The Rise and the Sudden Fall of the Harmonium

SEVEN YEARS AGO, WHEN Ravindra Katoti became the first harmonium player to receive an A grade from All India Radio (AIR), he began to pursue what hadn’t been achieved in decades—to secure a solo harmonium performance on AIR.

The harmonium—despite its undeniable popularity across musical traditions and regions in India—has always had a dodgy reputation trailing it. Caught up first in the debates around its foreign origin in the early 1900s when the freedom struggle was gaining momen­tum and then its alleged unsuitability to Indian classical music, AIR banned the instrument altogether in 1940. After sev­eral entreaties by those who champion the harmonium, the ban was partially lifted in 1971 when it permitted its use as an accompaniment. But a solo perfor­mance was still a strict no. And Katoti wanted to change that.

AIR uses an audition system, where musicians are graded and offered broad­cast engagements accordingly. Once Katoti secured an A grade, he began to do the rounds of bureaucratic offices and station directors, trying to convince them that it was time to allow solo har­monium performances on the airwaves. He was finally given a slot in 2016 to do a solo performance on an experimental basis on AIR’s local Dharwad station in Karnataka. And two years later, as he continued to push the case, he was per­mitted to do the first solo harmonium performance on the national programme in more than four decades.

But four years since, the floodgates haven’t really opened. As Katoti points out, there have been no other solo per­formances after his. “They did it on an experimental basis. And once the experi­ment was over, they went back to their old mindset, it seems,” he says with a laugh.

The debates on the harmonium’s for­eign origin and unsuitability to Indian music that once led to its complete ban on AIR were reignited recently when Giani Harpreet Singh, the Jathedar of the Akal Takht, asked the Shiromani Gurd­wara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) to phase out the now ubiquitous harmoni­um from kirtans in the Golden Temple. Calling it a “British imposition”, he has set a timeline of three years to replace the harmonium with traditional string instruments. Around the same time, the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) asked raagis or hymn-singers in their gurdwaras to learn to play traditional string instruments in the next six months.

While there are few details about when the harmonium first entered the Golden Temple, it is now, as with other forms of music elsewhere in India, an integral part of Sikh devotional music. According to Alankar Singh, an assistant professor of music in Punjabi University’s Depart­ment of Music at Patiala who specialises in Hindustani classical music and Gurmat Sangeet, apart from being a trained singer in these traditions himself, the harmoni­um was first used at the Golden Temple sometime at the beginning of the 1900s, probably between 1905 and 1908. He points out that while Akal Takht’s Jathe­dar may have asked for the harmonium’s removal, it may have become so popular that it might be virtually impossible to do so. “Ninety-nine per cent of the raagis use the harmonium. Most of them don’t know how to play the traditional string instru­ments, which by the way, are very difficult to learn. So, I don’t know if this can even be done,” Singh says.

The harmonium may have originated in the West, but today, it mostly resides in the Indian subcontinent. Although the prototype of the harmonium was in de­velopment a little while earlier, the first known patent of the instrument, in 1840, was by a French inventor named Alexan­dre Debain. In the early part of the Raj, British officers had struggled with their musical instruments. Instruments such as organs and harpsichords were tough to transport over the seas, and when brought, rapidly deteriorated in the heat and humidity. But the harmonium solved those problems. It was portable, far cheaper to produce, and more durable than any other keyboard instrument.

DEBAIN’S INVENTION, HOWEVER, was nothing like the harmonium we know today. An upright instrument, its bellows had to be operated by foot. Soon, modifications were being made. According to one widely held belief, a musical instrument maker in Calcutta called Dwarkanath Ghose had begun manufacturing the version of the harmo­nium we are familiar with today by 1875, where the bellows are hand-pumped, and which can be played while seated on the floor with singers and percussionists.

But according to Sudhir Nayak, a highly regarded harmonium player in Mumbai who has also been collect­ing memorabilia associated with the harmonium’s journey through India, this may not be entirely true. Accord­ing to him, even the inventor Debain had begun to manufacture smaller ver­sions of his original harmonium with hand-pumped bellows. Among Nayak’s prized possessions is a harmonium from Debain with hand-pumped bellows that was made sometime around the 1850s or 1860s, which he acquired from a musician friend in Australia about eight years ago, and which after a little refurbishment, can still be played. “Early on, there were no manufactur­ers [of harmonium], only dealers in In­dia. Dwarkanath Ghose in Kolkata and TS Ramchandra and Co in Mumbai were pioneers as dealers and later, as manufac­turers. Others were trying to manufac­ture the harmonium or its reeds, too. In 1901, there was a person called Jeevanlal Mistry and a relative of his, Mohanlal Mistry, both from Palitana in Bhavnagar [Gujarat] who were developing reeds. In fact, as the harmonium became popular, a cottage industry around the harmoni­um and reeds developed in Bhavnagar,” Nayak says.

According to Nayak, the harmonium in its earlier foot-operated bellows avatar first made its presence in Parsi theatre in the second half of the 1800s, from which it spread to Marathi and Kannada theatre.

The arrival of the harmonium in In­dia, especially once it was redesigned and tweaked, spread rapidly across the coun­try and its many musical forms. It began to replace the sarangi, which anyway suf­fered in formal concert settings because of its association with the music of cour­tesans, and which was much harder to learn and required a lot of effort on tun­ing for each raga. Not only did India start manufacturing its own harmoniums, but it is also said that by 1915 or so, it had become the world’s leading producer of the instrument.

The harmonium today is a fixture in nearly every major musical genre in In­dia—ranging from the devotional music of the Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, and others, to folk music, Rabindra Sangeet, Hindustani classical music, Bollywood, and even the preferred instrument of beg­gars on railway platforms. But instead of being celebrated as the musical instru­ment that ties the diversity of India, the treatment meted to it has often been the opposite; its popularity is only matched by the condemnation it often generates.

Caught up in the freedom struggle, where it was branded as a ‘foreign’ instru­ment, the harmonium’s sound was soon described as incompatible with Indian music. A lot of the criticism around its sound lies in the instrument’s inability to produce the microtones and ornamen­tations so celebrated in Indian classical music such as the ghasit, the meend, and the gamak (the slides and glides between notes, and the accents on notes). Accord­ing to its critics, the fundamentals of Western and Indian music are different, and no crossovers with instruments like the harmonium can be permitted.

ACCORDING TO MATTHEW Rahaim, an assistant professor of ethnomusicology in the Department of Music at the University of Minnesota, the attempt to banish the sound of the harmonium was part of an attempt to define a national sound for India, distinct from the West. In a paper published by The Journal of Asian Studies in 2011 titled ‘That Ban(e) of Indian Music: Hearing Politics in The Harmonium’, he points out the notions that Indian melody is essentially continuous and Western melody is essentially discrete, that India and the West have essentially different intonational systems (and hence players cannot produce slides between notes on the harmonium, and that it suffers from tuning issues when used in Indian classi­cal music), do not hold weight. “Though these generalisations offer a tidy theo­retical distinction between Indian and Western music, they do not account well for the technical practices of Indian or Western musicians. Examples of tonal continuity in Western art music include string, trombone, vocal portamenti, ex­pressive vibrato, and the whole range of rhythmic nuance between staccato and legato. The many examples of tonal dis­creteness in Indian music include taan, jhala and sparsh on fretted instruments such as sitar and dilruba, and the rapid, stop-laden vocables of sung taranas. Other instruments used for raga music, such as the santoor [a hammered dulcimer] and the jal tarang [a series of cups tuned by fill­ing them with varying amounts of water] are incapable of bending notes, and thus avoid ragas with great tonal nuance, as the harmonium does—and yet they are widely accepted as Indian instruments,” he writes. “The harmonium, in these de­bates, does not threaten individual Indian musicians so much as it threatens the idea of a singular Indian musical sensibility.”

The harmonium however got caught in the crosshairs of the freedom move­ment and the debates of an ‘Indian musi­cal sensibility’, with even its early cham­pions like Tagore later turning against it. And despite its popularity over the years with acclaimed classical and film musi­cians, it has continued to suffer since, as visible in the latest diktat by the Akal Takht’s jathedar.

When it was banned by AIR, Rahaim recounts an amusing incident when a group of Indian musicians staged a mock funeral procession for the harmonium near AIR headquarters, with several harmonium artists and AIR staff serv­ing as pallbearers for eleven harmoni­ums, as they lowered the harmoniums into a specially prepared grave. The ban, however, seems to have been well-received elsewhere. A 1940 issue of Indian Listener, the AIR journal, featured a car­toon of ‘Herr Monium’, Rahaim writes, dressed in a Nazi uniform, and advertised “a special programme featuring the rise and fall of a dictator.”

“Limitation is a universal fact,” says Katoti, when talking about the demerits associated with harmoniums in Indian classical music. “Every voice, every in­strument has its limitation. When you go to a restaurant you ask what is available. You don’t ask what’s not on the menu.”

According to Nayak, the debates about the harmonium’s unsuitability for Indian music disregard the evolu­tion that has gone into the instrument. “These aspects like the meend, gamak, and ghasit still can’t be produced on the harmonium. But maestros like my gu­ruji [the celebrated harmonium player Tulsidas Borkar] have brought it [the har­monium’s sound] so close to them that you don’t feel the necessity of the exact kind of meend produced by vocal music, or gamak and ghasit,” he says. “Like my other guruji [the vocalist Pandit Jitendra Abhisheki] used to say, you have a beauti­ful bride and you have 30 pieces of jewel­lery. Does she need to put on all those 30 pieces to look beautiful? Or will she look beautiful with even three or four?”

Banned from AIR for a long time and still largely banished from some classical music traditions like Carnatic (at least in its solo renditions), the har­monium, its proponents say, has been undergoing rapid evolution over the years, with players making both big and small modifications to bring it closer to classical sensibilities. Nayak gives the ex­ample of how his guru Tulsidas Borkar, understanding the importance of visual representation in an instrument’s devel­opment, had his harmonium modified so that the keyboard was raised about an inch higher than normal. “With the sitar, you can see the hand movements of the player, so also on the tabla. With the har­monium, it often looks like there is just a box there, with the player behind. So, with this modification, when my guruji played on the stage, you could clearly see the finger movements,” he says.

Several more changes have taken place or are in the offing. The harmonium player Vidyadhar Oke, for instance, has developed a harmonium that can play 22 microtones as required in Indian classical music.

THE DIGITAL MUSICAL instru­ments company Radel has recently launched a digital harmonium called the Maadhurium that, its founder Raj Narayan claims, addresses the charges of the harmonium’s unsuitability to Indian music, and is so light and compact that it can be carried in a backpack.

Narayan, an aerospace engineer, and entrepreneur who is part of the defence industry and whose company Radel pro­duces a variety of digital musical instru­ments, is also a performing musician. He first began working on a digital harmo­nium in 2000. But he put that on hold to churn out electronic versions of other in­struments. In the years since, Radel has launched a number of instruments from digital versions of the veena, tanpura to the tabla. As the earlier reluctance to such electronic developments has withered in recent times, Narayan returned to the development of the Maadhurium about four years ago.

“I’m a performing musician, and so are several members of my family. Along with my engineering background, I was able to appreciate these issues from both a scientific and a musician’s point of view,” Narayan says. “Since all instruments nowadays contain a signifi­cant amount of software, I realised that using software, I could provide or devel­op a harmonium which could be set to either the Western or Indian scale. Now, with this harmonium, at the touch of a button, it can be set to either the Western or Indian scale.”

Nayak is both a fan and a critic of the many modifications being made to the instrument. He believes modifications are necessary for any instrument’s evo­lution, but not to the point that they be­come unrecognisable. “You can’t change a particular instrument because it’s not producing some kind of music you want,” he says.

But his mind is currently turned to the debates of the harmonium’s space at the Golden Temple. “When I visited the Golden Temple, it was the sound of har­monium that first attracted me. In that beautiful ambience, the sound of the harmonium and the way the raagis sing the kirtan, it is so beautiful, it immediately captures your attention,” he says. “Can you just wish the harmonium away?” he asks. “Is it even possible?”

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