The Empire Sings Back

THE YEAR IS 1926. Among the audience at Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s concert in Egmore in Madras is a Theosophist, lost in a half-hour-long unmetered exposition of Raag Jaunpuri. Margaret Cousins knew a thing or two about music. Since moving to India with her husband a decade ago, the Irish musician had helped Rabindranath Tagore set ‘Jana Gana Mana’ to tune. She had attended Carnatic music concerts in Madras over the years, but left dissatisfied, for “the character of the voice, the instruments and the religious subject-matter of the songs seemed out of keeping entirely with the environment of the unresponsive, over-large hall.” Yet, Hindustani vocalist Abdul Karim Khan, of the Kirana gharana, captivated her like none other. “His power over intonation is the most complete I can imagine possible. His voice melts through the most difficult of intervals, clearly enunciates microtones, has every shade of expression. His personal art conquered, for me, all the distraction of surrounding inappropriateness and ugliness,” she writes.

Western elites of the 19th and the early 20th centuries had a bifocal vision of Indian music—it was a diamond defined by its flaws, an Orientalist’s fantasy, a chaotic and incoherent thing defying the conventions of harmony and form, or, as Pandit Amarnath puts it in his 1989 book Living Idioms in Hindustani Music: A Dictionary of Terms and Terminology, “a sort of sleeping beauty requiring the European Prince Charming to bring it back to life.” Western music, meanwhile, was not “in much repute among the Natives of India”, and military bands were established in the native regiments of the East India Company to inculcate an appreciation of European culture and music. Aristocrats like the Maharaja of Mysore and the Maratha ruler of Tanjore, a small but prosperous hub of the arts in Tamil country, had turned patrons of European music and set up bands of their own, and the Hindoo College in Calcutta (now Presidency University) even offered formal training in Western music, but most Indians, including musicians, thought little of music sans devotion and natural microtones. There were exceptions on either side, of course. Tagore, who had grown up learning Western as well as Indian music, was inspired by opera and Scottish folk songs like ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, for they “conveyed emotions such as laughter or merriment, which was unknown in the Indian musical repertoire.” For a handful of musicians from the West, among them the Indophile English composer Gustav von Holst, India became the sweet fountain from which all thirsty souls could drink. Holst studied Sanskrit epics and texts and Indian musical elements, and had a six-year-long ‘Indian phase’ when he wrote choral hymns based on the Rig Veda, a one-act chamber opera from the Mahabharata called Savitri, a three-act opera on the story of Sita and more. In Resonances of the Raj: India in the English Musical Imagination,1897-1947, Nalini Ghuman traces the story of Maud MacCarthy—how “an independent, professional musician made her way alone to India in the early years of the century, absorbed the music through immersion and practice, and returned to take on a new, albeit unofficial, role at the centre of the English musical establishment”—and other musical pioneers at the heart of the British-Indian interstices.

The scope of these cross-cultural experiments came to extend far beyond the Anglicised elite and fin-de-siecle Orientalists. In south India, the fitful coastal breeze bearing martial music from Fort St George changed the course of an entire system of classical music that prides itself on supposedly divine origins and unchanging traditions. In the early 1790s, when Ramaswami Dikshitar, a Carnatic musician from Tiruvarur, moved to Manali near Madras upon the invitation of Muttukrishna Mudaliar, the last chief merchant of the East India Company, his teenaged sons—Muthuswami, Balaswami and Chinnaswami—encountered, for the first time at close quarters, the world of Western music with its sprightly tunes and sparkling orchestral instruments. Muthuswami Dikshitar, he of the esoteric tradition of Shakti worship and author of over 400 compositions who would later be hailed as one of the Carnatic trinity of composer-musicians to shape the arc of south Indian music, riffed on basic Western tunes to craft a set of 33 compositions called nottuswaras, set in the C major scale with pitch intervals corresponding to those of Raga Sankarabharanam and sahitya in Sanskrit.

While Muthuswami Dikshitar went on to focus on classical and complex compositions, his younger brother Balaswami spent three years studying the violin under the Mudaliars’ patronage. It is Balaswami Dikshitar who is credited with inducting the instrument into the hallowed annals of Carnatic music. He is said to have taught Vadivelu, one of four musicians who made up the Tanjore Quartet patronised by the Maratha king Serfoji II, and later by Maharaja Swati Tirunal of Travancore. Varahappa Dikshitar (1795-1869), a minister at Serfoji II’s court and the leader of his royal band, is said to be another early exponent of the violin.

Serfoji himself was introduced to Western music by Christian missionaries; he even appointed Vedanayagam Sastriyar, a Tamil Christian who composed over 500 songs for congregational singing, set to Carnatic ragas, as a court poet. The king’s Tanjore Band had 42 members including musicians who played Indian instruments, as also the Irish pipe, the harp, the violin, the piano, the clarinet, the flute, the French horn and the trumpet, for all of which Serfoji had Sanskrit and Marathi names. The trumpet bugle was called Kartiki, the kettle drum Birudu Dundubhi and the clarinet Manjula Sarkva. His own compositions in the Western style are simple melodies and his collection of music books reveals an interest in contemporary composers but not the greats of Western music.

In his book A Southern Music, musician TM Krishna writes that paintings from Thanjavur dating back to 1800 indicate the violin had already been used in Sadir, the precursor to Bharatanatyam. “The music in Sadir was the same as the music that was being shaped into Karnatik art music. The other instrument that found its way into Sadir was the clarinet, not to forget the harmonium… In the 20th century, the clarinet became a kutcheri instrument,” he notes. By the start of the 20th century, Carnatic musicians had found that though fashioned of European maple and pine, the violin, if re-tuned to suit Indian music, could reproduce nearly every nuance of the human voice, thus making it a perfect shadow instrument for accompanying a vocalist. Heavenly maidens bearing lutes with bows surfaced in Raja Ravi Varma paintings. A book published in 1905 on the lives of musicians by T Singaracharyulu and T Chinna Singaracharyulu featured a photograph with the older sibling holding a violin—making it perhaps the earliest photograph of a Carnatic violinist—and the younger a tambura. The brothers are responsible for elevating the trinity of Tyagaraja, Dikshitar and Syama Sastri to demigods even if Purandaradasa, Kshetrayya and other composers had, equally, shaped the legacy of Carnatic music.

Musicologist AM Chinnaswami Mudaliar notated Tyagaraja’s compositions in western staff notation, which were then published in 1892-1893

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Incidentally, some compositions of Tyagaraja—Gatamoha, Mariyadagadura and Varalilaganalola in Sankarabharanam and Bhavanuta in Mohanam among them—display a Western influence. Tyagaraja is also said to have been accompanied on the violin by his disciple Walahjapet Krishnaswami Bhagavatar. Bhagavatar later helped musicologist AM Chinnaswami Mudaliar notate some of Tyagaraja’s compositions in Western staff notation, which were then published in 1892-1893. Mudaliar, in turn, would encourage Subbarama Dikshitar, a descendant of the Dikshitar parampara, to include staff notation in his magnum opus, the Sangita Sampradaya Pradarsini, published in 1904.

“We do not have recordings of Tirukkodikaval Krishna Iyer and Malikkottai Govindaswamy Pillai, violinists from the late-19th century who are said to have developed bowing and fingering techniques suitable for Carnatic music,” says Carnatic violinist RK Shriram Kumar. “Techniques have since been refined considerably and several banis have emerged. India has made the violin its own, even if it cannot make good violins yet.” The cultural diffusion that began with the violin has been unstoppable, notes musicologist N Ramanathan. “If the clarinet replaced the mukha-veena in Bharatanatyam recitals in the early 20th century, the Western flute, the saxophone, the guitar and the mandolin have over time claimed their space on the Carnatic stage. Some temples today have saxophones instead of nagaswaram.”

Equally, European harpsichordists and composers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, such as Sophia Plowden, Margaret Fowke and William Hamilton Bird, seem to have leapt at opportunities to collect Indian music, usually from nautch parties, and to arrange them into palatable salon pieces for European audiences. “Sophia spent a great deal of her time collecting and performing the Persian and Hindustani songs of nautch performers at the Lucknow court. One in particular captured her fascination—the celebrated Kashmiri courtesan Khanum Jan. Sophia wrote down Khanum’s songs and those of her companions in European notation; they were then turned into harmonised arrangements for the harpsichord, and published to great acclaim by William Hamilton Bird in Calcutta in 1789. For a while, these European-style salon pieces known as “Hindustani Airs” were all the rage in drawing rooms across the British Empire from Inverness to Singapore,” writes music historian Katherine Butler Schofield of King’s College London.

The colonial encounter fostered an undeniable influence of the West and the East on one another’s music, but not just at the level of adopting instruments and peripheral attempts at mutual interpretation such as nottuswaras and ‘Hindustani airs’, says Carnatic pianist Anil Srinivasan. “There were composers who were influenced at a deeper level and experimented with structure and form—from Leo Delibes’ opera Lakme inspired by the Indian goddess of wealth, to Claude Debussy’s love affair with Hindustani music post a meeting with the sitar player Inayat Khan, and French composer and pianist Maurice Delage, who, while on a tour of India in 1912, learnt from Carnatic singer Coimbatore Thayi and composed Quatre poèmes hindous, four pieces of music in honour of four Indian cities (Jaipur, Varanasi, Lahore and Chennai) that reflect the raga patterns of Vachaspati, Varali, Latangi and others. Delage also used something called the prepared piano, where a piece of cardboard is placed under the strings to emulate Indian gamaka,” Srinivasan says. “The arc of inspiration, from Muthuswami Dikshitar to a 1930s recording of the brothers Muthi and Mani playing Nagumomu in raga Abheri as a duet on the violin and the piano, was a scientific rather than an artistic one.”

A 1905 book on musicians by T Singaracharyulu (left) and T Chinna Singaracharyulu featured a photo with the older sibling holding a violin, making it perhaps the earliest photograph of a carnatic violinist, and the younger a tambura

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This osmosis was, on occasion, coloured by the politics of the Raj. The harmonium, an organ designed by a German professor, became truly Indian in 1875 when Dwarkanath Ghose, whose company Dwarkin & Sons manufactured musical instruments in Calcutta, developed a hand-operated version half the size of the original. Pretty soon, it became a cheap and easy alternative to the sarangi and despite its limitations won favour with top Hindustani musicians. The sarangi had been associated with courtesans, who, along with Muslim ustads, were being increasingly marginalised by musical reformers who strove to rebrand raga music as part of an ancient Hindu heritage. As the link between music and bhakti was reinforced, and the Hindu music politics of Tagore, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Vishnu Digambar Paluskar swept India, the harmonium was cast aside by purists and All India Radio even banned the instrument from its airwaves from 1940 to 1971.

In his work on musical renaissance in England and India between 1874 and 1914, Martin Clayton, professor of ethnomusicology at Durham University, UK, sketches some of the relationships between movements of musical revival and reform in India and Britain. “In England these years are now associated with folksong collection, national music and the ‘Musical Renaissance’; in India, with the adoption of classical music by nationalist movements and the development of an urban, largely Hindu concert culture—also sometimes referred to as a musical renaissance,” he writes. As the Indian nationalist movement wore on, the Western fascination with the East was beginning to wear off, but Britons like Arthur Henry Fox Strangways (1859-1948), a musicologist who had befriended Tagore in the early 20th century and helped him get Gitanjali published by Macmillan, continued to engage with Indian music as one of the founders of the India Society, London. By the time India was a free country, identity politics no longer marred the assimilation of Western influences. To this day, Harikesanallur Muthiah Bhagavathar’s (1877-1945) ‘English Note’, as sung by virtuoso vocalist Madurai Mani Iyer, remains one of the most popular closing pieces on the Carnatic concert stage—a light, folksy diversion to jig to as evening falls.

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