Some twenty years ago, I was in Lahore for an academic conference, where I met an aspiring classical vocalist who travelled every week to learn from a teacher in Karachi. Though I cannot hold a note myself, I have had a lifelong love for Hindustani music. I was thus surprised to learn from this talented Pakistani singer that his teacher spoke derisively of a particular raga as one that “belonged to the Hindus” (woh toh Hinduon ka raga hai). I didn’t have the heart to tell the young man that such distinctions did not exist among classical musicians in India, or that a singer he admired, Roshanara Begum, had continued to sing the ragas, Shankara and Durga, after she moved to Pakistan even though they were named for Hindu deities. I could also have mentioned Salamat Ali Khan’s rendition of “Nadiya Kinare Mora Gaon” where this singer (who also lived in Pakistan) explains that the thumri is based on the love of Radha for Krishna. Admittedly, both Roshanara and Salamat were born well before Partition when such seamless interchange of ideas and motifs between different faiths was part of the musical culture of undivided India.
That conversation in Lahore came back to me when I was studying the vast collection of Gandhi Papers held at what is now called the Prime Ministers’ Memorial Library. The Gandhi Papers deal largely with the Mahatma’s work as a freedom fighter and social reformer. But I also found here a file dealing with, of all things, classical music. In November 1944, the eminent Hindustani vocalist, Omkarnath Thakur, had written to Gandhi asking for his assistance in starting a Faculty of Music at the Banaras Hindu University. In this proposed new department at BHU, said Thakur to Gandhi, “a systematic study of the different styles of Indian Classical Music could be undertaken. There will be no racial distinction on the selection of styles. The important place which music occupies in the cultural pattern of India, its great value as a synthesiser of the different tendencies, which are blended in the Indian Civilization are well known.” Thakur wanted Gandhi to give his blessings for the new enterprise and also help raise funds for it.
Also in this file was a letter from a South Indian musician expanding on Thakur’s proposal. He was the violinist, Parur Sundaram Iyer. Originally from Kerala, trained in the Carnatic style, Sundaram Iyer had moved to Bombay to teach in the celebrated music school founded by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar. Iyer’s colleagues included Omkarnath Thakur and Narayan Rao Khare. Khare later joined Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram, where he acted as an informal ‘director of music’.
After moving to Bombay, Sundaram Iyer also began playing the violin in the Hindustani style, which had never really been attempted before. His letter to Gandhi (dated November 7, 1944) introduced his diverse interests and backgrounds and also reminded the Mahatma that the correspondent “had the honour of entertaining you with my violin, when you were in Madras for the Congress in 1927”. Iyer now urged the leader of the freedom movement to support this new scheme, since “a regular music university for India would be the crowning activities of the various music conferences [that] have been taking place… for the past many years”.
Sundaram Iyer told Gandhi that “with your blessings any project is bound to become a great success”. Significantly, he added: “And music being the most powerful factor tending to Hindu-Muslim unity, I need not repeat again and again the necessity of patronisation of music even in higher degrees.” He further pointed out that Muslim and Hindu musicians sang songs of Naimat Khan (better known as Sadarang), Kabir, Tulsi, and Mira “without indulging in controversy of any kind whatever”.
Sundaram Iyer’s letter ended with this plea: “I hope Mahathmaji will be pleased to kindly start the Sangeet University soon and thus maintain the dignity of our immortal and invaluable treasure of music. As soon as the university is started Hindu-Muslim unity will soon spread and our long awaited swaraj will be attained.”
Where Thakur had written in general terms of Indian classical music being a “synthesiser”, Sundaram Iyer explicitly spoke of it being a prime vehicle of Hindu-Muslim unity. He was drawing here on his own experience (he was, incidentally, a close friend and great admirer of the Kirana gharana ustad, Abdul Karim Khan), but of course he also knew that harmonious relations between India‘s two leading faith communities was a subject particularly close to Gandhi’s heart. Unfortunately, there is no reply from Gandhi to Iyer on record. Gandhi did briefly answer Thakur, telling him that he should follow the Santiniketan model and let music flourish organically within the institution rather than use political patronage or corporate funds.
Gandhi died in 1948. Two years later, a Faculty of Music was established at the Banaras Hindu University. It was headed by Omkarnath Thakur. Sundaram Iyer was now himself serving as Professor of Music at Madras University. His son and pupil, M.S. Gopalakrishnan, had begun playing in both the Carnatic and the Hindustani style, occasionally accompanying his father’s friend, Omkarnath Thakur. Meanwhile, another gifted young violinist originally trained in the Carnatic tradition had moved to Banaras to become Thakur’s student and protégé. This was N. Rajam, who is still performing in her eighties, and has strong claims to being the greatest classical instrumentalist now alive.
Rajam, herself a Tamil living in Banaras, played some memorable duets with that home-grown Banarasi, Bismillah Khan, their performances (available on YouTube) being splendid illustrations of how music remains a powerful factor tending to Hindu-Muslim unity. If the nadaswaram is the shehnai’s Carnatic equivalent, then Bismillah’s almost exact southern counterpart was Sheik Chinna Moulana, who resided and played in the temple town of Srirangam, in yet another illustration of the syncreticism that Parur Sundaram Iyer had celebrated in his letter to Gandhi.
More than any other field, it is classical music where Hindus and Muslims have lived, worked, laboured, and created together. Some of the greatest Hindu musicians owe an enormous debt to their training at the hands of Muslim ustads. Think only of what Alladiya Khan meant to Kesarbai Kerkar or what Allauddin Khan meant to Ravi Shankar. On the other side, the technically ‘Hindu’ influence on technically ‘Muslim’ music is manifest in, for example, the gorgeous renditions by the Agra gharana maestros, Sharafat and Latafat Hussain Khan, of a composition in Yaman with the refrain, “Darshan Devo Shankar Mahadeva”, asking the Hindu God, Shiva, to grant the Muslim singer/devotee a sight of his divine luminosity.
That said, the Partition of India did hurt the capaciously inclusive syncretism of our musical heritage. This damage was first evident and has been most enduring in Pakistan, which is why younger singers there know not of the allegedly ‘Hindu’ themes in the music of Roshanara Begum and Salamat Ali Khan, and which is why Bade Ghulam Khan chose to leave the Muslim homeland and return to India in the 1950s. After 1947, Pakistan had virtually no Hindu or Sikh musicians active in public, whereas Hindu-majority India had dozens, if not hundreds, of outstanding Muslim and Sikh musicians performing to great acclaim, and often having Hindu students too.
Yet there is no room for complacency. Bollywood has now largely succumbed to the majoritarianism of the Narendra Modi regime; can one imagine a song with the magical resonance of Lata Mangeshkar’s “Allah Tero Naam, Ishwar Tero Naam” (from 1961; lyrics by Sahir Ludhianvi, music by Jaidev) being composed or sung in the present time? And there are some insidious attempts to cast classical music in a professedly ‘Hindu’ idiom as well. Listening to a concert by an accomplished Banarasi thumri singer, I was horrified to hear him make disparaging remarks about sundry “Khan Sahibs”, which may have been related to his own upper caste Hindu background. Several Carnatic musicians have openly identified with the prime minister and his Hindu-first party. A friend who is a music scholar tells me that State patronage of classical vocalists in India is now closely linked to a performer’s religious identity, and to their willingness to be identified with the ideology of the ruling regime.
One hopes that these are just straws in the wind, and that beyond the realms of politics and the State, Hindustani and Carnatic musicians shall resist these tendencies and temptations. Our classical music is the greatest achievement of Indian civilisation, and it would be tragic if its inherently pluralist and syncretic character falls prey to the polarising poison of Hindutva.
ramachandraguha@yahoo.in