Glimpses from the practice room...

Thus far I haven't made good on my intentions to share much of my own musical/practice journey since arriving in Delhi back in February. I chalk this up to a byproduct of relentless perfectionism, and the fact that I only starting playing pakhawaj back in April, but I'm renewing the intention to share more.

Last night, Shashi Kant Pathak (one of my three pakhawaj teachers) arrived in Hauz Khas with a sarangiya named Rajesh, who he works with at Kathak Kendra. It was my first time playing with sarangi, or live lehera accompaniment of any kind for that matter. An incredible experience all around. Allie snapped a few clips from the session so I'll share one here. Low light, grainy quality, all that... Who cares. 

Enjoy!

Mumbai

As the two largest of India's five megacities of ten million plus, Mumbai and Delhi enjoy a rivalry somewhat reminiscent of that between New York and Los Angeles. Both are major cultural centers, but their differences are significant enough to fuel their respective claims to supremacy. Mumbai, a former colonial port spilling off the Maharashtrian coast and into the choppy Arabian Sea, is home to the massive Hindi-language film industry (Bollywood) and serves as the nerve center of Indian finance. Landlocked Delhi, the national capital, houses countless government institutions and somehow makes Mumbai, a sprawling metropolis of some twenty million souls, feel small by contrast. The New York-Los Angeles comparison breaks down pretty quickly--this is India after all. Even the largest cities in the United States can't compete with the sheer scale of either.

Before last weekend, I'd visited Mumbai just once, arriving by train from Goa in the middle of the night and making my way by cab directly into the heart South Mumbai, the oldest part of the city. I'd wandered around sightseeing for a couple days before catching a flight to Kolkata to round out my post-language program travels back in 2017. Allie, for all of her prior trips to North India and all her love of Bollywood, had never been, which provided the impetus for our weekend getaway. We each have friends who have been doing research there this year, and the quick flight down from Delhi, along with free lodging, made it a relatively easy excursion.

We flew in Friday afternoon on a Boeing 777 (two aisles, nine seats across in economy), an alarmingly large aircraft for a domestic flight. My best guess is that Air India needed the aircraft in Mumbai and figured it made more sense to fly it down well under capacity than with no cargo at all. It made for a quick flight in any case, and no sooner had I finished my lunch of chicken biryani than the pilot announced we'd begun our descent into Mumbai.

Despite my concern about making it out of the unfamiliar airport and through Friday rush hour, we easily booked a car and found our way to Andheri West, where my friend Janaki (not Indian, despite the name) has been living this summer. Janaki and I first met in an introductory Hindi class at UW-Madison in 2016, then both travelled to Jaipur to continue our studies in 2017. That summer we spent a lot of time together within a small nucleus of friends, but until this summer I hadn't seen her since. Janaki is working on a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan and had just been settling into eighteen months of field research in Shimla when covid hit in early 2020. The pandemic completely derailed her project, which she has since reinvented, and this year AIIS allowed her to resume her grant to carry out research for a new multi-site project on tarot readers and various occult divination practices that brought her to Mumbai. Although all three of us resided in Jaipur simultaneously for Hindi study in 2017,  Allie and Janaki had never met. I had a feeling they would enjoy each other's company and that proved to be the case. 

Friday evening we stayed in, chatting at length over chai and some vegetarian fare provided earlier that afternoon by Janaki's cook. Towards the end of the night, after showing off the various tarot decks she had collected in Mumbai, Janaki did readings for both of us. She's quite skilled at it, though I have little by way of comparison, and without offering any overtly predictive advice, helped us both wrestle with looming questions we had posed for the readings.

From there the weekend progressed in a pleasant stream of sleeping in, cappuccinos, and casual sightseeing. Mumbai may not be as large as Delhi, but it still takes a lot of energy to navigate--arguably more, given the absence of a functional Metro system. Yesterday afternoon, after heading south towards Colaba so Janaki could exchange the remaining rupee balance of her Indian bank account for USD (she flies home on Wednesday), we visited an impressive exhibit of Rini Dhumal's artwork at the Mumbai branch of the National Gallery of Modern Art. None of us had ever heard of her, but we were quite taken with her work and the way it was staged in the space.

We capped off the weekend by rendezvousing with Paige, a friend from Allie's Pune days, who is now living in Mumbai and happens to be part of my Fulbright cohort. She is working on a historical project that looks at women's roles in both the Black Panther Party and the Dalit Panther Party, which drew inspiration from the former in organizing for Dalit rights beginning in the 1970s. Discussing our various projects, and comparing notes on life and research in India, made for stimulating conversation over a leisurely dinner at Fatty Bao in Bandra.

Before bed we said our goodbyes to Janaki, who sleeps later than we do, and set alarms for seven to ensure we'd reach the airport with plenty of time to spare. The return trip to Delhi somehow went even more smoothly than the outbound leg, and we were back in Hauz Khas and ready for a nap by around two.

Once we were up and moving, Allie and I walked the hundred meters or so to our corner cafe, ordered sandwiches and espresso drinks, and sat for awhile settling back into the familiar surroundings. At one point Allie, who thoroughly enjoyed her first trip to Mumbai, looked up at me and said, "It feels good to be back in Delhi." I was somewhat taken aback, for until now I've always gotten the impression that Delhi's distinctive vibrational frequency was a bit too much for her, but I knew exactly what she meant. After visiting her in Lucknow, I'd said more or less the same upon my return. She acted like I was crazy every time I explained how once you adapt to Delhi something in you fundamentally changes. A love for Delhi is hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it, but once you've felt it nothing quite compares. Nowhere else can fill or break your heart in quite the same way, for better and for worse. Not even dear Mumbai, with all its filmi glamour, its infinite skylines, and its delicious coastal breezes.

Dome Sweet Dome

Neela Gumbad (Blue Dome) near Humayun's Tomb

 

Allie indulges in ice cream appetizer at a recent Fulbright banquet 

in "The Dome," Ambassador Hotel

Ceremonial masks at the Sangeet Natak Akademi Museum

First amrood (guava) of the season 

First tabla lesson (with yours truly)

Tough times near Hauz Khas Village

Independence Day at Lodhi Garden

Off to Mumbai for the weekend tomorrow morning, then back to Delhi on Monday to prep for Simon's arrival. More updates soon. For now, enjoy the pics :)

Azaadi

“At the stroke of midnight, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”

                                                        --Jawaharlal Nehru, August 15, 1947

This August 15th, India celebrates 75 years of independence. 75 years ago, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nation's first Prime Minister, addressed crowds gathered in front of Lal Qila in Old Delhi with the "Tricolour" of independent India flying high above the 17th-century Mughal fortress for the first time. The occasion marked the end of generations of European imperial presence in South Asia, the final 90 years of which saw the British Raj consolidate political, economic, and military control over the vast territories of British India. Decades of nationalist organizing and two world wars precipitated British withdrawal in 1947, but the haste with which they ultimately departed spawned one of the largest humanitarian crises in the history of humankind.

For all the jubilation and flag waving today, August 15th also marks the date of Partition, the cleaving of India and Pakistan--two independent "secular" nations demarcated along religious lines, and the forced migration of some 20 million souls across a haphazard border cut by the colonizers on their way out the door. Of these migrants, some two million lost their lives before ever settling in a new home. Families and communities were torn apart. The wounds, while hardly fresh, have never fully healed.

75 years is a long time when measured against a single human life, but merely a blip in the civilizational history of the subcontinent. As India and Pakistan turn 75 this year, there are still survivors who can tell their own stories of Partition--tales of loss, hope, and lives rebuilt amidst unimaginable suffering and trauma. By the time these antagonistic South Asian neighbors turn 100, such stories will only be found in history books or retold by descendants who never knew the worlds left behind.

I am not an Indian, and thus will never feel the pride of waving the Tricolour and chanting "Hindustan Zindabaad" or "Jai Hind" like the school children marching around our neighborhood this morning. Wary as I am of nationalism in its varied forms, I have never even felt such attachment to the flag or patriotic slogans of my own nation. As an American, however, I can relate to a certain pride in Independence--a pride in having successfully thrown off the shackles of (the same) imperial power. 

But these victories and celebrations always have a dark side. American Independence is forever blemished by the nation's own history of imperialism and an inability to fight sincerely and consistently for its simple founding principle that "all men (and women) are created equal." By contrast, Indian Independence is haunted by the specter of Partition and ongoing communal violence between Hindus and Muslims--violence that is ignored, if not encouraged, by current political leaders. In the spirit of anti-imperialism, it is worth taking time to celebrate August 15th. In the spirit of humanitarianism, it is also worth taking time to mourn.

All quiet on the blogging front

Having accumulated a bunch of great footage from the past few weeks, I'm struggling to work up sufficient motivation to curate clips. The little chest cold I woke up with this morning isn't helping the cause. It occurs to me that I really don't need to take on extra work, so I'm not going to...

Of all the footage, I was most excited to share clips of Yashwant Vaishnav's tabla solo from the Swara Samrat Festival, a multi-city affair commemorating the 100th birth anniversary of sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan. There's not much I can do to put the performance in context beyond stating that Yashwant is a generational talent whose feats on the tabla appear almost superhuman. His hour-plus solo on July 24th brought the entire Delhi audience, including a number of senior maestros, to their feet. Someone suggested over the microphone that Yashwant had "conquered" the audience. While the verbage may have been a touch extreme, it's also impossible to deny.

Enjoy.