IT could be said with stories, three to be precise. Can we call it ‘Three Stories on Music’s Peace Mission’? Perhaps. The stories within the stories can remain unnamed. Music is after all an evanescence that one carries around in the mind.

The first: Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said came together on a unique project to mark the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. The Weimar Workshop, as it is famously known, brought together Arab and Israeli musicians along with a smaller group of German musicians to perform in an orchestra. In a conversation with Barenboim – that reflects on explorations on music and society – Said calls the Weimar Workshop a ‘daring experiment’. Most of the participants were in the age group of 18 and 25, except for one Kurdish boy who was fifteen. The group was led by the renowned Chinese-American cellist, Yo Yo Ma and music director of the Berlin State Opera, Barenboim, also a resolute critic of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

Recounting the event, Said says: ‘There was a question of whether the governments would allow the students to attend. They all did come in the end, including a group from Syria, a group from Jordan, one from the Palestinian territories, and others from Israel, Egypt, Lebanon and maybe one or two other countries. There was an assumption that this programme might be an alternative way of making peace. The peace process didn’t seem to be bringing results. But I don’t think saving the peace process was our main intention.’ For both Said and Barenboim, it was important to see what would be the outcome of bringing these musicians together, for an orchestra in the spirit of Goethe. That Goethe who wrote a ‘fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam.’ It is said that Goethe, after reading a page of the Quran, was so enchanted that he discovered Islam through Persian and Arabic sources.

The story of the workshop gets more interesting from this point. During a chat in the workshop with Said, a young boy put his hand up and said he felt ‘discriminated’. A Lebanese violinist offered his bit to this story of discrimination. ‘After the programme, late into the night, a few of us meet to improvise Arab music.’ The young boy continued: ‘I am an Albanian. I’m from Israel, but I am originally from Albania and I’m Jewish, and they said to me that only Arabs can play Arabic music.’ It was a shocker, an extraordinary moment; who could play Arab music and who couldn’t, was the question. What followed were arguments and counter arguments, but in about ten days’ time when these rough moments showed signs of settling down, the Arab boy was teaching Yo Yo Ma how to tune his cello to the Arabic scale. He had begun to feel that the Chinese could play Arab music, and in the days to come, this circle only grew wider.

Said, after narrating the incident, records his observations: ‘It wasn’t only the Israelis and Arabs who didn’t care for each other. There were some Arabs who didn’t care for other Arabs as well as Israelis who cordially disliked other Israelis. It was remarkable to witness the group, despite the tensions of the first week or ten days, turn themselves into a real orchestra. In my opinion, what you saw had no political overtones at all. One set of identities was superseded by another set. There was an Israeli group, and a Russian group, and a Syrian group, a Lebanese group, a Palestinian group and a group of Palestinian Israelis. All of them suddenly became cellists and violinists playing the same piece in the same orchestra under the same conductor.

‘I will never forget the look of amazement on the part of the Israeli musicians during the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh, where the oboist plays a very exposed A major scale. They all turned around to watch an Egyptian student play a perfect A major scale on the oboe, which Daniel had elicited out of him. The transformation of these kids from one thing to another was basically unstoppable.’

 

One of the Syrian kids, Barenboim says, had never met an Israeli before, and for him, an Israeli was a negative example of what can happen to his country and to the Arab world. But this same boy, found himself sharing a musical stand with an Israeli cellist. ‘They were trying to play the same note with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow, with the same sound, with the same expression. They were trying to do something together, something about which they cared, about which they were both passionate. Well, having achieved that one note, they already can’t look at each other the same way, because they shared a common experience,’ Barenboim narrates, capturing that transforming moment poignantly.

At the Weimar Workshop were a group of musicians whose geo-political identities, to begin with, preceded their personal identities as musicians. In fact, their identities as musicians was so shrouded by their national identities, that music which is otherwise believed to transcend time, space and language, also belonged to a regiment. Cast in a dichotomy of such identities, they were unhappy, caught as they were between explicit political opinions, and the not-so-explicit nature of art. Faith (in their case, music) is infinitely more complex than that which is determined by the dominant dichotomies of our times – which includes nation, language, geopolitical borders, and identity.

The existence of these musicians, it seemed, was located somewhere in between these dichotomies. What was that position? It could only be determined by confronting the ambivalences that are intrinsic to the nature of art, the artist and the artistic process. Music, like faith, could neither be viewed as a totalizing category nor as a monolithic one – both are fraught with dangers.

As Daniel Barenboim argues, this is the beginning of cultural intolerance. There is a clear difference between the feelings of cultural heritage and fascistic ideas about the nation state. So, to say that something that is culturally Arab, is fine, but to say that only Arabs can play a piece of music, is a problem. As a reaction against global homogenization, there is a return to comfortable symbols of the past. Ironically, at the same time market globalization renders everything the same. So, the musician of the Weimar Workshop had to find his position between ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ that coexist in contradictory harmony in the contemporary world.

 

What is peace in music? Where is it located? Is it in the text or the lyric? Is it in the score or the notation? Is it in its soundscape? Let’s keep these questions with us as we turn our attention to the second story. In the 19th and 20th centuries, reformatting of the Carnatic and Hindustani music genres took place. The nationalist-cultural project in modern India was underwritten by questions of power, caste and gender. During these times, the sonic qualities of every kind of music were assessed and analysed using these parameters. Art music practices or what is commonly referred to as ‘classical music’, was recast as national treasure.

 

With classical music moving out of courts and into urban spaces in the 19th century, music was amidst a new listenership, it was being understood and consumed differently. The music along with the musician, the new space it came to occupy, the new patronage and status that it received, along with the growing repertoire of symbols, codes and objects that it came to embody – the community involved in this believed that it was ‘performing the nation’. The performing elite and the people who inhabited these realms, reclaimed artistic inheritance and kept a distance from the hereditary performers. This was happening both in the North and South. Apart from the hierarchy that it created among music, high brow and low brow, it got attached to social practices such as caste and gender.

The great musician, D.V. Paluskar, equated religion with nationalism and treated classical music as Hindu music. In the South, it was urbanization, Madras Music Academy, the national and language movements. The ‘classical’ of modern India exemplified through its persona, bears the features of the nation state itself. While the music sang of spirituality, equanimity, oneness with God and more, its exterior was a robust machismo. Did all of the music world react to this new era in a particular way? If there were variations, what were they? How were they shaped? There are plenty of stories that flow out of this epochal era, but let’s study two. They could be seen as aberrations, but they were highly influential, powerful and austere – they carried in them the essence of art and art practice itself.

Caste, gender and class was a pertinent issue in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is interesting how many musicians of those times were able to transcend boundaries of caste and gender through their art. Sawai Gandharva – guru to maestros such as Bhimsen Joshi, Gangubai Hangal and Firoz Dastur – was a devout Brahmin who believed in elaborate puja and ritual. His deep faith in his God, bestowed upon him the moral generosity to open the doors of his home to every seeker. His quarrels, punishments and extraordinary love to all of them had its basis only in music and nothing else. Sawai Gandharva learnt from a Muslim guru, Abdul Karim Khan, and took everyone into his fold, even when they faced social ostracization.

 

It is a matter of great curiosity and interest, how these social evils did not become major impediments in the artistic world. The stories that one finds in abundance were not only at loggerheads with what we recognize as motifs in the larger social world, but even in the artistic world as well. Religion and caste hierarchy did not become hurdles for learning. There are ever so many instances of Muslim gurus and Hindu students, upper caste shishyas and lower caste gurus. They lived together in the gurukula system, and carried out duties for them. Even a conservative lingayat like Mallikarjun Mansur learnt from Muslim gurus like Manji Khan and Burji Khan and had deep reverence for them. A highly conservative Madhwa Brahmin, Pandit Ramarao Naik was the disciple of Ustad Faiyaz Khan. The ustad not only took him under his wings and taught him the complex Agra style, but for ten long years that Ramarao Naik lived with him, Faiyaz Khan cooked rice and pulses in a separate kitchen for his prized disciple.

 

The glaring contradictions of the time – the deeply conservative society and the rather democratic world of art – are hard to resolve, though they didn’t exist completely as watertight compartments. However, cultural life or the world of art has never determined the politics of a country, nor does it hold a mirror to man to man relationships. As William Weber says about the relation between music and politics, ‘Musical life had its own politics and was part of that larger world.’ Cast into the social orbit, these questions had no easy answers. However, from the way many of these remarkable human beings lived, it is possible to understand that they were extremely faithful to their own allegiances – they were devout Brahmins, Muslims and Lingayats, but that never took away their respect for other belief systems. There was no hierarchy – no high and no low – in their understanding of other faiths or practices. At the same time there was no compromise on their own set of beliefs either. Largely driven and determined by humanist concerns, rigid regimentation of caste practices and private gods seemed ironical in the way they lived their lives.

Faiyaz Khan saab was staunchly religious. He offered namaaz five times a day. Just as he was eager to reach his audience through his music, he also sought union with his God. The devout Muslim that he was, he took part in Hindu festivals like Holi, Deepawali and several others. In fact, Partition affected him deeply. Many of his friends and relatives moved over to Pakistan, but Khan saab refused to leave the country. Those close to Khan saab have recalled how he was so deeply influenced by Hindu culture and that it was unthinkable for him to move to Pakistan. In fact, from his compositions one can hardly tell that they are creations of a Muslim composer.

The tradition of learning, in this case music, has never been separate from the individual and the society. While the three work and exist simultaneously, it is however not necessary that artistic traditions live as part of social traditions. Nevertheless, it is only when these two traditions come face to face does ‘tradition’, as defined by the individual, take birth. Hence tradition is not static, but something that is constantly expanding and evolving as the individual continually defines and redefines it. If Gangubai was speaking of adherence to her guru’s music, she was speaking of her implicit faith in the musical tradition, in the gurushishya parampara. But her own philosophy of life, which largely defined her musical persona as well, emerged from her personal negotiations with social traditions. If in her life she became a prominent symbol of communal harmony, even as her own private God Mylaralinga was constantly on her breath, it speaks of the way tradition materialized in her.

 

Baba Allauddin Khan saab, the maestro of Maihar, was not different either. He believed that oneness with God can be achieved only when the human being surrenders himself to his creative faculties. Baba was a devout Muslim, but his sur sadhana had brought him extremely close to the Hindu gods as well. For someone as spiritual as him, it was difficult to paint his notes with colours of caste. This extraordinary musician, who named his daughter Annapurna after the Hindu goddess, said that he experienced oneness with God only through his music. When Baba fell very ill, the doctors advised that he be shifted to the hospital for treatment. Baba refused, he was a great devotee of Ma Sharada, and was adamant that he die at her feet and not in a hospital.

 

Kesarbai Kerkar’s life was one of exacting sadhana, as an end in itself. Rabindranath Tagore wrote in his dairy (1938) after listening to her at a private baithak: ‘I consider myself fortunate in securing a chance for listening to Kesarbai’s singing which is an artistic phenomenon of exquisite perfection… The magic of her voice with the mystery of its varied modulations has repeatedly proved its true significance not in any pedantic display of technical subtleties mechanically accurate, but in the revelation of the miracle of music only possible for a born genius.’ Kesarbai was born into a family of traditional women musicians, but her gurus were all men of the upper caste, Ramakrishnabuva Vaze and Bhaskarbua Bhakle. She went to the great maestro, Alladiya Khan saab and begged him to take her as his disciple. He nurtured Kesarbai’s music with care and rigour for 25 long years.

Khan saab knew that he had a priceless gem as his disciple but he ordered her not to sing until he gave her permission. Not even once did Kesarbai ask him if she could perform in those 25 years. Khan saab, in what could be seen as the greatest tribute, said that his most worthy disciples were the phenomenal musicians, Mogubai Kurdikar and Kesarbai Kerkar. These journeys were ridden with difficulties, pain and turmoil; but nothing could deter the guru or the disciples.

M.L. Vasanthakumari, who also shares her background with Gangubai and Kesarbai, excelled in technique, something that the music world believed was out of bounds for a woman. MLV was trained by a revolutionary musician like G.N. Balasubramaniam: this upper caste guru recognized the remarkable ability of MLV and prepared her for every kind of intellectual challenge in the world of music, ridden with brazen male superiority.

Tradition is replete with contradictory forces; if one desires to understand it, it has to be understood in its paradoxes. For instance, Pandit Ramarao Naik who studied under the large-hearted maestro Faiyaz Khan, was extremely conservative, bordering on bigotry. He was willing to learn music under a Muslim maestro, he even ate what his Muslim guru cooked for him, but was a fanatic casteist when he accepted students. How does one understand these personal idiosyncrasies? How was it that some artistes were able to transcend social boundaries – as it plays out with respect to caste, gender and class in these stories – through their art, while some could not?

The secular space that we find in art probably emerged from the artiste’s personal understanding of religion and gender. Even with private gods and very private practices of worship, they were able to create a cosmos of their own where all gods co-existed under the huge umbrella of art. Here, perhaps, social truths had made peace with tradition. If tradition manifested itself differently in different geographical locations and different contexts, the individual was responsible. The social values and its inherited paradigms do not belong in the art, but to the society in which it lives.

 

If the first part of the second story is how the world of music dealt with the manifestations of political and social changes, the second part is about how an individual in the throes of many of these major developments, envisaged a very different kind of journey for himself and music. It was a strong response, a journey of conviction. The process and the outcome was an inseparable fusing of elements that were always kept separate – both physically and philosophically. He reflected on the functions of music, its sources and potential in a manner that was a far cry from common imagination. Speaking of this unsurpassed musician, Kumar Gandharva, Raghav Menon writes in The Musical Journey of Kumar Gandharva: ‘It was like a meteor that he passed across the sky and cut in his wake the body of Hindustani classical music into two neat halves; one half before Kumar Gandharva and one half after him, a kind of a B.C. and an A.D. in Indian music. It was the magical opening up of man from one tradition to the building of another.’

 

Kumar Gandharva, the most influential musician of modern India, but less studied, questioned the basis of all understanding that constituted music. At the face of it, it seems that Kumar Gandharva’s quest was completely divorced from the socio-political churning that was taking place and was immersed completely in the artistic personal, on the contrary, through his search for truth he was raising deep questions about what constituted the classical. His findings, and the music that he later configured, dismantled, in a way, the highbrow notions of the classical.

Kumar’s musical realm was beyond what he had learnt and mastered. It crossed the conventional notions of musical domain and tradition. The meanings or the depth of this universe of music could hardly be spelt out – he was finding it impossible to unearth the mystery of the ragas, and the power they exercised over him. He felt deeply troubled, and suffered: Kumar Gandharva was certain that he could no longer follow the music that came in the traditional mode of teaching, connected to a learner becoming a performer. The art that he had acquired and the art that he aspired for were disparate. It was at this point that the folk of Dewas, to where he had moved, came to his rescue. Kumar Gandharva, Raghava Menon writes, believed that the folk do not sing to each other, they are actually telling each other, it was a dialogue. It therefore is speech that sounds like music, something that flows from a lived life. Kumar Gandharva could have perceived this as a conversation – with the other within you. A folk tune, he said, does not have a raga, it has the seeds of feeling. For Kumar Gandharva, the raga was not at all a scale, the feelings in the folk had to be brought into the raga.

 

After years of listening and analysing, Kumar Gandharva’s music had a second birth. It democratized the ‘pure’ and ‘hierarchical’ world of art to say that the future of the classical was in how much of the vitality of the folk one could perceive and imbue. Form, he said, derived meaning only from content: the raga came to life and acquired breadth only because of the meaning of the words. Therefore, even the idea that the raga structure is a given was contested. His perceptions of music were not merely a quest for the philosophical but also for social coexistence. In his quest he made the shastra or theory of music subservient to experience. In fact, Kumar Gandharva believed that truth could be attained only through the creative understanding of the social.

Kumar Gandharva who tried to incorporate the unheard into the classical, pioneered in giving a twist to Kabir’s writings as well. The raging sharpness of the socio-philosophical in Kabir was captured by Kumar Gandharva. He could, through his unique idiom, bring to the experience of the listener the inner recesses of Kabir. Kumar Gandharva used to say, ‘Bhajan singing is not bhakti sangeet. It is not the subject of God in the lyrics of the bhajan that makes it into bhakti sangeet but the man singing it.’ Raghava Menon says: ‘It was the blaze of heat in his voice, the high temperature that suddenly made you uncomfortable with the slap of meaning in the bhajan. It is the nature of bhakti which is instantly identified in every single nuance of Kumar’s tearing, pitiless bhajans. Kumar obviously knew bhakti differently from the safe social approach to bhajan singing, where people gather to remember God.’ The social had to disturb you, only then will emerge a music that will leap into the spiritual.

Is peace then something that you hear, something that you experience? Does it arise from a bed of tranquil emotions? Peace is a struggle, it is an eternal search that emerges from turbulent selves, warring ideas and emotions, deep ambivalences – all born out of an intense passion for social order. Singing, Kumar Gandharva used to say, is built on the substance of silence, at the very centre of every swara is hidden a vast silence. His journey began in the social, moved to the personal and journeyed to the spiritual. That’s why Kumar could say music should be bare – Nirbhay and Nirgun.

 

The third story is that of Gandhi, for whom music was chiefly something that enhanced the power of prayer, which he strongly advocated. He was very fond of the bhajan, not as an expression of religion or God, but as a channel of emotional experience that augmented the moral imperative. In fact, Rebecca Brown writes that like the charkha, music was also a symbol of Gandhian politics. The repetitious and recursive nature of the activity gave it the ability to work in a larger collective space. He therefore roped in the tallest musicians of this country – D.V. Paluskar to M.S. Subbalakshmi – so that he could gear the people of this country towards swaraj and ahimsa. Music had to train the body and mind to an inner experience of truth, it was not mere enjoyment. In his own personal practice and in the routine of the Sabarmati ashram, music was for moral and social regeneration and embodied spiritual politics. It had to resonate with a purity of purpose.

 

Kumar Gandharva’s views come strikingly close to Gandhi’s. Even though the bhajan was Gandhi’s most favourite genre of music, it was neither an occasion to remember God nor was it a mere celebration of music. It was ‘the blaze of heat within’, an unsparing, exacting route towards a moral awakening. In Gandhi’s case, it was also stirring a sonic emotion in the masses, on the arduous route to swarajya.

Gandhi says:¹ ‘Music has given me peace. I can remember occasions when music instantly tranquilised my mind when I was greatly agitated over something. Music has helped me overcome anger. I can recall occasions when a hymn sank deep into me, though the same thing expressed in prose had failed to touch me. I also found that the meaning of hymns discordantly sung has failed to come home to me.’ In saying this, Gandhi stresses on music’s therapeutic value; he is also driving home the importance of music as an idea and not merely words. The musical idea, he says, heightens the literary idea. And when he says ‘discordantly sung’, one presumes that he is not speaking of it as an off note musically, but also its inappropriateness, a disharmony. Though D.V. Paluskar’s Ramadhun was adopted by Gandhi in the freedom struggle, he changed it to suit his personal idea of the Ramarajya which was the coexistence of all Gods, and all thoughts. It was Gandhi who added the line Ishwara Allah Tero Naam, which is absent in Paluskar’s version.

‘There are two aspects of things, the outward and inward. It is purely a matter of emphasis with me. The outward has no meaning except in so far as it helps the inward. All true art is the expression of the soul. The outward forms have value in so far as they are the expression of the inner spirit of man’, Gandhi writes, and this again is something that finds concurrence with Kumar Gandharva’s views. It is from life that the art begins, it is through life that art has to pass, and it is this art that has been processed by life that the spiritual-philosophical is experienced. In other words, art has to be found, discovered and formulated in this laboratory called life.

 

Then what is peace? Is it an experience that is uniform to the song, the singer and the listener? Is it located in art or is it located in life? Is it that which imitates life in its Utopia? For both Kumar Gandharva and Gandhi, music and bhakti is that which makes its journey from the saguna to the nirguna, from love to knowledge, from form to formlessness. It was a journey from one to the other, it was neither monotheistic nor was it trapped in dichotomy.

Art draws from life, but art is not life. Life on the contrary, as Gandhi said, is art. This art which is life, must be the handmaid to art itself, he believed. Said, commenting on the Weimar Workshop says: ‘There is more of a concentration today on the affirmation of identity, on the need for roots, on the values of one’s own culture and one’s own sense of belonging. One has to accept the idea that one is putting down one’s own identity to the side, in order to explore the other. If ‘peace’ in the Weimar Workshop is found in the journey towards the other, it was similar in the case of the life of Hindustani musicians too. For Kumar Gandharva, the ‘other’ was located both in the inner realm and the outer realm, and peace had to be found only through a pitiless inner struggle in which all facades of truth are destroyed.

 

So was it for Gandhi. Peace had to be a reflection of the beauty of life itself, and this beauty was something that one had to arrive at and was not something that was readily available. Peace, is therefore beauty, a beauty that preserves an ecosystem that is both timeless and spaceless. It is a journey from constructed truth to truth itself. This journey, as one sees in these Three Stories on Music’s Peace mission, is a ruthless one – something that is continually demanding the sacrifice of the constructed ‘self’.

According to Gandhi, ‘Life must immensely exceed all the arts put together. What, after all, does the fussing with art amount to if it all the time stultifies life instead of elevating it? Is it not grotesque to claim – as so many artistes do – that art is the crown of creation, the last meaning of existence?’

If the idea of art be the idea of peace, peace is that process which makes it possible to journey to a place beyond the self, from constructed truth to truth itself. Peace is that place which one needs to travel to, it is neither in a raga nor in the lyric. It is neither in the coming together of a diverse set of musicians of diverse nationalities playing a ‘peace score’. Peace is in the constant negotiation with the self, of shedding the self, and making a journey beyond music.

 

Footnote:

1. The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol VI, The Voice of Truth. Navjivan Press.