Embodying the music: A tribute to sarod legend Pt. Rajeev Taranath

“I don’t understand when it is said that Indian music is abstract. I can only say that it takes an Ali Akbar to create immediacies of the sensuousness, of dark, of unutterably sad and desolate and of the vibrant gold tranquilities, each of which comes through with the specificity of touching one’s love in the dark.”

I wrote these lines down in 1988. I had only recently become a sarod student of the maestro Pt. Rajeev Taranath, then. Some of us — disciples, friends, and fans — wanted to put together a felicitation event for him on the occasion of his 56th birthday. As a part of this event, we planned on bringing out a souvenir. We also asked Rajeevji to give us a write-up (he did not like writing, he spoke, and somebody wrote it down).

This time around, the task of writing was given to me. I remember vividly how he sat on a big cane armchair and spoke. And I kept writing. The whole article flowed like a fine, flawless and always-already perfect piece of music. Rajeevji had captured the amazing journey of his life in two rare and wonderful pages. In essence, what he says of his Guru in this write-up is at the heart of his musical thinking. Rajeevji maintains that Indian music is not abstract. It manifests itself when the body, mind, emotion, and spirit are all fused together. It is the concrete sense of wholeness you feel when the body and music are one.

Krishna Manavalli

Agnosticism and devotion

Rajeevji often invoked such metaphors of musical embodiment. For instance, when he narrated the first instance of meeting his Guru Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and listening to his music, he described such a moment of incarnation. Interestingly enough, Rajeevji called his Guru, the “ishtadevatha” (his personal god). Among the many rich contradictions which were part of his personality, this tension between agnosticism and devotion was significant. His rationalism in other walks of life was curiously inflected by a profound feeling of devotion towards music and his Guru. No wonder that he sometimes used religious analogies to illustrate those fine moments of transcendence he experienced in art.

This is strongly evident in an interview he did with me on the Doordarshan in the 90s. He spoke of the indelible impact of hearing his Guru’s music at the Town Hall way back in 1952. “I not only heard [Khansaab’s] music, I conceived it. It’s like birthing … a pregnancy. That kind of expression and that kind of experience is something you find in the Bible. You are filled with the Holy Ghost. Everything comes together fused at that moment. It’s an epiphany!” Rajeevji evoked this sense of embodiment when he spoke of his Guru’s teaching, “Khansaab’s music flowed into me.” He also felt that Khansaab sat in his fingers when he played.

Sarod maestro Pandit Rajeev Taranath
| Photo Credit:
M.A. Sriram

Of Eliot and Yeats

In fact, the crucial connection that Rajeevji forges between music and the body reminds me of two poets he worked on in his long and illustrious literary career as a professor, critic and writer (although he claimed to have moved away from literature, he always read — anything from Shakespeare to Kambar, from Wallace Stevens to Ananthamurthy or Adiga. And even today, he is much respected in the Indian literary circles as a seminal thinker). One is T.S. Eliot, whom he was not particularly fond of. But he wrote his doctoral thesis on this modernist literary giant. The other was a poet after his heart, W.B. Yeats.

Both poets describe an effulgent moment when the temporal and the timeless coalesce, a moment when the transcendent becomes embodied. According to Eliot, in this moment of illumination, “You are the music/while the music lasts.” Yeats evokes this singular moment in a somewhat different manner. His famous rhetorical question, “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” highlights a similar experience of total inwardness with art. In Rajeev Taranathji, you perceive this sense of music permeating the body. After all, the iconic image of the maestro — his head bent over the instrument on his lap, eyes closed and rapt in some musical otherworld — is familiar to Hindustani music lovers. His was a life filled with music and more.

Literature, languages (he spoke nine with ease), poetry to poultry, cooking to sports — it was a mindbogglingly wide array of interests and knowledge that this man of brilliant intellect and keen sense of life possessed. However, neither his singular search for musical excellence nor his strong preoccupation with things of the mind took him away from people. His social commitment, political stances, which he was fearlessly vocal about or his profound cultural concerns made him throb deeply to his immediate contexts. His splendid ability to relate to people, to laugh, and to empathise with them was an integral part of his being. This multi-faceted genius passed away on June 11 this year. But his music, literary and cultural work, social concerns, and, above all, the unforgettable love he felt for people are the great legacy he left us.

Perhaps this is why his friend of a lifetime, Chandrasekhar Kambar, declares, “Rajeev and his father are tall people who walk[ed] among us. They always come into my imagination as larger-than-life myth figures. Their contemporaneity is fused with something timeless.” Kambar’s dreamer-musician Chandamutta sets off on a quest for the moon raga (perhaps reminiscent of the raga that Ali Akbar Khan created and Rajeevji played magnificently — Chandranandan). Whether it is the young boatman who goes in search of the silver moon swimming like fish in the water on a night of floods, the hunter boy who aims at the moon from his tree-shelter, Ninnadi in Shikharasoorya, or the rebellious Chambasa who brings in new ways of thinking into his society in Shivana Dangura — there are a host of dreamers and myth-heroes of Kambar’s oeuvre whom, the stalwart Kannada writer says, were inspired by his musician friend.

Curiously enough, there is another myth figure, Karna of Mahabharata, whom Rajeevji identified with sometimes, although for a different reason. He was found quipping, “Like mine, Karna’s life, too, was a series of sad happenings. So, across all these centuries, it’s this sense of being thwarted again and again that we share.” But the similarities between the two are surely of a higher order. Son of the Sun God, extraordinary archer Karna did not get what was due to him in life. Still, his immense generosity did not lessen a bit. Friend or enemy, whoever asked him for anything, he gave of his largesse. So did the good-hearted Rajeevji. And he simply brushed off any feeling of ill will with a “baksh do” (forgive). He was indeed a complex and unusual blend of a dreamer relentlessly in pursuit of an impersonal art and, at the same time, a loving, caring and enormously generous people’s person.

Event on October 19

On the 19th of this month (Saturday), the Pt Rajeev Taranath Memorial Trust is organising an event to celebrate the birthday of this magnificent musician, literary figure, and cultural thinker. The event at Ravindra Kalakshetra is co-hosted by Karnataka Sahitya Akademi, Bengaluru. The evening features talks by eminent musicians and literary figures like Hamsalekha, Boluwar Mohamad Kui, Sarvamangala, and Mukundraj. This is followed by a Hindustani vocal music concert by Pt Venkatesh Kumar.

(The author, a student of Pt. Rajeev Taranath, is currently a Professor in the Department of Studies in English at the University of Mysore. She is a well-known translator who works in English and Kannada languages.)