While the sitar continues to live on in the Indian and even global musical consciousness, as one of our most beautiful, classical music instruments, it still remains an enigmatic object of reverence to most. That the sitar or rather its predecessor, the veena, has always been associated with goddess Saraswati has helped to strengthen the aura of divinity around it.
Sitar recitals by such contemporary well-known artists like Budhaditya Mukherjee, Shahid Parvez, Niladri Kumar and Ravi Shankar’s (who first exported sitar to the West) daughter Anoushka Shankar, draw avid music enthusiasts, by virtue of the melodious, ringing sounds of the instrument and the eternal power of Indian raga-sangeet to elevate the human spirit.
While these recitals can be and are enjoyed, even without any grounding in the intricacies of Indian classical music or the sitar, surely one’s enjoyment would be greater, if one gained a basic understanding of the instrument and raga-sangeet. What is a raga? How does a sitarist unravel its mystery in a one-hour or even half-an-hour recital?
To offer basic education on raga-sangeet in a two-hour workshop may seem ambitious. A masterclass on sitar held by music composer, sitar player, writer and educator Tushar Bhatia in the Education Centre of Dr Bhau Daji Lad museum in Mumbai under the aegis of cultural group ‘Swardhara’ undertook to do that recently. It attracted a sundry audience of all ages.
Designed as a lecture-demonstration, the workshop also featured Amruta Kulkarni, a student of Pt Arvind Pareikh, on the sitar and Harekrishna Rath on the tabla, who demonstrated the points as Bhatia elucidated them.
It was a soup-to-nuts kind of lecture, beginning with the nucleus of Indian classical music — a swara (musical note), more particularly shadj (sa) which Bhatia explained is so-called as it gives rise to the next six notes (re, ga, ma, pa, dha, ni). We learnt that ragas existed for thousands of years, while the 10 thaats (families of ragas) arose only about 200 years back, as a way of classifying and understanding ragas. And so while ragas of the same thaat like kaafi thaat may have some similar features like siblings have, each also has distinct features which makes for its unique personality.
The takeaway from the class
What made the workshop a winning proposition was Bhatia’s remarkable communication skills, matched by his depth of knowledge. Thanks to his clarity and simplicity of explanation, apt choice of words and analogies, and Kulkarni’s deft sitar demos, the rubric of raga-sangeet slowly became more accessible. We learnt that ragas are primarily vehicles of expression and reflect a range of emotions such as sorrow, frustration, wonder and joy. The essence of raga-sangeet is ‘meend’ or musical curves joining notes, and ‘andolan’ (oscillation). Crowning meend as the greatest gift of Indian classical music to the world (Western music does not have meends), Bhatia revealed how a raga is elaborated through meends and andolans and how different ragas can be identified by different meends.
“Two ragas may have same notes, but the different curves make for their separate identities. Similarly, two ragas like Miya ki Malhar and Bahar have the same notes, but the way these notes are oscillated is different and that distinguishes them,” he explained.
Ranking vocal music as the highest form of music, Bhatia revealed that all instrumental music flowed from vocal music and emulated its elements. The sitar evolved some 3,000 years ago from the veena which was used to play dhrupad — a slow, heavy form of music. As dhrupad yielded to khayals (meaning imagination) an instrument affording higher flexibility and speed of movement was needed and the sitar emerged. A typical sitar recital is structured as alap, jod and jhala (the introverted part without tabla accompaniment), followed by the extroverted part — vilambit gat, madhya laya gat, drut gat and jhaala — played to beats on the tabla. “The alap introduces the raga, its various notes, its key meends, like a story begins by introducing its main characters, and then gradually builds up to a climax, in the case of sitar, the final jhala.”
The detailed lecture-demo proved to be an eye-opener for both pure-play listeners and students of sitar. Chandrika Moiya, a sitar student, said, “I didn’t know that the second string of sitar actually served as a tanpura and that the tumba, the round base of the sitar, made of dried pumpkin, was actually responsible for its resonance; any round hollow as also in a tabla produces resonance. Attending the lecture has keened my desire to pursue sitar.”
The democratic character of raga-sangeet shone through the lecture. “An Indian classical musician enjoys complete freedom of expression and can develop a raga as he/she wishes. Much of the music is improvised on the stage itself. This is the uniqueness of Indian classical music,” added Bhatia.
Set up in 2012 by Bhatia and Brinda Shankar to make India’s rich tradition of art, culture and music accessible to a modern audience, Swardhara has been regularly curating and presenting programmes in different cities of India and abroad. It has featured both well-known and upcoming artistes, around varied themes such as Rabindranath Tagore’s music or Urdu ghazals (Meer se Majrooh tak) or classical music compositions and Kathak (Gaur baran Radhika). The objective as Bhatia states is to “celebrate Indian culture and heritage through music, poetry and dance.”
The sitar masterclass is set to be followed by a masterclass on vocal classical music by the renowned vocalist-sitar player Irshad Khan in December, in Mumbai and Gaur baran Radhika programme in Pune in January 2018. Thus flows the river of swaras.
