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Gandharva raga

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Date: 2003-8-12

The musical practices of several Hindustani classical music gurus of the last century were turned, post-facto, into theories. This is how it must have happened.

Suppose I was a vocalist who could sustain her breath for minutes on end. I made that my USP and proposed that all good music was a matter of holding ones breath for minutes on end. Or if I had a stentorian voice that did not bend too easily, I proposed that the essence of good music lay in a full-throttled blast, not in delicate nakhras.

Once in a while, however, a musician came along who abjured existing theories and looked for ways to make his music more meaningful to himself. Such a musician was Pandit Kumar Gandharva, who composed and sang what he personally thought and felt, his approach to music being inclusive rather than exclusive.

He was a great proponent of the idea that all ragas had their origins in folk melodies. Perfectly logical one would imagine. For unless you persuaded yourself that they fell out of the heavens into the laps of the chosen few, you would have to grant that they must have evolved, at least partially, from the music that was being made all around by the common people. It was by no means an original idea, but one that Kumar Gandharva pursued joyously in his music.

Another aspect of folk songs is their direct relationship with the life around. It is because the lyricists sang of their everyday experiences and feelings that their songs were so lively and true. Many of Kumar Gandharvas compositions are also deeply personal in this sense.

How perfectly he fitted word to melody became apparent when Vasundhara Komkali, his wife and disciple, sang his compositions in Hindol and Madhya Suraj at the Karnataka Sangh on Sunday, the 3rd of August.

The occasion was the Pt Krishnarao Shankar Pandit Smriti Utsav, presented by Khayal Trust in collaboration with Kalabharati.

Komkali began the concert with a stately Desi, in the course of which one realised that she had finally found her own idiom within Kumar Gandharvas style. Her voice, once stiff and strident has now acquired a pliant expressivity that gives emotional colour to her music.

Before she sang the Hindol, she told us with a disarming smile that Kumar Gandharva used to find it a difficult raga to elaborate upon. What could you do with a raga that had only four notes he would complain. As a way of dealing with the problem, he composed a song in the raga to speak of why he found it so frustrating!

This turned out to be an utterly delightful composition. After singing the opening alap, Komkali stopped, smiled mischievously and said, See thats all there is to it. But when she resumed singing, we saw how skillfully the bandish had been composed to bring out both the nature of the raga and of the complaint.

The Madhya Suraj that followed is one of Kumars folk-based ragas. With shades of Bairagi and Shivaranjani it has a komal rishabh that pierces straight to the heart.

Kumar possibly composed both song and raga together to express the anguish he felt when he heard the piteous bleating of a she goat being led to the slaughter. The song is the goats prayer to the Mother, asking her to save her. The reason why I plead with you like this Mother, she says, is because ghar mein lalawa akele bin mohe (my baby is at home alone without me). The very sound of the word lalawa is evocative of all the sweet tenderness of mother-love, that the baby will now be deprived of.

As Komkali elaborated on the bandish, punctuated by a judicious use of that aching komal rishabh, there were few eyes left in that packed auditorium that were still dry.