IT is essential that I begin this discussion from my own artistic space: music – classical music – Karnatik music. In attempting this exactitude in self-referencing, I have placed myself under the heavy burden of socially and politically mooted ontologies. In doing so I have also raised a related fundamental question – what does it mean to learn something and engage deeply in its nuances?

That ‘something’ gives me a tangible, defined reason – a goal as well as a useful tool. But that end, ironically, limits the journey. We land up mastering ‘it’ and conquering territories but along the way lose the experience. At times, reflection does remind us of the real, but usually we are too absorbed in the achievements to allow it to touch and transform us. This is what actually happens, as distinct from the ideal which is held out. And, hence it is critical that we question any learning that achieves this end.

Unlike many words in English, ‘learn’ does not have deep Latin or Greek roots. It has an earthy root in the Old English leornian, meaning ‘to acquire knowledge’. The Latin for ‘learning’ is altogether different – doctrina and the Greek is mathisi, which is clearly connected to the Greek mathematica for the English mathematics. So learning, in its English sense, is connected to acquiring, almost stocking up, hoarding. This sounds avaricious, nowhere near the utopian notion of learning that many of us have. But it does tell us something about the arrogance of that we possess in the name of knowledge. Somewhere built into the notion of learning is the idea that more knowledge makes us better or greater. And maybe it is from this feeling that learning becomes acquiring. We don’t learn; we procure, amass, appropriate, gain and purchase.

But what are we acquiring? I have learnt Karnatik music for many years, gone through the rigour of lessons, practice, tried to comprehend its emotional and technical refinements and know what it means to ‘sing’: I use that word in its completeness. In that intensely private journey of ‘acquisition’, I anoint what I have received with a purity-crown where, within the sound of music, the reality life or, in another word, its politics disappears. I have trained myself to ‘believe’ I am removed from or have ‘risen above’ the mundane movements of life. But this is a dichotomous existence because, every time I walk on the road, meet a person, vote in an election, visit a temple or just read the newspaper, the politically entrenched ‘me’ reappears. This duality is true, but I am very careful not to allow the political to seep into my articulation of the art.

 

Therefore, my acquisition of musical ‘knowledge’ forces the construction of an impregnable wall that separates me from the real, and divides the outer and the inner. This division is a loss because the interconnectivity between the outer and the real helps me to investigate the nature of knowledge itself. Everything that we learn as knowledge is formulated, layered and textured by the socio-political. Even when learnt with the greatest respect and sincerity from an open-minded teacher, it is not just a deep truth, it is also a commentary on people, power mechanisms, political movements and social compulsions. And more significantly, it places me as a student within the framework.

Establishing this, subconsciously defines my journey in the chosen field. This reality raises some interesting problems. In art for example, we need to ask whether the pristine artistic moment is also a violent political tool. Secondly, can knowledge ever be independent of baggage? Can there be a learning that is beyond or detached from these conditions? I will try to address some of these thoughts through this essay.

The guru-sishya bond is the most romanticized relationship in the myths that populate Indian pedagogy. There are numerous examples of the ideal guru and like any folktale, these stories are meant to carry forward cultural-moral belief systems, a way of life. Also built into these tales are power structures that too are passed on. The problem with any description of the perfect is that it is an aspirational hook that bestows upon us the powers that the position offers, even when we do not possess the unachievable qualities demanded of that perfection! If truth be told, no one can be that ‘perfect’. But the structure allows the game of control even when used with the best of intentions. This is not an argument for or against but a statement of reality.

We have teachers who are depicted as realized beings, revealing the truth by creating transformational contexts. Some don’t utter a word, but their ‘being’ is the lesson. Others are scholars, poets and philosophers who analyze and debate the subject. There are also instances of the guru learning through the sishya, from women or a person of lower caste – all the above quoted to prove the catholicity of the culture.

 

Gurus nevertheless wield tremendous power and what transpires in the classroom is defined by their intentions. Though there have been many questioning and combative sishyas, the general attitude expected from the learner is that of humility and reverence. Questioning stops at technical and operational issues at best. The most intrinsic and foundational challenges are rarely raised. They are accepted truths, the edifice on which teaching operates. Unfortunately, since it is in these questions that the socio-political is intricately inter-woven, these ideas are constantly brushed under the carpet, ridiculed or trivialized. This teacher-centric power imbalance is the backbone of learning in schools, corporations, bureaucracy, politics or our family. The socio-emotional structure that governs transference is already defined and so-called modernity has not changed its nature. If anything, technology has only further entrenched it by keeping human beings apart.

In Karnatik music, the teacher is in general anchored in an age-old belief system about music and buys into its scaffolding. As a consequence, the student, most of the times unknowingly, is imbibing both and weaving for herself a social-aesthetic that defines the music. This is important to understand – the connect between the aesthetic and the social.

We have to realize that every line of music has a social, political and aesthetic story and it is very difficult to separate one from another, or try understanding each in isolation. A certain phrase in a raga or compositional form can be lost to posterity, if the community of musicians who sang them are not part of the narrative. Therefore, music is simultaneously a musical and a non-musical activity and every music class is an aesthetic-socio-political playground. And automatically, all that we assimilate as knowledge is a complex bundle of human constructions.

Yet, the guru and sishya can transcend this by creating unconditioned spaces of experience. For this to happen, one needs a teacher who is comfortable being a vulnerable human being. Vulnerability here does not refer to weakness; it is the ability to reveal oneself completely as a person of contradictions, fears and uncertainty, to everyone and especially the student. This quality allows us to receive in a way that we never can quite know ‘as who we are or what we think we should be.’ But in the normal course, unfortunately, the guru and sishya are just acting out designated roles.

 

The relationship must shed formulaic obedience and obeisance towards the ‘giver’ and the ‘given’. What we need is the possibility that both of them can enter a state of wonderment. Rapture pervades the space and the teacher and student inexplicably observe knowledge without judgment. It is important that aesthetic judgment emanating from the socio-political is discarded. In this fullness, knowledge becomes a happening – osmosis. This allows for the sieving out of personal preferences from all that is shared. The guru who controls the learning space must be a catalyst in transforming knowledge into experience designing the psychological shape of the classroom so as to emanate from this spirit. But this is not easy since it entails a loss of control and flattens the guru-sishya hierarchy. In this living, the guru and the sishya automatically derive a deeper sense of the ‘greys’ that blur any access to art experience. This grey is the class-caste-gender inequality embedded in the music. This freedom triggers articulated and non-articulated questioning of questions that are not in search of answers but provide a passageway into the essence of the art form. In this, knowledge is derived from dispassionate experience.

 

I have here discussed one context, Karnatik music, but it is certainly possible that students imbibe this spirit from other learning environments. It is a distinct possibility that the sishya begins to observe and question music with the same intensity and experience as she does in her public school. This results in a cross-pollination of learning. The irony here is that many believe that it happens the other way – art to other learning contexts – but in convention bound art forms everyone learns in fear of some idea and someone, including the dead!

But the problem in life is that every learning is inbound and model-led to reinforce the mechanics of the subject rather than allowing anyone to really come in contact with its experience. The way we learn chemistry in college, or about relationships from family and friends, methods of protest from activists and political lessons from the nation state are, each, very different in technique from one another. But the rules that govern how we learn and what we imbibe are the same. Using diverse semantics we learn constructions and formulae while intrinsically venerating similar control structures. The role of the dvarapalaka (gatekeeper) is to make sure that at no point of time questions that destabilize these high-rise buildings are allowed within their vicinity. The moment these uncomfortable thoughts are raised, caretakers are up in arms.

So do we really learn? Are we able to touch and feel the real that we seek? These are the questions that we ought to be asking. The problem is that all the while the substance is right in front of us but we hardly see it, at times by chance it passes by, yet our own mindset and the people around pull us back into the cocoon of safety. Learning as established is just a smoke screen, conditioning and control being the real intent and it operates at an emotional, psychological and even in the much-touted intellectual domain.

 

If an individual can break through this glass ceiling, what follows is magic! The contradiction between the transformative nature of the knowledge experience and what we have made of it in our midst forces the person to ask existential questions. What is the true nature of learning and why am I engaged with it? What is the relationship between the individual and nature? This enquiry may begin as a simple technical query but a willingness to look within will open up a boundary-less vista of understanding that embraces disciplines cutting across humanity’s creative pursuits.

When we follow this pathway we will recognize that the separated identities we hold permeate all acts of our life. It is only when there is an acceptance of this conundrum that acquisition ends and learning begins. It is in the flux generated from the realization that the urge to acquire knowledge unwittingly but invariably removes us from the real, that clarity begins to emerge. What is this clarity? It is the ability to be moved, stirred and shaken in ‘knowing’.

 

Self-enquiry is a term often used by spiritualists to indicate a cleansing process. I refuse to fall into that trap, because it is just another hierarchy of the self-aware versus the uninitiated. I am not speaking of a shuddhi because all of us remain ‘polluted’ by who we are and where we stand; that, in fact, is the core of being alive. Life will always remain a personal battle; we will continue to be imperfect, struggling to make sense of all that we do. But we can constantly be aware of the minefields that force us to push away ideas and, more importantly, not realize the preciousness of what we have right in front of us.

We live a life of transaction, where only the complexity of sale varies from market to market. This contractual existence must be challenged. The difficulty with this atmavicharana is that we derive immense pleasure from the way we deliver knowing to people, convincing everyone that this is the real, judged as correct and good – all the while oppressing and controlling minds. Why would we want that destroyed? To remove ourselves from this web of comfort and power is no mean task.

In Latin discernere means ‘to separate, to distinguish’. I will interpret this term with reference to our present discussion. To separate and distinguish are seen as virtues. But if we were to ask, why and how we distinguish, we will find that these separations are based on habit, memory and the simplistic phrase, ‘likes-dislikes’. We remain the same, surrounded by similar people who think similarly. The others may be wonderful but they are kept beyond the circle that reinforces our belief system. Depending on our power within society, our might and numbers will be decided. But as we have discussed earlier, understanding comes when we can remove ourselves from these limitations; until then knowing will remain a mirage. And fascinatingly, in Latin the word for unlearning is undiscere.

Let us not misinterpret undiscere to mean an inability to distinguish. I would rather see it as a quality where diversity is experienced as individual states of beauty and not comparative ranking. You may ask whether I am advocating that everything and anything goes. Even though it does sound like that, what I am trying to convey is something slightly different. Is it possible to allow knowledge to enrich one without socially manufactured contortions? The more we are able to do this the more will we question the charlatan stowed away in the deep recesses of our minds. This is the quality I seek. It is also distinctly possible to dislike something yet realize its intrinsic honesty and depth. Can we do this?

 

We could say unlearning is the actual learning. Unlearning is not erasing all that we know. It is a beautiful voyage of removing the cobwebs that do not allow us to feel ‘that which is being learnt’. These webs are within our minds and all around us, created by humanity. I am not going to get myself entangled with the epistemological question of knowledge and knowing, but this I will state, that to experience beauty (which is knowledge) we have to remain aware of the fake that the marketplace has established as the genuine. And as we all know, the marketplace is not just an economic den, it is equally a cultural cesspool. The tragedy is that we know this but fear of rejection and ostracism stops us from moving forward. And unlearning is not a one-time operation; it needs to happen again and again until we step outside the maze.

Unlearning challenges the status quo, accepted formulations and the establishment; the person taking this route is, therefore, labelled a dissenter. She is disliked, what she says is laughed at; she is labelled a ‘rebel without a cause’. Anger is the primary emotion that the dissenter evokes and violence is not too far behind. Both these are just defence mechanisms we human beings create for ourselves, so that we can shut our minds to that which is uncomfortable.

 

It is important to understand that the dissenter is as problematic for the liberal as she is to the autocrat; in each of these states, people just choose different things to hold onto. The dissenter is, therefore, most of the times, a soloist, part of the woodwork but not a piece of furniture. The dissenter is actually an all-pervading consciousness that can never be thrown out. We may discard the individual and in her lifetime she may be pushed to the rim of society, but her hard-hitting questions will never disappear. They will nag us and remain irritants, and we have to wonder why. The reason is, of course, obvious. They come from an inner core and speak an unconditioned truth that demolishes all what we hold as sacrosanct.

The dissenter may not always be right about the way she wants to address the obstructions that disallow learning, but there is no doubt that the questions she raises are essential and substantial. The dissenter is also constantly gathering and unlearning, the only difference between us and her is that she is aware of this condition and willing to put herself through the struggles of ridding herself of this muddle. We, on the other hand, celebrate remaining in the well. At the same time the dissenter is not out there, an outsider or pariah; she lives within every one of us hoping that a day will come when we awaken from our prolonged slumber.

 

I began this exploration by placing myself within a specific knowledge milieu and then disowned the environment; yet I held on to ‘that which I believe exists even beyond it’. This may sound like a magicians trick, even a charade, an attempt to be ‘different’, all the while remaining stuck in the rut. I write with the strength of what art has given me during those un-preconditioned moments when everyone has looked and marvelled not appreciated, smiled not clapped, wondered not defined, cried not wept. We all received but not something from out there; we opened ourselves to our own minds and music was just a catalyst,

Knowledge and learning are vitally experiential which is why layers of conditions manipulate them. This makes moving from the personal arena – where my, mine, ours and every other form of ownership strangulates me to the unrestricted ‘open’ – a daunting task. Can I move to this space un-curtailed by the personal? All I know is that I will trip and fall many times over, but I have to pick myself up and keep trying.

I will end with this final thought. If after all the unlearning and dissension I find that the knowledge that I thought existed behind the screen of conflict is emptiness, will I have the courage to accept it and move on? I don’t have an answer to that as yet. I only know that I write and speak as a musician and I use that term not to define me, but to remind myself that being ‘in music’ is my unlearning.

 

* T.M. Krishna is the author of A Southern Music: The Karnatik Story. HarperCollins India, 2013.