‘Since the 1980s,” says writer and musician Amit Chaudhuri, “Indian classical music has ossified — it has become a world of hierarchy and gestures.”
In Johannesburg last week for lectures and a performance, Chaudhuri is professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia. His award-winning 2009 novel, The Immortals, speaks on many levels: as a poignant evocation of a time and a place (1980s Mumbai), a comedy of manners, a coming-of-age tale and a memorial to a music scene in transition.
In that decade urbanisation, democracy, imported records and, above all, the movies were erasing the last traces of the milieu where master musicians had the status of saints, and princes were patrons, and where there was space for natural voices and contesting interpretations within the tradition.
Instead, his protagonists — sulky teenage singing student Nirmalya, his vocally gifted mother Mallika and their teacher Shyamji — move in a world where even gurus must earn a living and where the light-voiced style of film singers such as Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle is becoming omnipresent, feeding the market for a standardised musical product.
Through the Eighties and Nineties, Chaudhuri feels, “the music became a sort of national music: state-sponsored and commodified as symbolic of Indian authenticity. Some musicians became national emblems and people didn’t look beyond that. Certain elements, such as jugalbandi [a musical statement-and-response pattern] and sawaal-jawaabi — where you’re playing with both the raga and the time signature — were done to death, so bankrupt that they drew immediate applause merely for being recognisable.”
He’s impatient with the notion of cultural creation as something that can be held still and owned in this way: Nirmalya in The Immortals is disturbed by the thought that “the ragas had no composer — It was the idea of the author, wasn’t it, that made one see a work of art — as a piece of property — And this sense of ownership and origination went into how a race saw itself through its artists. He realised — with a feeling of despair as well as an incongruous feeling of liberation, that this, though, was not the way to understand Indian music.”
Static notions of origination, authenticity and ownership and their logical consequence — the postcolonial discourse of transplantation and indigenisation — don’t appeal to Chaudhuri.
Rather, he’s concerned to document the “moments of recognition” in both literature and music of “diverse modes of contact; idiosyncratic disruptions of time that [speak of] an ongoing process and networks of affiliation stretching in every direction”.
Too much Indian literature since Salman Rushdie, he feels, has defined itself in terms of the “Indian-ness” that Western critics defined and adored — “an incorrigible hybridity”. But Chaudhuri argues that Indian culture in the past 200 years has been characterised rather by “a playful inward eclecticism and cosmopolitanism, fed by the city, the coming of English, the emergence of new secular values in the 19th century — an eclecticism of the imagination”.
That extended impulse to imagine across — and question — categories also inspires his music. Albums trenchantly titled This Is not Fusion and Found Music play (he uses the term a lot) with the transformation of elements within and between genres, challenging origins, authenticity and ownership.
“It was a reaction to Indo-Western fusion as I knew it before 2005: an Indian classical musician moonlighting with Western players: him soloing, representing some so-called immemorial tradition; them adding colour and representing the modern — neither category in itself static but becoming static in their meeting.”
But it was also inspired by moments of what he calls “double hearing”, such as a santoor in a hotel lobby apparently breaking into Auld Lang Syne.
“Of course, there’s a pentatonic base to both. These accidents in my own listening fascinate me; they point to the Indian and Western in me being hopelessly mixed-up.” Chaudhuri’s musical findings — Eric Clapton’s Layla and Summertime, and the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood among them — are appropriated into a raga process where “the chord cycle is as much a parameter for improvisation as it ever is for a jazz musician”.
There’s clearly a lot of Chaudhuri in Nirmalya, the philosophical music student in The Immortals. But “the impulse was never just to recount my past. You make your points — with the material available to you through your own life. I’m fascinated by Nirmalya, but also distanced from him; I can parody the questions he asks as performance but also tap into his genuine intensity to convey the Âsincerity of the emotions.”
The Immortals‘ comedy of manners, heavy with the described minutiae of possessions and settings, is not simply satire. It lets Chaudhuri ask a far more profound question about their meaning: “Do we view the ordinary in the same way post-globalisation as we did when the ordinary had the power to be redemptive?”