Great Conversations

I've just finished reading William Dalrymple’s memoir of living in Delhi, “City of Djinns.” I have many thoughts about the book, and take some issue with his attitudes to portraying India’s (in particular, Delhi’s) history as just a succession of rulers with their own architectural styles. I only want to mention one reaction, however, which is that I generally sympathize with his approach to India. He’s British, but comes from a background relatively similar to mine, in terms of education and attraction to India. He spent a year in Delhi, and he creates his memoir of experience out of three main components – 1) research he pursues on his own in the form of written texts and treatises, 2) subjective reactions to living and moving in daily Indian life (as with me, the most entertaining and bizarre category), and 3) incredibly insightful conversations with English-speaking Indians that link the first two categories together.

It is this last category, the conversations, which I want to write a little about today. It’s impossible to overstate the enlightening effect these single conversations have in the context of India. I felt myself straddling an ever-widening gulf, reading about the long and great histories of culture and music in North India, and then going out every day into the chaos, the frustrating back-and-forth, the material-craving attitudes of the street and the temples. Between the two, I was losing grip of any knowledge or understanding I might have gained up to that point – then, over the course of a single sit-down with a scholar or friend, all of that would suddenly smash together into a cohesive picture (perhaps still illogical, but that’s India). I would rush off after these encounters, racing against time while my eyes were still open, and try to transcribe as many of the things that made sense to me. This is maybe the power with which Indians view their own country, holding the jigsaw puzzle together whereas a Westerner is undone by the fact that the lines don’t actually meet up.

Here I’ll summarize what I scribbled down after a lunch with my friend Dhruv at a café in S. Delhi. By way of introduction, he is a very accomplished singer who makes his living giving concerts and making recordings. He has performed internationally, most recently in Berlin, and has numerous engagements and talent representation in N. India. He knows Indian classical music very well, having studied from an early age, but most often refers to himself as a “sufi singer” since he personally studied under perhaps the most famous South Asian singer of all time, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Dhruv talked about times that he’s collaborated with Western musicians, and said that he can tell when they have preconceived notions about him. In these instances, they think that their music (based on Western harmony and polyphony) is more complicated and advanced than Indian music, and that their training was undoubtedly better because they have been to top-name conservatories. He joked that the feels they initially view him as some kind of Barbarian, an emissary of a primitive age and culture.

Of course, the upshot, as he (not too modestly) tells it, is that once they are confronted with the fact that he has a technical skill, they are taken aback. To hear Dhruv tell it, the musical training he has is more useful than a Western conservatory. “Indians are the best copycats in the World”, he said repeatedly, “why else do you think they, along with the Chinese, are surging ahead now?” Though I've heard this sentiment most often applied in finance, manufacturing, and marketing, here means it through musical collaboration. In other words, because the whole progression of his learning has been by ear and through repetition, instead of notation, he can imitate complicated figures that Western musicians play, but when he rips off a long taan (improvisation) they’re left wondering, ‘How’d he do that?’

I appreciate hearing all this, and frankly agree for the most part. A part of me can sympathize with the engrained notion that Western music is superior, more complex, and that because of my top-rate education I would expect to ‘know more’ about music writ-large than an Indian musician. But at times, like speaking to Dhruv, that notion was turned on its head. With him, I see the usefulness, more fundamental even than understanding Bach’s tonality and Hanon’s exercises, of merging one’s ear and skills in imitation. It seems truer to the Source, the reason of why we make music - the fact that we hear, distinguish, and react to sounds. Moving on from the comparison that is not too favorable to the West (although he admits that the greatest Western musicians do ‘get it’), he gave me a neat demonstration of incorporating Arab-style modes into particular Sufi songs. My ear was open enough that I could hear what he was doing, and it was another minor revelation about how aware performers and audiences of North Indian music are to the saturation of their culture from Arab and Persian influence.

The other big area we discussed, of great interest to me, was the all-encompassing process of learning Indian music. Since we are both vocalists, I thought we would have a lot of notes to compare (no pun intended). I mentioned something that had dawned on me, that being in the right state of mind and body seemed absolutely crucial to singing Indian music – I think I get away with practicing other music whether or not I’m really feeling focused on it. My friend agreed completely, saying both that singing ragas makes you reflect more readily on what your state is, but on the flip side, that all the complex vibrato and three-octave improvisations of ragas just don’t happen unless you are truly concentrating. Hence, this idea I always like to think of from a rational perspective, saying that I prefer ‘thinking musicians’, Dhruv put simply as, “Music is transmitting to the outside what is on the inside.” One thing about Indian philosophy and arts that is refreshing is the willingness to put things directly, avoiding the flowery, intellectual language we sometimes deem necessary in order to sound ‘intelligent’ or ‘cultured’.

And finally, we briefly tackled the guru-shisya relationship, which translates as master-disciple. This is still the true, accepted way of learning Indian music, despite the fact that there now exist many conservatories and private schools in the Western mold. The guru-shisya doesn’t just pertain to music, of course, the same thing is held as the ideal whether one is learning yoga, classical dance, etc. One fundamental of this relationship, as referenced above, is the methodology of imitation. The guru does, the shishya imitates. This is, essentially what I had with my ragi. The other thing that must be present, Dhruv says, is often more difficult for Westerners (again I include myself) to swallow, “the teather is always right, the student is always wrong.” While I didn’t launch into any personal example with Dhruv, I do find this absolute mentality to be distasteful. Not only were there many times that I knew my teacher had misspoken and wanted to correct him, but giving that kind of absolute power, history has shown us again and again, can be ruinous to all parties. As a defense of it, though, Dhruv said that what Westerners misunderstand the relationship in thinking it’s just another thing that 'Indians do because it’s expected', whereas he understands it as each artist choosing to humble him or herself by submitting to that relationship, which is very spiritually healthy.