Sangeet Sammelan

I’m posting this now as I’ve just returned from two days in New Delhi. First, I should just say briefly that getting a second look at the Capital city (and this one not fresh off the plane and intimidated by everything) I’ve discovered a lot to like about it. Maybe it helps that Spring is fully in bloom, and long patches of budding trees and landscaped flowers line avenues between Embassies, government buildings from the British days, and tons of performing arts halls and theatres. More than that, though, I was struck by how metropolitan it seems, now that I’ve only been in the cities and villages of the Punjab, and the relatively isolated mountain towns of Himachal. It really seemed more befitting of a major world capital this time, though it still depends where you look – the train station, and all touristed areas in North Delhi, are overwhelming for the more predictable reasons – crowd, chaos, poverty, staggering monuments in decay.

My purpose for going this weekend was the two-day Sangeet Sammelan (classical music festival) taking place at the Kamani Auditorium. There are many such festivals in Delhi throughout the year, but when I saw that this one fit my calendar, I decided it was too good an opportunity to miss (how often in my life will I be able to go to Delhi for a weekend of great Hindustani artists?); and the express train is only 5-6 hours from Amritsar, so it works to go for just a couple days.

I also had a somewhat dramatic arrival at the concerts. Someone warned me a few days before that these types of events in Delhi usually required expensive passes to be purchased in advance. This gave me reason to fret as I was hoping to go essentially right from the train to the concert. Luckily, in defiance of other types of Indian bureaucracy, there was a contact number listed. I called the number, asking for a pass and explaining I was coming in that day. The nice gentleman, Mr. Bawa, said that was no problem, and I should come at the time after my train arrived. When I came in the rickshaw, the security guard informed me that there were no passes at that time, I should come back around 4pm. Even though I overheard him tell the woman behind me in Hindi to come at 5pm (which cast some suspicions on his reliability) I went away and came back at 4pm. The same guard then informed me that, actually, the passes were all “finished.” Fortunately for my quick thinking, I whipped out my phone, dialed the nice Mr. Bawa, who came out from inside and, in front of the guard, handed me a free pass to come inside for the concert!

Another detail is that the first night was devoted to honoring the singer Pandit Jasraj who, amazingly, was the first Indian classical singer I had ever heard in person, in the fall of my senior year at Harvard, just as this music was beginning to capture my interest. So it was somewhat fitting that he be there on hand the first time I experienced a concert with a competent understanding of the music. There was a terribly awkward award ceremony for him, when the auditorium had barely thirty people in it, and the MC paused for applause every time he said Panditji’s name, but after that we proceeded to the good stuff.

The concerts were absolutely mesmerizing. I sort of surprised myself with endurance, attending over ten hours of music in two days (divided between North Indian vocal, sitar, violin, and South Indian vocal and vina). There were times when my mind wandered a little bit, but by and large I was tuned in to listening to the ragas, making mental notes and questions, which I wrote down, later in the hotel. It probably won’t do me much good to go into technical observations or even wax poetical about the experience, since I don’t have any recording of it to be able to take you there, but I’ll try a little using a specific example.

The first vocalist was a female singer who was introduced as having a singing style “as grand as the monuments in the city from which she hails”, meaning Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. There indeed was something grand and sculpted about the way she unfolded the raga (which, fortunately, was one I actually knew so I could follow it much better!). In contrast, the singer who began the program on the second evening was a large man who had a very different style.

At first, it rubbed me the wrong way and I resigned myself to enduring the performance without enjoying it. Whereas the female singer had a very open-throated sound on the unmetered opening section, this guy struck me as very nasal, producing the sound almost out of the side of his mouth. His presentation of the raga was very close to boring – he only added one note at a time, holding each for a very long time, and barely adding any ornamentation to the approach or ending.

As this introduction part went on for another twenty minutes, though (did I mention these performances are long?), I became aware that I was hearing things I didn’t even know to listen for. His ‘nasal’ way of singing, I realized was actually producing incredibly rich overtones that resonated with the tanpura (drone) and even the tabla (pitched drum). Further, it was only by holding the notes for such a long time, and not obscuring them with complicated slides, that you could truly get inside this sound, as if you were hearing the note for the first time. It also made much more explicit, somehow over this long time-format, the distance between the notes. Even neighboring ones, which can be quickly jumped over in the fast taans, felt like separate planets arranged in the solar system.

The real kicker is that, back in the hotel, I went back to the section I had been reading about the different gharanas, schools or guilds, of vocal training. Though each has its own style, it didn’t mean much to me when I read it out of context – but I skipped back to the section on the kirana gharana, which this male singer represented, and I saw in print exactly the things I had thought! This gharana, it said, was ‘note-oriented’ and less concerned about the text or meter, instead adding one note at a time, each with its own inflection, to convey the totality of the raga through its notes. I feel like this is one of those life-learning experiences that educators always tell their kids about. If only the above would fit into a hallmark card I could send it to my teachers to know that their efforts were worthwhile…

**PS. Nick - you have to know that I wrote this post before I had read your email asking me to explain the Kirana Gharana...creepy