margaret Chatterjee goes on to describe how a Christmas service was covered by television cameras and beamed across the country. She found that the young choristers, when not covered by the cameras, were reading comics. Margaret contrasts this with what she saw in a particular church that had a professional choir, whose members would rustle through the pages of The Times when not singing, and they had no interest at all in the sermon that was being preached!

The writer's range of experience is enormous and ability to juxtapose a variety of ideas to arrive at surprising conclusions is admirable. For example, in the essay entitled On Saying Goodbye, she begins by saying, It is heartbreaking when the paper streamers between the ship and the coast start breaking one by one. There is no parallel ritual when departures are made by air. Of course, looking out of the plane can be saddening as familiar and much loved landscapes disappear beneath a blanket of cloud.

In the same essay, she proceeds to bring in her intimate relationship with the piano she practised on as a child and rediscovered much later in life on a visit to England. In touching my old piano which was no longer mine, I relived years of music-making in which the piano and I were partners, both suffering the cold weather and both delighted when the sounds we made, the joint efforts of both of us, were such that we could hear Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin speak to us. If my old piano and I struggled with the cold, my present piano and I struggle with the heat and the endless attacks of sand from tropical storms that creep into every nook and cranny of the rooms.

She proves her versatility further in the droll, charming essay On Having Nine Sons: Long ago, one of my husband's colleagues, in the English department where he was professor, had an unusual family. There were nine sons but not a single daughter. This seemed unprecedented. If there had been nine daughters, and there were such cases, it is likely to have been regarded as a calamity in this particular culture.

Combining sociology with fairy tale in this opening paragraph, she proceeds to narrate how the nine brothers had been trained in cooking, washing up, serving a meal, buying supplies from the market, keeping accounts, answering the phone and taking messages, welcoming guests, and childcare insofar as the older ones had specific duties vis-a-vis the youngest. She goes on to describe a fine meal, beautifully served when invited to the household along with her husband.

Margaret Chatterjee continues with her impish humour in the essay The American General. It begins with her sitting in the University Parks and being joined by an American general who happened to be a classics man. She has a pleasant conversation with him about Plato, Aristotle and Roman history.

Not uncharacteristically, she introduces another incident into her little story. It was all so much pleasanter than something I had to face some time later. Pataudi, yes the original Pataudi, had come with his team to play the Oxford team and I had been yanked out of my study and seated next to him at the official dinner and I knew absolutely nothing about cricket.

Margaret Chatterjee's book is a delight for both the scholar and the layperson.

On Urdu literature

Glimpses of Urdu Literature by Zahida Zaidi, who has taught English literature for long at Aligarh Muslim University, comprises select writings on poets and prose writers who have enriched Urdu literature in the 20th century. This is a timely book, as Urdu is on the verge of virtual extinction in the land of its birth, thanks largely to right-wing Hindu politics. Successive governments at the Centre, usually Congress-led, have paid lip service to the richness and malleability of the language without doing anything concrete to sustain it. It is a well-known fact that a language survives and prospers on the strength of its ability to generate employment. Unless people can earn a reasonably decent livelihood using a language in their place of employment, the chances of that particular language becoming a vehicle of creative expression are quite slim.

Urdu, after the partition of India in 1947, gradually went into a decline. All official work in government offices in northern India, without warning, began to be done in Hindi, apart from English. The principal culprits in this affair were the State governments in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, where until recently Urdu held sway. This was so because the two States were, in terms of both demographical density and the number of seats in Parliament, the most powerful in the country. The largest exodus of Muslims to Pakistan in 1947 came from these two provinces. Urdu, therefore, came to be regarded, both overtly and covertly, as a language of the enemy'.

Around the time of Independence, Hindi, a far less flexible language which had the blessings of Mahatma Gandhi, suddenly became the rallying point for Hindus within the Indian National Congress, and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh and its cultural' arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, both the offspring of the rabidly anti-Muslim Hindu Mahasabha. There was an attempt through an Act of Parliament to ram Hindi down the throats of non-Hindi-speaking Indians, an act of folly that led to the violent anti-Hindi agitations in the South, particularly Tamil Nadu.

Zahida Zaidi, according to the blurb introducing her, is a distinguished bi-lingual writer in English and Urdu. Her approach in this book is erudite without being overbearing and is aimed at an eclectic readership. In the chapter Secular and Humanist Traditions of Urdu Poetry, she observes, The earliest expression of a profound humanism is to be found in the profound utterances of Kabir, a poet whose spiritual creed represents the meeting point of Bhakti and Tasavuf (Sufism). Kabir glorified Life, Love, Nature and Beauty and celebrated the human body as the abode of the beloved, i.e. God. And by virtue of his emphasis on purity and depth of human relations, his faith in the dignity of human labour, and a simple way of life, and above all by virtue of his emphasis on the common essence of all religions, Kabir became not only a mystic poet par-excellence but also the living voice of the downtrodden.

On the form of the ghazal in Urdu poetry, she observes: It allowed much greater creative freedom and was often rooted in human realities. Of mysticism being a recurring theme in Urdu poetry and a powerful, recurring ingredient in classical ghazal, Zahida Zaidi suggests, Indeed, in classical Urdu ghazal, it is difficult to say exactly where human love ends and divine love begins. The poetry of Mir Taqi Mir, Asadullah Khan Ghalib and Momin Khan Momin, three great masters of Urdu poetry in its years of glory, bears out this contention.

She is perceptive in her assessment of lesser-known poets such as Akhtarul Iman as she is about celebrities such as Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Makhdoom Muhiuddin, both darlings of the Left on the subcontinent. Her reading of Quratul-Ain Haider's novel Chandni Begum and two novellas Agle Janam and Seeta Haran can be helpful to the uninitiated.

Zahida Zaidi as a critic and essayist is almost always interesting.

Hindustani music

Ashok Ranade is a well-known writer on Hindustani music and a trained vocalist in the idiom. His latest offering, Some Hindustani Musicians, with a subtitle They Lit The Way!' is rich in information for those uninitiated into the intricacies and mysteries of Hindustani music and the singers who brought glory to the form and to themselves. As most books on the subject, it suffers from its share of prejudices, primary amongst them being the idea that the real Shashtriya vocal music was the preserve of the Hindu Brahmin Maratha male or the lower-caste Bai or professional female musician.

Ranade cannot avoid stalwart Muslim musicians such as Ustad Faiyyaz Hussain Khan of the Agra Gharana or Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana Gharana, who made khayal singing of his kind hugely popular among Hindu vocalists. Two of the most charismatic Maratha singers, Sawai Gandharva, who was Khan Saheb's direct pupil, and Bhimsen Joshi, who studied under Sawai Gandharva for three years, made the Kirana style famous throughout the country. This book has some interesting and many fatuous observations on the artists who grace its pages.

Ranade, while acknowledging Bhimsen Joshi's unparalleled popularity as a vocalist, seems to suggest in a barely discernible patronising manner that his triumph was largely because of superb technique (taiyyari) and his pandering to his audiences. The essay on Bhimsen Joshi is the shortest in the book and the least serious. It appears to have been written to silence potential critics. Whatever be the author's prejudices and Bhimsen Joshi's limitations in the true knowledge' of raagas, on a good day he could move the most discerning of pundits of raagdari to tears with the beauty of his singing.

The longest chapter is on the maverick experimentalist Kumar Gandharva, whose thin, piercing voice and accompanying tanpuras were unfailingly mellifluous in tune. Ranade the classicist makes a sincere attempt to understand the unique qualities that constituted Kumar Gandharva's musical quest. He, of course, was the subject of much romantic speculation in the music world because of his two musical careers pre-tuberculosis and post-tuberculosis. When he returned, his technique had altered as had his approach to the very idea of khayal singing. He tried in his own way to get to the heart of a raaga without too many technical frills like different kinds of taans and gamaks. Ranade tries to understand what made Kumar Gandharva's singing so captivating despite such austere means.

When it comes to more traditional exponents of khayal, Ranade is really good. His piece on Ramkrishna Buwa Vaze, a master lost in the mists of time, possibly because of lack of extant recordings, is both informative and touching, as is the one on Krishna Rao Fulambrikar. There is an illuminating vignette on Bal Gandharva, a great star of Marathi Natya Sangeet, who when ill and old was assisted on to the stage and suddenly transformed himself as he began to sing and recaptured his lost magic.

The essays on singers such as Anant Manohar Joshi, Mallikarjun Mansur, Kesarbai Kerkar, Omkarnath Thakur and Roshanara Begum, amongst others, tell the reader about their technique and musical aesthetics. Ranade's biases notwithstanding, it is a fine book.

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