Music of India
Even in a music community where young masters and child prodigies are now the norm, Ramana Balachandhran is a rarity. Something of a musical polymath, he chose to excel in the toughest and least popular of instruments – the veena. If you had dropped in at any of Ramana’s concerts
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The plain white tag around the neck of the tanpura says simply: 1890, Miraj, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan. Around it, many more tanpuras stand tall, perched on their protuberant bases like awkward sentinels of sound. Their tags tell their respective origin stories – their scale, celebrated owners, faceless craftsmen with single
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The sour golugu berries/And shark fish and mullet/When I eat the fish you appear in my dreams/My dark and handsome sweetheart/You bring such a good catch. In 1938, a delightfully piquant Telugu folk song, titled Golakondoyi, made its debut on All India Radio, and as we
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A tiny one-bedroom flat tucked into a quieter lane of Chennai’s Mandavelli neighbourhood is something of a pilgrimage destination for Carnatic violin students. This is where, overseen by images of dozens of deities, A Kanyakumari, 71, has taught some of the brightest young talent on the concert circuit today.
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It hosts India’s oldest classical music festival, the Harballabh Sangeet Sammelan, and is home to at least two gharanas of vocal music and one of percussive music. It is the birthplace of some of the biggest icons of the Hindustani form. Its sacred music is rooted in dhrupad and
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Rithvik Raja, among the younger stars of the Carnatic vocal scene, has an astonishing estimate to share. Of the around 1,000 Carnatic classical concerts scheduled in Chennai this festive season, close to 650 feature musicians under 30. The figure is stunning because classical music around the world has a
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N Rajam is surprised that you see a quartet of women violinists from across three generations of a family as an inspirational saga of feminist triumph. “Really? Things have changed now, no?” she asks, strong eyebrows raised in mild amusement. You argue back. What about gender discrimination? Male dominance in
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Gaon Badabar, Post Office Sujangarh, Churu. Till about a century ago that used to be the Thar address of the Gangani clan. Today they are scattered around the mohallas of the Regarpura area in Delhi’s Karol Bagh, around half-a-dozen households which spring to life every morning at 7.30
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The word wild pops up often in colonial descriptions of the tappa, a dazzlingly fast-paced, quirky music form that revels in the art of the unpredictable. “Wild but pleasing when understood,” says 18th-century music collector William Hamilton Bird in Oriental Miscellany (1789). Says Sarah Plowden, another 18th-century chronicler of Hindustani
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Ajab duniya, jaariya kahan hai?/Jaan paryo na maika aage ke paachhe re, Baithe jyo guni yeh hain, poochhat inaso mein/ Batayide kahan, ye aage ke paachhe re. Where is this strange world headed? I can’t fathom, it is moving ahead or going back in time? I see the
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If music were charted on a gender spectrum, popular theory has it that the dhrupad would fall on the masculine end and the thumri feminine, with the khayal somewhere on the continuum but tending towards the masculine. This would explain why the thumri has been at the heart of some
Music of India
“The melodic character of Indian music and the harmonic character of Western music are like oil and water. They will not mix…Nor should there be any fear that one will harm the other.” — Sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, 1967, The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, Oliver Craske — Sitar maestro