Sep 3, 2009, 12.00am IST
Bindu Chawla.
It is like a raga pantheon: Many gods, and yet the same God. And so many ragas, and yet the same Raga.
The first thing the ancients taught their disciples in music was: Ek sadhe sab sadhe, sab saadhe sab jaaye in other words, if you practiced One Raga to perfection, you had practiced all, but if you tried to perfect all, you had lost all.
Down the ages students of music began to take the adage a bit too seriously. Instead of thinking that the practice of one raga gave them access to all ragas, they actually thought that not too many ragas needed to be practiced, ever.
Narad Muni, who would often visit the mythical, celestial land of the ragas to find out how they were doing, had much to say. As he reported, each raga was as healthy and luminous as the amount of times, and the devotion and perfection with which it was being sung in the material world. In fact he had found many ragas maimed, many ill, and a lot more suffering they had been sung and played so incorrectly by musicians in the big bad material world. But the one thing that Narad Muni did not ever report on was the number of ragas. In myth, they were personified as people who were in states of deep sleep, never having been woken up at all!
Since ragas came to be, less than half of the pantheon has been awakened either by being sung or played. From a total of 999 ragas that the ancient texts estimate in the cosmic order, only musicians in the world of Hindustani music have explored a quarter.
Musicians will look at the gallery, and sing a handful of ragas all through their lives, concentrating again and again, on a familiar few, afraid to initiate unusual melodies and the not-so-well-known ragas, because it is hard work, that takes a while to establish them in the minds and hearts of listeners. Don’t some medical doctors prescribe only from a certain stock of familiar medicines, even for complicated diseases?
Ancient texts say that the human body which is the virat, or the cosmos itself-- is known to contain within it as many cures as the diseases that will ever afflict its soul, and consequently its body. Similarly, each of the 999 ragas has the potential of a particular kind of healing, not found in any other raga.
In the Indore gharana , master guru Ustad Amir Khan Saheb was known to take forward his raga repertoire from the number of 15-20, sung by his predecessor generation, to 60-70 approximately, in his own lifetime. After him, his disciple Pandit Amarnath added another 200 ragas, enriching further the schools repertoire with new bandishes or lyrics in those ragas. Both masters were also very bold in terms of introducing these lesser-heard melodies to a not-so-initiated public. But with each raga they were, after all, only evoking its blessings, for everybody and for themselves.
Pandit Amarnath often used to tell us this story. One morning, when the Kirana gharana master, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan Saheb, was singing the raga Lalit at the dargah of Ajmer Sharif, the presiding pir saheb was moved to tears. As the pir saheb tried to gather more people around the master to hear him sing, he said something that can be said for all the ragas when they are sung or played with devotion-- Lalit ki khairat bat rahi hai, ise lete jao the raga Lalit is being distributed as sacrament (prasad) please take it along with you!
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