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CULTURE is amorphous and is difficult to define. The social elite usually purveys what passes for it down the line. Culture is also whimsical, even comic, depending on the way you eat a hamburger to the method you apply to explain the ingredients of a song.
Take a small aspect of India`s classical music for example. It has always been a puzzle that there are two completely different varieties of Raag Durga, one of them a lilting pentatonic melody traditionally sung in northern India in the middle part of evening, the other indescribably bland.
There is the alluring Durga sung in the Bilawal format or `thaat`, which we are most familiar with via Kesarbai Kerkar, Bimsen Joshi, Tina Sani, Farida Khanum, etc. And there is a little heard Durga that belongs to the Khamaj family of raags. At least one other raag — Gauri — is sung in two different scale clusters of Purvi and Bhairav thaats. Why couldn`t the two kinds of Durga and Gauri raags be given different names?
After all there are other popular raags that sound more similar to each other than the two listed above, but they have a different name for each. You would not call Bhimpalasi, say, Patdeep or confuse Bhopali with Shuddh Kalyan although the most discerning listener can occasionally confuse one with the other.
Each raag thus has a separate name, except the two Durgas and the two Gauris. (It is a remarkable coincidence that Gauri and Durga happen to be different names of the same goddess, Lord Shiva`s consort.) Why this very avoidable confusion? It sounds like giving two of your offspring the same name. The only explanation that comes to mind is the ego of the patrons of music, the maharajas of yore.
I once witnessed the legendary tabla wizard Ahmedjaan Thirakwa indulging my schoolmates in Lucknow because the twin brothers were scions of the city`s premier Munshi Nawal Kishore family. Incredibly, the Ustaad regaled the boys by producing the sound of a steam locomotive on the drums that should have accompanied a Ravi Shankar or a Vilayat Khan. Indian musicians of the northern Hindustani genre were betrothed to their feudal patrons and were thus prone to be marshalled by their whims. One patron may have said the Bilawal thaat version was the real Durga, enough for his rival to assert that the Khamaj version was truer. I am just guessing and I can`t think of another explanation for the absurdity.
Such absurdities abound in other ways too. There was a much-hyped discussion a few years ago over a film song about a blouse (choli), which some thought was risqué. The song was vulgar for other reasons but it is ridiculous to critique it through the prism of prudery. This country claims to have pioneered the passionate art of Khajuraho. There is so much literature ranging from Sanskrit to a more recent language like Urdu to rejoice in the risqué, which makes any discussion on a choli song sound squeamish.
`Morey jobana pe aayi bahaar, balam pardesa na jahiyo` was an amazing composition in Raag Tilak Kamod made memorable by Ustad Faiyaz Khan on the eve of India`s independence. The words literally celebrated bosom. The audiences swooned and sighed. Were they dirty? The question wades into a wider discussion perhaps for some other occasion.
Suffice it to say that recent classical musicians have tinkered with old compositions to make them more agreeable to a stiffer audience. Jyoti Pande is a successful diplomat and gifted singer. He has great command in the recitation of soz and salaams, which makes this Brahmin popular in Shia gatherings. He made an astute observation once about neo-prudery in music. In an old composition in Durga — `Sakhi mori rumjhum` — there was reference to a woman`s anxiety in stormy weather when she feels an urge to meet her lover.
In the censored version the woman wants to brave the bad weather to fetch water from the well. Kaise jaaon piya paas, becomes kaise jaaon jal bharne. As Pande observed, what a perverse thought to want to go to fetch water bang in the middle of a raging storm! But prudery works by different logic, if it has any.
A traditional composition in the early afternoon Raag Madhmaad Saarang was subverted to suit the newer
constricted minds. In the original version, the woman asks the dyer of clothes to colour her lover`s bed sheet in a certain way (the reason is left beautifully unstated) while in the current interpretation the sheet is replaced by the lover`s turban. Piya ki chadariya becomes piya ki pagariya.
When Indian classical music originated there was no nation state in the world. There were principalities in South Asia but never an empire that straddled the length and breadth of India. One of the old raags is called Desh. The word happens to mean a nation. That was enough for some brilliant fellow to harness the raag, involving passages rendered by different top-notch musicians, into a televised message of nation-building. “Let the Desh raag reverberate through the nation” goes the message — a classic example of the social elite keeping pace with their dwindling capacity to appreciate art in its finer context.
The tragedy is that despite all the tinkering to please the new social order, or perhaps because of it, the audiences have still deserted the classical music halls for popular television serials.
Music shops on the other hand are doing brisk business in a large and still increasing variety of religious music being belted out across India. There is pressure on classical singers to include a few religious songs or bhajans in their repertoire. It took an artiste of the calibre of Gangubai Hangal to put her foot down against the nouveau-riche trend. “Hum bhajan wajan nahi gaatey. Pakka gana sunna hai to baith jao,” she thundered when the sponsor whispered the public`s request for a religious song.
The transition from the eccentricities of the maharajas to the assertion of a burgeoning middle class as new patrons of culture could not be fully understood without a visit to a McDonald`s outlet in Delhi. Here you would witness a strange cultural assertion in full cry. It is manifested in the way an American fast food group, celebrated for its hamburgers made with beef, is selling `hamburgers` with potato stuffing. Why would the assertive Indian class prefer to eat a patently spurious `hamburger` by subverting the ingredients of the original Big Mac, particularly when a home-grown food stall next door offers a more authentic vegetarian recipe?
With the raging identity crisis permeating India`s present cultural flux, I am not going to be surprised if McDonald`s one day sponsors a classical music concert. And what if it gets an accomplished singer, rendered unemployable by the success of TV serials, to dedicate a new composition to the occasion called Raag Hamburger?
The writer is Dawn`s correspondent in Delhi.
