By Aakar Patel

The News: November 2, 2008

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan of Kasur fled to India and became a citizen in 1958 because Pakistanis had little interest in music. Nehru requested him to move and Morarjibhai Desai gave him a bungalow in South Bombay, but what really convinced him was the audience.

While the Muslim is an equal — some might say superior — exponent of Hindustani music, its patron is the Hindu. Without the middle-class, upper-caste urban Hindu, Hindustani music in India would be in the same shape it is in Pakistan today.

In cities across India each weekend, concert halls are filled up by clerks, managers, accountants, housewives, retirees and students who will use public transport to listen to Khayal or Dhrupad or Carnatic.

Even lectures on Hindustani music get an audience on a Sunday morning. These are held in Bombay in places like Sri Shanmukhananda Hall or the Karnataka Sangha in Matunga, a Brahmin stronghold. Shanmukhananda (www.shanmukhanada.org.in) is where Zakir Hussain holds his annual concert on February 3 commemorating the barsi of his father, Allah Rakha.

The New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta has played there, as has Shakti with John McLaughlin, and Lahore’s Mekaal Hasan Band filled 2,000 seats in their first concert in India by word of mouth alone. But the hall’s primary audience comes to listen to the masters of Khayal, Dhrupad and Carnatic, and they have heard them in their prime: Amir Khan, Bhimsen Joshi, Jasraj, Rashid Khan, Ajay Chakraborty, Sultan Khan, Anindo Chatterjee, Bismillah Khah, Semmangudi Srinivas Iyer, L Subramaniam, M S Subbalakshmi.

Musicians in India are adored. They are venerated and revered and worshipped. Even angry Gujarat is a huge patron of Hindustani music, and Pakistani singers Mehdi Hassan and Ghulam Ali have sung in Ahmedabad and Surat dozens of times.

The story is that when 28-year-old Allah Rakha (Punjab Gharana) packed his bags to go to Lahore in 1947, his students said they would lay down on the tracks and not let his train move. The love is two-way.

Indian musicians make their money through concerts, since record and CD sales are poor. Concerts are ticketed, with the big money coming through either sponsors or in private concerts, which are popular in India.

Despite this, Rashid Khan (Sehaswan-Rampur) will come at 6am and sing for free to students of St Xavier’s who will fill the college auditorium during their annual festival, Malhar.

Hindustani music follows the pahar and the raags played are those that are appropriate for the hour. A continuous 24-hour (or even 48-hour) concert is not uncommon and will have over a dozen top musicians taking the stage in succession, each playing the raag appropriate for the time they are performing. Asavari in the morning, Bhimpalasi in the afternoon, Hamsadhwani (called Hans Dhun in Pakistan) in the evening, Jaijaiwanti at night and so on.

The biggest annual concert anywhere in the world is the 13-day Saptak Festival (www.saptak.org) held from January 1 in Ahmedabad. Entry is free, and none of the 80 musicians is paid — but the biggest names in Hindustani music sing there each year and have since 1980. Singers of the quality of Kishori Amonkar grumble mildly at the mob that clamours for them and at the lack of proper facility, but they come each year. Giant screens are now put outside the hall for those who cannot get seats.

Music is the one art, the one arena on the subcontinent where we are least bigoted. Dhrupad is the oldest form of music in India, and is made of chants from the Sam Veda, dating to 1500 BC.

It had its revival in the early 16th century under Raja Man Singh Tomar of Gwalior. Khayal is recent, attributed to the musician Sadarang in the court of Muhammad Shah Rangeela in the early 18th century, and earlier to the great Amir Khusro (1253-1325) and his Qawwal Bachche Gharana.

Dhrupad’s songs use variations of the sounds that make up the phrase Om Ananta Hari Narayan. It is sung to the accompaniment of a tanpura and the loud, gonging pakhavaj, not the tabla. This Hindu tradition has been kept alive in India after independence by a Muslim family, the Dagars. Zakiruddin Khan and Allahbande Khan and their eight grandsons, particularly the duos of Moinuddin and Aminuddin, and Zahiruddin and Faiyyazuddin.

Without the Dagar family, the art and tradition would have been lost. That has always been the way of Hindustani music, the one true shared part of sub-continental culture which is neither Hindu nor Muslim, or is both.

Hindus will listen in tears to a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan rendition of Allama Iqbal’s Shikwa and exult at lines that sing of the kalma being recited in the shade of swords, because the emotions that his music produces are known to them.

The teaching of music in India is unorganised. At the school level it is almost zero, and middle-class Indians must depend on musicians who teach children at home, or on music schools that are widespread only in cities.

There are a few universities with music faculties and there is one world-class institution that produces musicians of quality: Indian Tobacco Company’s Sangeet Research Academy (www.itcsra.org), which trained Rashid Khan. But the key to sustaining art is in getting kids to learn it at school.

Our music is complex and mood-based. Its biggest drawback is that unlike classical music it is not taught in notation. In America, even the smallest high school will have dozens of students who can read music fluently and play it often in marching bands and school concerts. Children in the west easily learn the canon of classical music because it is written in a language that can be taught and is not to be understood subliminally, like Hindustani music is.

Some work to codify our music was done by Bombay’s V N Bhatkande (died 1936), who wrote a history of the raags and classified them into 10 thaats, or mother raags. Each of Hindustani’s raags can be seen as coming out of one of these 10: Asavari, Bhairav, Bhairavi, Bilawal, Kafi, Kalyan, Khamaj, Marwa, Poorvi and Todi.

Bhatkande also traced the gharanas and their individual styles of music. Though further academic work has been done on this subject, there is little at the popular level which brings understanding to enthusiasts, especially children. The only people who truly know Hindustani music are those who have listened to it and have been guided in their listening over many years.

Where there has not been a natural problem, Indian pettiness has created one, such as the decision to ban the harmonium as a solo instrument by All India Radio in 1940. This single act by a bureaucrat, who judged the harmonium too modern, decimated the ranks of solo harmonium players in India at a time when All India Radio was music’s biggest patron.

India, Pakistan and Bangladesh must codify and simplify our music. We must produce a canon that can be understood by students and is easily taught. Our music is one of the few things of quality we have to teach the world. But we need to first understand it ourselves.

The writer is a former editor who lives in Bombay. Email: aakar.patel@ gmail.com