BY and large I am inclined to agree with William Shakespeare that dislike for music reflects a negative attribute in a human being. Therefore, much more than his lines from the Twelfth Night where he describes music as the food of love and so on, I find Julius Caesar’s fear of Cassius, who has no ear for music, as a more compelling observation that supports the argument.

Caesar says: “Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights. Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.” The Bard then throws in the punch line as Caesar grapples with his mortal fear of Cassius. “He reads much, he is a great observer, and he looks quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays, as thou dost, Antony; he hears no music.”

The difference between the Mughal Emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb was said to have been heightened by their proximity to music. Akbar, the great grandfather of Aurangzeb, had the acclaimed musician Tansen among his celebrated courtiers, part of the reason perhaps why he is known as Akbar the Great. By contrast Aurangzeb was a spartan man with no taste for music. In fact, it is said that he once ordered music to be “buried” so deep into the ground that it would never dare to disturb his deeply pious moments of meditation.

Aurangzeb is often criticized as a religious zealot, which he may or may not have been. But there were quite a few Muslim rulers in India who were deeply religious but who still had a lot of time for music. However, rulers like Nero who had played the fiddle while Rome burnt dilute Shakespeare’s tremendous pitch for music. Adolf Hitler too patronized Richard Wagner. Regarded as Germanic to its core, Wagner’s music generally accompanied Nazi mass rallies.

It was in this context that I was shocked to hear from friends in New York that Pandit Jasraj, an outstanding exponent of Hindustani classical singing, was performing at a charity show there last week to raise funds for, of all the people, the rightwing Hindu fanatics of the so-called Sangh parivar! It was heartening to note though that non-resident Indians, mostly comprising secular Hindus, staged an impressive protest outside the Ganesh Temple in Flushing, where the concert was held.

Following excerpts from an e-mail I received from friends in New York gives us an idea of where and how the Hindu right is consolidating.

“New York, July 26, 2002

“Non-resident Indians demonstrated today at the Ganesh Temple in Flushing, New York, to protest the meeting and reception being held there for the Sangh Parivar demagogue Sadhvi Ritambra. The 60 or 70 Indian and Indian-American demonstrators came from different religious and socio-economic backgrounds; there were children and old people, and even one wheelchair-bound protestor.

“A few noted American scholars of India such as Owen Lynch and Johanna Lessinger also came to join the protest against the Sadhvi, drawn there by their emotional attachment to India and their concern at the rise of the intolerant ideology of Hindutva. The demonstration had been called by four organizations — INSAF (International South Asia Forum), the SAMAR media collective, FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists) and Non-resident Indians for a Secular and Harmonious India — and was endorsed by IMAN (Indian Muslim Alert Network).

“The protestors stood at the entrance of the temple auditorium, holding up pictures of the tortured, charred corpses of Muslim women and infants killed by Hindutva mobs in Gujarat this year, and carrying placards that said ‘2,000 dead and counting: end minority persecution in India,’ ‘Sadhvi Ritambara has blood on her hands,’ ‘Real Hindus don’t support genocide’.

“Many of the protestors outside the temple were Hindus and Muslims of Gujarati origin. Vipul Desai had cut short his annual vacation in the Hamptons to stand outside the Flushing temple with a placard, distributing leaflets to those who were coming in to listen to Sadhvi Ritambara.

“I had to be at this protest”, he said with visible emotion, “the carnage happened in my hometown”. Saeed Patel was one of the protestors who tried to talk to the incoming Sangh Parivar supporters about the right of Muslims to live with dignity in a secular India. “I’m Gujarati too”, he said poignantly to a Hindutvavadi from Gujarat who had come for the Sadhvi Ritambara event.

Greeted by a hail of slogans as soon as she stepped out of the car, Sadhvi Ritambara scurried hurriedly into the auditorium with the event organizers. Protestor Satish Kolluri suddenly recognized a familiar figure going into the auditorium behind her, and shouted out: “Pandit Jasraj, what are you doing here? How can you sing for the Sadhvi?”

The aging Hindustani classical singer turned around and walked back to face Kolluri and the other protestors. “Let me explain,” he said. Kolluri was outraged as only a sincere lifelong admirer can be: Hindustani classical music is, after all, a living embodiment of the syncretic Hindu-Muslim basis of Indian culture, a standing refutation of the so-called Hindu-Aryan purity that the Sangh Parivar wishes to foist on India. Unable to face Kolluri’s genuine sense of betrayal, the old man walked wordlessly back into the auditorium.

Now I had always seen the Hindutva forces as completely bereft of the aesthetic gift of music. Their bhajans are unmusical, not a patch on D.V. Paluskar or MS Subbalaxmi’s secular appeal of yore. In fact, I have often cited an amazingly syncretic bhajan as an unparalleled feat among musical compositions. Madhuban Mein Radhika Nachey Re, sung in Raag Hameer by Mohammad Rafi, written by Shakeel Badayuni, musically composed by Naushad and enacted by Dilip Kumar, all Muslim men! Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali’s Hari Om Tat Sat, in Pahadi Dhun, if I am not mistaken, is a matchless composition celebrating a patently Hindu worldview.

I do not subscribe to the notion that music, in India or elsewhere, began with the ethereal sound of Om, as some obscurantist musicologists do. But there must have been something about Vedic music that someone like Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, the peerless sarod maestro, has been imparting its essence even today to his disciples. One such disciple of the legendary Ali Akbar is Dasanudas Adhikari.

The ancients, says Adhikar, ascribed sacred significance to justly-intoned musical intervals because of their cosmic universality. The Vedic civilization, for example, was quite aware of the inner harmonic structure of timbre, and felt that the various harmonic intervals symbolized the sacred emotions of love for divinity. Thus ‘justly-intoned’ music was a central element in Vedic colleges of sacred lore. The ancient Greeks expressed similar ideas as found in the writings of Pythagoras and others.

Interestingly, over the past few years a movement back towards just temperament has begun, mostly on the basis of the more pleasurable sound of what is known as ‘justly-intoned’ music. This music has more profound benefits that are not readily apparent to the direct observation of the senses. Adhikari’s own research work, performed in 1968-71, observed definite improvements in the state and performance of various living beings by exposure to ‘justly-intoned’ music. Or so he claims.

His experimental work began by exposing simple plants to various kinds of sound vibrations and measuring the results. He worked with sprouts because they grew fast and were easy to design experiments for. He exposed various kinds of seeds to a wide variety of music available on commercial recordings and measured the germination rate, sprouting time, growth rate, rate of weight gain, chlorophyll content and time to second-stage growth with the appearance of leaves.

In a nutshell, after a large number of trials he was able to determine several statistically significant trends in the data:

1. Plants exposed to early styles of music did better than those exposed to modern music or controls exposed to no music at all.

2. Plants exposed to Vedic and other justly-intoned music did better than other categories.

3. Plants exposed to Vedic devotional chanting and Gregorian chants did best of all.

Adhikari says he repeated the same series of trials with animals — goats and cows — and got roughly analogous results. Things got really interesting when he extended the experiments to people. His principal measurement tools were the short form of the Stanford- Benet IQ test, and the common Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory test (MMPI), both of which he had extensive experience using in advertising research focus groups.

He got very similar results to the previous trials. People who listened to modern styles of music, regardless of their musical preferences, did uniformly worse on the psychological tests than people who listened to ancient styles or Vedic ‘justly-intoned’ music.

The only flaw in this otherwise entirely interesting construct is that Adhikari is an official of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, a group that has found itself heavily supporting the rising tide of Hindu fanaticism. It is unthinkable that many or at least some members of the mobs in Gujarat who raped, pillaged and killed innocent folks may have been seriously interested in music, Vedic or otherwise. The thought scares me. That is why I believe Shakespeare was by and large right, but not always so.

WITH the announcement that Sindh Governor Mohammedmian Soomro will contest for both National Assembly and Provincial Assembly seats from Jacobabad — the ancestral seat of the Soomros — the cat is out of the bag.

The governor, a career banker, has not joined any political party but the portents are that he will be contesting from the platform of the newly-formed or “created” Sindh Democratic Alliance (SDA). No wonder that SDA ministers have been thrust on Sindh at a time when the elections are just round the corner to level the ground for the Sindh governor.

It is perhaps for the same reason that a new chief secretary has been brought in. The newly-appointed ministers, specially the local government minister, have been obviously given the task of taming the union and district councils. These un-elected ministers who are, at the most, temporary government servants have unleashed harassment among the elected representatives of the people — hurling threats here, there and everywhere.

And they have selected a lethal weapon of displacing the senior government employees who do not have the ability to produce the “desired results”. It is known to all and sundry that the “Awam Dost” (PPP) candidates control most of the districts and union councils in Sindh, barring Karachi, and it is as clear as daylight that the administrative changes are aimed at crushing the PPP supporters.

In the recent past, such senior officers as district coordination officers, formerly commissioners, were transferred on just one telephone call or a letter of the district Nazim but at present no district Nazim is being taken into confidence in the wholesale transfer of senior officers. The district Nazims and the district councils have adopted resolutions against these transfers but in vain.

Many officers of grade-16 to grade-20 have been transferred from the Larkana district alone, without the knowledge of the district Nazim what to talk of his consent. The district council, Larkana, has adopted a unanimous resolution assailing the large- scale transfers of government officials without consulting the district Nazim. It has demanded that transfer orders of these officials be withdrawn.

The meeting also asked the provincial local government minister to mind his language, and called the transfers flagrant violation of the Sindh Local Government Ordinance. The session also accused the minister of trying to destroy the devolution plan.

Larkana, needless to say, is the exclusive preserve of the Pakistan People’s Party and the stronghold of the Bhutto family. Even in absence of Benazir Bhutto, no one can win elections in Larkana without her blessings. The powers that be know this fact and that is the reason that it has been made the main target.

The other stronghold of the PPP is the Khairpur district, headed by Nafeesa Shah, the daughter of former Sindh chief minister Syed Qaim Ali Shah. Over one dozen officers holding key posts have been transferred in the recent past. They include, DCO, EDO (finance), EDO (education), EDO (local government) and many others.

On July 18, the Nazims of different talukas and union councils observed token hunger strike against the transfer of DPO Abdul Khaliq Shaikh who has been reportedly recommended for the Quaid-i-Azam Award for launching operation against the dacoits. Of course, these transfers had taken place without taking the district Nazim into confidence.

The Nawabshah district is the bastion of power of the Zardaris, the in-laws of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto; and the sister of former senator Asif Ali Zardari, Faryal Talpur, is the elected district Nazim. Many administrative changes have taken place there without the knowledge of the district Nazim. Faryal Talpur told Dawn that she was amazed to see these changes, and added that it would make difficult for the new system to run smoothly.

The district Nazim of Shikarpur — the native district of the Soomros — Mohammad Arif Khan Mehar has also raised strong objections to transfers and postings of officials without the recommendations of the Nazims. On July 12, he said that this had undermined the position of the elected Nazims.

These transfers plus a campaign of vilification unleashed by the SDA ministers have created a storm in the already turbulent political waters of the Sindh province and are being rightly termed pre-election rigging. Sindh PPP president Nisar Ahmad Khuhro told newsmen at a function in Hyderabad on July 20 that the government was making allout efforts to manage the election results in its favour through pre-election rigging.

He said all tactics at pre-polls rigging were being employed by the government in the shape of massive reshuffling in the civil bureaucracy. Lashing out at the SDA, Mr Khuhro said the government was making allout efforts in getting the nominated ministers elected in the ensuing elections. Even a resolution was moved in the district council, Hyderabad, on July 23 to condemn the behaviour of the nominated ministers although the district council of Hyderabad is to a very large extent anti-PPP.

However, the move was thwarted by the acting convener of the district council who took refuge behind “lack of quorum”. However, the district Nazim of Hyderabad, Dr Makhdoom Rafiquzzaman, who is also the younger brother of the acting chairperson of the PPP, Makhdoom Mohammad Amin Fahim, has written letters to NRB chairman Gen Tanveer Hussain Naqvi and the Sindh Governor protesting against the uncalled for behaviour of the newly-inducted provincial ministers.

Addressing the district council session on July 23, Makhdoom Rafiq said the ministers were supposed to look after the affairs of their ministries only. He said he had written to the NRB chief that the devolution plan was his brain-child and it was up to him to destroy it or make it work.

The latest reports said the NRB chairman had summoned all the district Nazims of Sindh to Islamabad to listen to their grievances. As if the massive transfers of the civil bureaucracy and the anti-PPP campaign launched by the nominated ministers was not enough, the Sindh government has recently notified the promotion of 16 additional district and sessions judges (B-19) as district and sessions judges (B-20) which has come under strong criticism by the Sindh Bar Council, Pakistan Bar Council and Karachi Bar Association.

It may be pointed out here that senior judicial officers will be the returning officers and assistant returning officers in the ensuing elections. Whether these promotions tantamount to pre- poll rigging is anybody’s guess. The only redeeming feature is that Chief Election Commissioner Justice Irshad Hassan Khan has taken notice, though late, of the pre-election rigging and disapproved the use of official machinery by the governors for their election campaigns.

The CEC at his meeting with a delegation of the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal led by Liaquat Baloch, according to press reports, condemned the use of official machinery for electioneering. The CEC has also made it clear that the ministers desirous of contesting elections should relinquish their posts well before the polling day. However, the irony is that he has not specifically said as to what he means by “well before polling day”.

The CEC has also taken exception to the transfers and postings of officials at this point of time. However, the question is, who will implement this order, for only a few days back more than half a dozen DSPs were transferred in the Hyderabad region alone? If the posting orders of the officials transferred in Sindh during the last three weeks are not reversed, the elections, at least in Sindh, will be nothing but a farce comparable to the presidential referendum.

MULTAN IS often called a ‘living monument’ for being among the few ancient but thriving cities on the globe. The present Multan is believed to have been built on the ruins of some previous Multan cities. Definite history of Multan before the Arab invasion (AD700-970) is unknown. There are legends and somewhere traces of the pre-Arab period of Multan. Historians believed great macedonian conqueror Alexander had passed through the district of Multan in 325-26BC.

A legend says Multan and its surrounding cities were the place where Alexander sustained wounds during a battle with local tribesmen called Mallois. He was so grievously injured that rumours of his death spread in the ranks of his army. However, the macedonians took over the area and did mass slaughter of the locals. In the tunnel of history, later on, the local people saw the Dynasty of Mauria rulers.

Before the arrival of Arab victors, Multan, along with Sindh, was the part of Rai Dynasty. According to the description of the foreign travellers of that time, Multan was the capital of the Rai country that comprised four provinces.

Remains of the Hindu temples in the present-day Multan are perhaps of the Mauria and Rai Dynasties. However, most of the temples and monuments of the Hindu period have been vanished with time. The famous among those were the Sun-god temple and Parhladpuri temple. The following periods of Arab, Karmatian, Mughal and British rules left their traces in the shape of buildings of their respective architectural values and styles.

There are mosques, shrines, gardens and above all the famous Qasimbagh Fort which bore ample testimony to the rich heritage of Multan. But, the story of Multan would be incomplete without the mention of its artisans who materialized the dreams of the rulers of the time with a combination of hard work and skill. Artisans of Multan are famous for carving designs in glazed tiles and pottery, vitreous enamel, silver ornaments, silk and cotton products woven on traditional handlooms, silk fabrics, metal work, camel skin products and calligraphy.

But, ironically, the heritage of Multan and its traditional artisans have been under great threat of becoming extinct due to the apathy of officials concerned to conserve the monumental landmarks and absence of patronage to keep the art alive for the future generations.

The only major restoration work done in recent times is on the shrine of Saint Shah Rukn-i-Alam and the work deservedly won the Agha Khan award for architecture. Rest of the buildings have become a picture of neglect due to the indifference of the people at the helm.

District bureaucrats from time to time put on efforts but with little consideration and mind. Consequently, their efforts ended up in devastation to the buildings than doing any good. The 118-year-old colonial era building of the Town Hall at the Ghanta Ghar Chowk and gates of the old walled city are examples of their mindless efforts.

Now, the children of artisans have decided not to carry the ancestral profession due to lack of patronage and rewards and are opting for other sources of earning bread.

There were talks about setting up of an ‘art bazaar’ in Multan to promote the traditional art forms but so far no serious step has been taken in this regard.

Still alive after braving innumerable military expeditions down the centuries, Multan needs a fair deal for the conservation and restoration of its rich architectural and artistic heritage.