Kishori Amonkar never got the Bharat Ratna, but she was India’s jewel

The human voice has a range—at its base, it is deep. The voice emerges from somewhere within, grounded firmly as if it were subterranean. Then it rises slowly and reaches the peak, at which point it becomes so sharp and clear that even when it has stopped, the sound reverberates in the silence. Kishori Amonkar’s genius lay in knowing the boundaries. She would then guide her voice along the contours of sound without knocking into the boundaries, making it seem astonishingly easy. The rest was silence.

She was a perfectionist. She did not like latecomers or disturbances of any kind at her concerts. She expected her accompanists to be accomplished—I remember one concert where midway through an aalaap, with which she initiated her performance, she turned around and instructed the accompanist what she must do, to provide the base from which her voice could soar. She often closed her eyes when she sang, her mind concentrating not so much on the words, because for her the lyrics were often immaterial, but on the architecture of the raga, so that she could meander through that open space within the bandish (composition) without getting lost, without hitting any wall, as her voice looked for and discovered the window through which she could leave those confines and float even higher, without breaking any rules.

Her annoyance with disturbance was real, and some mistook her temper (she was often called the diva) as a manifestation of her ego. On stage, however, it wasn’t her ego that was being disturbed; it was her willingness to submit, her devotion, that was being distracted, and she resented that. She was immersed in her raga: Like Arjuna, she was aiming at the target while looking at its reflection. She was focused on her bandish. At that moment, little else mattered—she could see her voice helping her travel towards perfection which was visible only to her, which lay within her grasp, and when she reached it, there was joy, satisfaction and gratitude, and her audience realized the power of her imagination.

She once told the journalist Sunil Sethi in an interview: “I must sing. I don’t sing for the gallery, I sing for him (referring to the divine).” When she sang, she became one with the swara (note) and the sur (key)—words didn’t matter, and peripheral noise was sacrilegious. She could see the note in front of her eyes, she said. She plunged into the language of the notes, to decipher the sounds, which may seem without meaning in any language, but yet were understood in every language. She could tell apart the effects of different notes in different ragas; she could inhabit the micro-notes, leading up to the playful jugalbandi, the virtuoso dialogue with the tabla player, or with a maestro like Hariprasad Chaurasia on the flute. The raga, the structured melody of classical music, became a live entity: formless yet real, fragile yet imperishable, fleeting yet memorable. She once said, “I surrender before the raga; I request him to show me the colours of notes.” She begged the raga to reveal itself, to go beyond its grammar, to realize the ecstasy that seemed so attainable and yet so distant.

I was lucky enough to have heard her live many times. Modern technology made her voice my companion on countless journeys, in all the cities in which I lived. Her joyous aalaap would provide bliss and even her plaintive notes could alleviate gloom. Her voice calmed the heat on blisteringly hot Mumbai summer afternoons; her raga Miyan Ki Malhar reminded me of a walk in the monsoon on Marine Drive even on a dark winter evening in New England; another raga, Yaman, offered warm comfort on the night snow fell lightly in New York; her rendering of the raga Bhoop erased the boundaries between my home in London and Mumbai, bringing back the vivid memory of her singing at the open quadrangle of St Xavier’s College.

I heard her a couple of times when she had a sore throat and you could feel her pain—her mind could visualize the landscape her voice wanted to inhabit, the frown on her face revealing pain because she knew she could not do what she wanted. But she would concentrate and try, and then her face would relax once inspiration had struck, a door was opened, and she had found another, softer, more melodious way out of the constraint, as she moved with the raga to a different scale, letting her voice climb a different peak. Then her eyes would open and if you sat close enough, you might even see her eyes glistening, and you could see the faint glimmer of a smile emerging on her face—in the battle between what her mind wanted and what her body offered, she had found a third way, bringing the two in harmony. It was as close as you could get to a divine experience.

The magic of Indian classical music is that no two concerts by the same artist are alike. Even if the accompanist is the same, the raga is the same, as is the singer, each performance becomes unique. You could have heard her raga Hamsadhwani at the Sawai Gandharva Bhimsen Mahotsav in Pune, or at a concert at the Bhulabhai Desai Auditorium in Mumbai, but the two would sound different. We marvel at the variety today even within the same thumri, a form of light classical music: Thanks to the recordings on the Internet, three of her versions of the unforgettable Babul Mora are relatively easy to find.

She never got the Bharat Ratna, but she was India’s jewel. When she sang Sahela Re, she became our friend, as we met her, and through her, we met music, her friend.

Salil Tripathi is a writer based in London.

courtesy : http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/NNh9Sjl0Db09lW7Dz70SIK/The-devotion-of-Kishori-Amonkar.html

From Avenue de la Paix in Geneva to Tavistock Square in London—many different statues, one enduring legacy

A statue of Gandhi at Tavistock Square in London. Photo: Alamy

A few days ago, as I was walking down Avenue de la Paix, which runs alongside Palais des Nations, where the UN meets, I paused at a spot from where you can see a statue of Mahatma Gandhi. He is sitting cross-legged, as if meditating in the vast grounds of the Palais. It is like a reminder to the diplomats who meet in this calm-mannered Swiss city, tugging at their conscience to stay focused on their job.

That day, some tourists were busy taking photographs next to the Gandhi statue. Someone had draped a large silken white scarf around the statue’s neck, and the tourists seemed happy. There was no guard around there telling them not to place the scarf on the statue, and the tourists dispersed soon, taking their scarf with them.

This was the day of the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. I have seen the same statue clad in white another time too—in winter, when light snowflakes crown Gandhi’s head, neck and shoulders, making the silhouette shine unexpectedly; on a dark winter afternoon, when the sun has already set, the silhouette glows, like silver lining around a cloud, the physical reality becoming the metaphor of the state of the world.

I have seen two Gandhi statues in London—the one at Tavistock Square near Euston station is similar to the one in Geneva, of a sitting Gandhi. Last year, a new Gandhi statue was unveiled at Westminster, opposite the Houses of Parliament. There, Gandhi stands alongside pillars of the erstwhile British empire, including his long-time rival Winston Churchill.

Gandhi’s presence there might at first glance seem incongruous, surrounded as he is by men Britain reveres—besides Churchill, there is another leader whom Gandhi challenged, Jan Smuts, as well as British prime ministers David Lloyd George, Viscount Palmerston, the Earl of Derby, Benjamin Disraeli, Robert Peel and George Canning. There are two other foreigners besides Gandhi (and the South African Smuts). One is Abraham Lincoln, and the other, Nelson Mandela. Women are conspicuously absent, and Gandhi is the only one never to have held public office. Gandhi’s statue looks the least imposing and is on the smallest pedestal, as if his feet are close to the ground, as if it is the others who need props to rise to imposing heights. By showing another way, without guns and without violence, Gandhi is inspiring enough not to need any additional support.

I thought of that when I stood in front of an unusual statue of Gandhi, at the Gandhi Square (formerly known as Government Square) in downtown Johannesburg in late May. On a pleasant Sunday, I had gone to that square, which is near the courts where Gandhi practised as a young lawyer between 1903 and 1910, at the corner of Rissik and Anderson Streets. Some signposts in the city annoyingly spell the place as Ghandi Square. Here, Gandhi is young and flamboyant, dressed dashingly in his legal robes, looking purposefully busy, as if he is about to reach the court and argue an important case.

But he knew the place he was assigned, and he challenged that. He was aware, he said, that he was part of “a despised minority. If the Europeans of South Africa will forgive me for saying so, we were all Coolies . I was an insignificant Coolie lawyer. At that time we had no Coolie doctors. We had no Coolie lawyers. I was the first in the field. Nevertheless (I was) a Coolie!” he said in 1947, the year before his death.

While many “Europeans” of South Africa—or the whites—did not like Gandhi at that time, he now faces criticism from black South Africans as well as a few Indian South African academics. Last year, Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed published a book, The South African Gandhi: Stretcher-Bearer Of Empire, which severely criticizes Gandhi’s politics a century ago. In April last year, a group protested near the statue, smearing it with white paint, carrying placards that said “Racist Gandhi Must Fall,” an extension of the Rhodes Must Fall movement, a protest that was originally directed against Cecil Rhodes’ statue at the University of Cape Town in 2015 and gradually spread wider (including to Oxford university in the UK) to decolonize the campus spaces, curricula and institutional memories by, for instance, tearing down statues and commemorations of those who supported racism and apartheid. It is difficult to take an opinion that sees Gandhi as an apologist of the empire or of racism seriously, as it is a view from a parallel universe.

I was at the square with my friend Kirti Menon. She is the great-granddaughter of Gandhi and lives in Johannesburg. She told me how she came with her family with cleaning materials to wash away the white paint when she heard of the act of vandalism. But an embarrassed city administration had already removed the paint. Kirti’s response to the affront was interesting. She wanted to restore the statue on her terms, peacefully, without damaging anything or abusing anyone, and to do so quietly. That was Gandhian.

You can criticize Gandhi, abuse him, ridicule him, but his reputation remains unaffected. Try doing that to any of the other leaders India idolizes, and their followers’ wrath is unleashed, as though those leaders were not men or women, but divinities. And yet they were fragile, or so the followers thought, for they could not withstand criticism from mere mortals. Gandhians don’t retaliate. And tourists continue to come to his statue and place a silken scarf on his shoulders. And on cold winter nights, as moonlight rests on those shoulders and that head, it highlights the silver lining of hope during our dismal, dark nights.

Salil Tripathi writes the column Here, There, Everywhere for Mint.

http://www.livemint.com/Leisure/b6fOVgHPb3tJk5HxNPHWlI/Gandhi-around-the-world.html

courtesy : Reproduced from "The Mint", 14 July 2016

This article was first published in Mint (www.livemint.com) on July 15, 2016.