It's All Happening

 

Lal Qila

Just two weeks ago I wondered if I'd ever break through the initial period of stasis to fill my schedule with consistent in-person research activities here in Delhi. Now I'm wondering if I've taken on too much too quickly. In reality, my current array of engagements is more or less exactly what envisioned when I arrived forty-four days ago. Getting these things off the ground takes time, especially when you're acclimating to life in a new country. And of course those early weeks weren't as static as they felt. They got me here.

Last week I posted about my first two interviews and the possibility of getting together with Utpal Ghoshal for tabla lessons geared towards kathak repertoire and dance accompaniment. Within hours of making that desire manifest, Utpal and I had scheduled a session at Kalashram for Thursday at 10 am. Thursday morning I packed up my tabla, walked the 750 meters door to door, and sat with Utpal da for an hour in the same rehearsal studio where we had met for the interview six days earlier. He started by asking me to play something for him, a pretty standard move in this world, so I launched into a Delhi gharana kayda I'd dusted off the previous afternoon for that explicit purpose. While I played, Utpal da nodded approvingly and commented a couple times about the quality of my hands. He made no attempt to alter the fundamentals of my technique, but gave me a little feedback regarding phrasing and stroke emphasis. He then taught a rela from his tabla guru, the late Subhankar Banerjee, and two kathak tihais he attributed to Birju Maharaj. Banerjee, a maestro of the Farrukhabad tabla gharana, was just 54 years old when he succumbed to covid last August in Kolkata. In a single calendar year Utpal da lost both his Gurus, Subhankar dada and Maharaj-ji. As we sat together at Kalashram, he taught me repertoire from both of them. The gravity of the situation was not lost on me. Around the one-hour mark, my capacity for absorbing new material began to fade and Utpal da and I parted with loose plans to meet at his house next week. That will save me hauling around tabla and it will save him a commute. Plus we'll be able to take our time.

Thursday afternoon I received an email from Shubha Chaudhuri at AIIS in Gurgaon alerting me that she was back in the office and would be happy to see me any time. We settled on Friday 2 pm, and after lunch yesterday I booked an Uber and set off for the institute in moderate South Delhi traffic (heavy traffic by  any other standard). When I arrived, Shubha was finishing her lunch. I waited several minutes in her office, and once she entered I shifted to a seat in front of her desk. We chatted for the better part of an hour about covid, life, and research. As tends to be the case, the connection face to face far exceeded that of our emails and initial zoom meeting. Kind of a fun aside, she knows my advisor Dard from when he was just a kid in the early 1980s. Shubha, who has been at ARCE (Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology) since 1982, worked closely with Dard's father, Dan Neuman, in those days. They even co-authored a book on the music of Rajasthan.

Before showing me around the facilities and introducing me to other staff, Shubha dialed up her friend Nirmalya Dey, an accomplished dhrupad singer in Delhi, to inquire about potential pakhawaj teachers for me. Pakhawaj, a barrel-shaped drum, is an ancestor of the modern tabla and its period of peak popularity predates the widespread embrace of tabla in North Indian court-music contexts. Its stroke vocabulary and repertoire is integral to kathak dance, though these days the pakhawaj is rarely used in dance accompaniment. Even so, I'm determined to learn the basics. The introductory email Shubha sent to Nirmalya several weeks earlier, as well as my follow-up message, had garnered no response. Who knows if he even checks his email. But when Shubha called yesterday he picked up the phone and the two of them chatted in Bangla for a few minutes. By the time they finished, Nirmalya had agreed to talk to Mohan Shyam Sharma, one of the leading pakhawaj players in Delhi (and by extension probably India, and the rest of the world for that matter). I left with Mohan-ji's contact info stored in my phone and decided to send a WhatsApp message while spacing out in the backseat on my long Uber ride back to Hauz Khas. Mohan called as I was whipping up an early dinner and we scheduled an initial meeting at his house in Badarpur for early Sunday afternoon. It's time to learn the Delhi Metro system.

Following the day trip south, last night culminated with a jaunt north to Lal Qila for the Shahid Parvez concert that had been on my radar for a couple weeks. After a few flat out refusals and attempts at price gouging, I found an autowala who didn't mind driving into the heart of Old Delhi during Friday rush hour--admittedly, a bit of a fools errand in hindsight. That said, no one could have anticipated the jam we encountered near Khan Market: an absolute standstill for 25-30 minutes with crawling traffic before and after. My driver chatted with a couple other autowalas nearby and they speculated roads had been closed for PM Modi's motorcade. The jam helped break the ice with my driver anyway and we did some sporadic chatting thereafter. The trip was a total mess, and I'm thankful for his good nature. All told, it took over 90 minutes to make it 15 kilometers from Hauz Khas up to Chandni Chowk. Without being asked, I volunteered an additional 50 rupees upon arrival and we parted as friends.

I hadn't realized beforehand that the concert was but one small part of the larger 10-day Red Fort Festival, which ends April 3rd. The carnival atmospheric paired strangely with the presentation of Hindustani music, right on down to the remote-controlled drone flying low overhead during the alap, but the illuminated Lal Qila made for a stunning backdrop. As support for my working theory regarding the general semi-competence of Indian audio engineers, the concert ended early in a catastrophic auditory meltdown. Sure, there were the expected low-end feedback issues early on, which they managed to resolve for the most part, but the climactic technical failure of the evening far surpassed anything I had  witnessed previously anywhere on earth. Some 10-15 minutes into the gat, after the tabla had entered, a series of terrible crackling sounds overtook the mix and the entire PA cut out in an instant. The musicians' hands were still moving, but no sound reached the back of the crowd. To their credit, the crew got things up and running again for a few minutes, but then it happened all over again. Immediately following the second incident, I saw Shahid Parvez packing his sitar and I knew we were through. The light show that followed--projected against Lal Qila, and infused as it was with hyper-nationalist narration of Indic civilizational history, really saved the evening. And as a bonus, the return trip to Hauz Khas took only 30 minutes. Go figure.

Today is my day of rest but also the first day of my Ramadan chilla, a forty-day pledge involving ritualized daily practice at the same time and same place with explicit focus on a specific goal. Ramadan (Ramzan) begins this evening. Though it only lasts a month, I will continue my chilla through May 11th. Ramadan and the chilla have nothing inherently in common, save perhaps a shared emphasis on physical discipline for the sake of transcendence. The timing just worked out this way. It will be third time I've undertaken such a pledge, dating back to the summer of 2016 in Madison, WI--the summer I started learning Hindi. The second chilla came amid deep quarantine in Bonny Doon, and with the camaraderie of my then-roommate Zack, April to May of 2020. Given the other demands on my schedule at present, and the importance of prioritizing research whenever possible, I will exercise some degree of flexibility regarding the timing of my daily practice. That's ok. I can play by my own rules here. With that in mind, my pledge is to practice two hours a day for forty days on my little Kashmiri rug, under my Ganesh murti, most likely with AC blasting in my bedroom from 2-4 pm. My focus will be on cleaning a 30-minute tabla solo that combines the repertoire I'm learning in my lessons with Utpal da along with the best of my repertoire from Loren and Guruji.

Let the games begin.