Do ragas have a history? Can we delve deep into the past of our music as historians and portray its picture to understand its evolution? What does ‘tradition’ really mean in music and how does an understanding of it influence our appreciation of the art? What is the relationship between culture and music? Is there a need to look at the history of Dhrupad afresh?
What role does accompaniment, especially that by sarangi, play in our music? Does the most famous Indian theory of aesthetic appreciation — the Rasa Siddhanta — really help us to enjoy contemporary music? These and many other such questions have been successfully raised and discussed in an important collection of articles written in Hindi by Mukund Lath over the past decades. The book “Sangeet aur Sanskriti” (Music and Culture) was brought out this year jointly by Sangeet Natak Akademi and Vijaya Books.
Mukund Lath is a man of many parts. He taught history at the Rajasthan Universtiy, Jaipur, and critically edited several medieval texts. He is a disciple of Pandit Jasraj and his writings on music have brought him several honours including Padma Shri; he is also a fellow of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Although he has written on music in both English and Hindi, he says that he expresses himself much more wholesomely in Hindi as ideas, though universal, are always expressed in a language that happens to be the carrier of a particular culture as also the medium of its expression.
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Writing in Hindi gives him a special feeling of closeness while writing in English engenders a feeling of being a ‘stranger’ or the ‘other’ in him. In the foreword to these thought-provoking though pedantic essays, Lath questions the Western practice of considering its music and philosophy as ‘mainstream’ and all other traditions of music and philosophy as ‘ethnomusic’ or ‘ethnophilosophy’. In his view, it shows the narrowness as well as Western arrogance of claiming monopoly over ‘universality of ideas’.
Himself a professional historian, Lath is not unaware of the problems that arise when one attempts a history of the raga because we do not have any artistic material to base it on. There is no way to know how Tansen, who created Darbari Kanhda, sang it himself. Or how it was sung by later generations, as no recordings are available. However, he claims to have found a way out and asserts that his history of the raga is based on the kala-shastra (theory of art) and not on the kala (art) itself. This to a great extent explains his undue fondness for Sanskrit treatises written by Sharangdev and others, as also his heavy scholastic approach.
It is rather surprising that he discusses these treatises in a way as if the Muslims never made their appearance on the political, and consequently, musical scene in North India. He quotes Kallinath who says that most of the ragas described by Sharangdev as prevalent in his time had gone out of vogue. It is difficult to understand how a history of the raga can be created on the basis of medieval Sanskrit treatises that contain illuminating theoretical discussions but often offer no clue about the actual musical practices.
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It is obvious that for his purpose, Lath has evolved a completely new approach to history. For him, the history of the raga is the history of how ideas about it evolved. However, one feels that even this project cannot be successfully attempted without taking into account those musical ideas that were introduced by the Muslims who brought their music from Central Asia and Iran and helped create such a successful fusion or amalgam that has grown in its appeal over the centuries and is still going strong.
Mukund Lath has penned a thought-provoking essay on accompaniment and the use of sarangi. He is right in pointing out that most vocalists hesitate to take sarangi, despite its many qualities, as an accompaniment as they are apprehensive that it might intrude into their performance and prove to be a disturbance rather than enhancement. He also makes us aware how tanpura is a late entrant in our music world and how it has acquired its present dominance.
The writer is a noted literary critic.