‘Tell me a story, something…,’ Ananthamurthy had urged me on that still evening. What story could one possibly tell a master storyteller? Kumar Gandharva’s rendering of ‘Sunta Hain Guru Gyaani’ hadn’t let go of me all through the day. As a result, Kabir was uppermost on my mind when he coerced me into telling a story. URA was very fond of nirguni bhajans, so I decided to narrate a little story which was a prelude to the Kabir composition: ‘Heli Mhaari, Nirbhay Reeje Re’.

There’s a large forest with a huge tree. A little bird visited the tree every day. She fed on the fruits and flowers of the tree, had a happy conversation with the indulgent, generous tree and flew away to return the next day. One day, there was a forest fire and the tree began to burn. ‘You have wings, fly away,’ the tree implored. The bird, with tears in her eyes, refused to go away. ‘I have eaten your fruits and flowers. My friend, to abandon you is not dharma. How can I be separated from you, let me burn along with you,’ the bird says.

The story stops there; echoing the vast, eternal expanse of the desert of Rajasthan, the folk musicians sing ‘Heli Mhaari… (My friend, fill your heart with compassion, be fearless)’. The endearing story that I narrated to URA is perhaps something that the folk singers have added to take you to the nirguna experience of Kabir through the saguna. After moments of silence, URA stated that self-negation was an important aspect of Kabir.

The conversation then shifted to Kumar Gandharva, a musician whose affinity with Kabir fascinated him. Talking about Kabir’s self-negation, we recalled Kumarji’s self-negation. URA, in his poem ‘Kumar Gandharva’, points out how Kumarji could negate his ordinary self through the creative act and achieve the shoonyata that Kabir spoke of.

‘I heard you first at Lalit Mahal

I felt,

I was being born again. I felt

the sound coming out of you

wave after wave

was there before you were born.

I saw the listeners sitting before you

their boundaries

dissolved.’¹

‘My first encounter with Kumar Gandharva was in Mysore in 1989. His music and our meeting later was so intense that I just had to write a poem,’ URA explained once again. I had heard this anecdote from him many times earlier. Each time, with genuine fascination, he would recall how Kumar Gandharva could leap beyond the self and soar to the edge of the text and leave one with its mysteries, but with equal felicity also completely shed this mystical self and come back to being an ordinary man thinking of food, pain and all the everydayness. ‘His music was transmitting the power of Kabir’s nirgun into his listeners. I was mesmerized. But later, as we all sat down for dinner, the manner in which he recovered himself into an ordinariness was astonishing,’ he said. This was something that he had written about in the poem too.

‘Grumbling that your hand was swollen with rheumatism, your leg too, praising the Mysore climate, praising my friend Ashok from Bhopal a little too much, you showed you were an ordinary fellow who could be my friend. You conspired to free me from the spell that bound me.’

 

After hours of intense music, Kumar Gandharva had spoken continuously, hungrily devouring his food as if he simply could no longer bear the wild, avadhoota Kabir riding on him; he had to break free from him. ‘I was disappointed as he stripped himself of his mystic attainment. But I realized that anyone who leads such an ecstatic life, in his case of music, has to transform himself into the ordinary. The intensity can become unbearable. Aa putta hak-kiya utkatateyoo inthadde alwa… suduva utkatate… (the intensity of the little bird is similar, isn’t it… the longing to burn…),’ he observed, uniting self-negation and intensity in one stroke.

‘I wondered how that mad Kabir from the far North could haunt our southern Kumar from Belgaum. I admired the celestial Gandharva’s worldly wisdom – how he freed himself by hurling that mad creature on innocents like us.’

Didn’t he speak of dissolving boundaries? Was it the dissolving line between the singer and the listener? Was he talking about how Kumar Gandharva dissolved the ‘guna’ of the text into ‘nirguna’ and thereby take Kabir’s formlessness onto a higher step? Or was he speaking of the leaps that both of them, Kumar Gandharva and he, were making into that Kabir space and thereby negating their selves?

I have often wondered what it is about Kumar Gandharva that makes him the most authentic voice of Kabir’s nirguni poetry? What made him so dear even to URA? This URA, who would lodge a complaint against Kumar Gandharva for demystifying himself, was someone who too comfortably straddled both the worlds of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘extraordinariness’. Was he perchance trying to understand his own worldly self and the pangs that he experienced through this musician? Many such thoughts swirl through my mind as I try to dig deeper and attempt to understand the creative processes of these dissolving boundaries.

 

Ananthamurthy would often remark that in good writing there invariably comes a point when it escapes the writer’s conscious self. The characters assume their own will and begin to take a route of their own. Such writing involves labour as well as a magic, the inexplicable element in them. ‘I always feel I am writing well when I go beyond my opinions; then, incidents present themselves to me like gifts from an unknown source,’ he would say. ‘I believed then in Eliot’s theory of impersonality. The man who suffers and the man who creates are different. Therefore, the writer is present in his work only as a catalytic agent. I like Eliot’s humility and his suspicion of author-arrogance but I no longer agree with him.’ He felt that Blake was more profound on this matter. Blake, and also Bendre, who uses the metaphor of a spider spinning out its own outer web from an inner substance, understand the sea change of the creative process. ‘A writer feels lucky and surprised when it happens. Then it would be possible for a writer to say with Blake "this is mine yet not mine". I want to be able to communicate such a feeling to my audience.’

Kumar Gandharva too often spoke of dissolving boundaries in the creative space, ‘the mine, yet not mine feeling’. ‘When I want to compose a bhajan, I don’t just read the poetry. I look, then I leave it alone, look and leave it alone. What does Kabir want to say? The whole thing that he has said, I say it myself – then I think… no that’s not it. There must be something higher that can be said through the medium of svara. Only then there is some point in composing.’ This wonderment and negotiation was a relentless process. In a conversation, he insisted that it was not in his music, but rather embedded in Kabir’s poetry itself. ‘No, I didn’t do anything. This exists in Kabir’s poem itself,’ he insisted emphatically. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that Kumar Gandharva enables his listeners to enter into that experience of shoonyata, the universe of emptiness where all that is mine dissolves into the not mine.

‘Bring me some Kumar Gandharva’s nirguni bhajans,’ URA asked. Text, he said was only a pretext. We argued over it. Musical meaning is perhaps greater than lyrical meaning, and perhaps they have a meeting point – we finally agreed on this. ‘To achieve the quality of nirguna in music is very hard. To bring in meaning and yet emphasize no-meaning is not easy,’ he added. Allama Prabhu, the 12th century Kannada mystic poet, presents probably the greatest example of nirguna. He creates a language for himself through which he attempts a perpetual negation. ‘You arrive at a meaning, but you are also giving up the meaning.’

 

But Raghava Menon in his book, The Musical Journey of Kumar Gandharva, makes an observation that stands contrary to common notions of musical meaning. ‘He sang out of the bandish and not out of the raga,’ he writes. Kumar Gandharva subordinated the raga to the bandish, never letting the raga take priority over the bandish. ‘This was the consequence of a highly developed and delicate literary grasp of the nature of the words of a language and the way they are spoken while being sung,’ writes Menon. For Kumar Gandharva, the content and composition were equally important – the poetry of Kabir which was his philosophical voice, finding expression in his music. In other words, Kumar Gandharva who believed that the svaroopa (form, structure) of the raga emanates from the nature of the bandish believed in the superiority of the idea and not of form.

 

Ananthamurthy would make similar observations, especially with respect to poetry. He often said that rhyme, alliteration, scheme, the ornamental aspects of poetry, are not as important as the poem itself. ‘It can be a prose poem too,’ he would say, particularly during the days that he was translating the poetry of Brecht and Rilke. ‘Let ideas determine the form; form should not control ideas’, he would repeatedly say. Raghava Menon captures this beautifully with respect to Kumar Gandharva, which, in a way, is also true of URA’s ideas of literature. ‘While there was a flexibility with respect to Kumar on the characteristics of gharana, he was inflexible in his vision of what music should be, boundless, beyond frontiers and paradigms.’

URA and Kumar Gandharva were rooted in their respective traditions, passionately engaged and in constant dialogue with it. URA drew his inner reserves from the likes of Shivaram Karanth, Gandhi, Ramana and Ramakrishna, but built his own thought on their legacy. ‘Like everyone else, I too strive to find my "voice",’ Kumar Gandharva had said. ‘One needs to keep at it hoping to find the elusive voice.’

In many of our everyday conversations, URA would speak of rejuvenation. ‘I have to begin afresh everyday, else this samsara is too much to take. Also, my yesterday’s ideas have to find new resonance today.’ Once, when he wrote a story after a gap of nearly two decades, he telephoned in great excitement from Kerala. ‘I am so happy that something which I thought was long over in me was reborn today.’ But once he began dialysis, this metaphor assumed a different meaning. ‘I am born every day, with new blood flowing in me…,’ he would say, and this was never just literal. ‘I am a practitioner of the most perishable art: everyday I die singing. That Kumar Gandharva who was singing, that raga Tilak Kamod that he sang – both are dead. Tomorrow again Tilak Kamod will be sung, and Kumar Gandharva will sing, but it will not be the same. In music whatever has happened once, by whichever person, may happen again, but it will not be the same,’ this was the creative Kumar Gandharva speaking.

 

Ananthamurthy was always thinking, revising, revisiting, reformulating… in the process he appeared inconsistent. But in the deeper sense he was shattering the ego, the process of self (sva) visarjane. He did it to Praneshacharya, to Jagannatha, to Ananthu, to Kuppanna Bhatta and each of his characters. Kumar Gandharva, through his music, was constantly pushing the boundaries. He was reworking tradition, and had also placed Kabir ‘shoonyata’ in the essence of his being. The sense of ‘I’ to both these path-breakers represented a roadblock to their destination. ‘Let your intelligence be grounded, listen to the earth,’ says Kabir. URA was always listening, to everyone. In the process of listening and thinking, he was reinventing. Kumar Gandharva epitomized Kabir’s ‘nirbhay, nirguna, gaaonga’, and URA personified it – the joy of freedom and of losing one’s self-identity.

The tree, the bird, keep rising like the phoenix. They perish, but they live on.

 

Footnote:

1. Translated by Linda Hess.