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| Vikram Sampath with Arpita Chatterjee at An Author’s Afternoon in Taj Bengal. Pictures: Rashbehari Das |
His quest started when he was a schoolboy and after 10 years of obsession, Vikram Sampath came out with the 760-page Splendours of Royal Mysore (2008). Trained in Carnatic music, he’s also the author of My Name is Gauhar Jaan and Voice of the Veena: S. Balachander as well as a music archivist and founder-director of the Bangalore Literature Festival. On April 21, he chatted with teacher, music researcher and translator Arpita Chatterjee before a select audience at An Author’s Afternoon, presented by Shree Cement at Taj Bengal, along with Prabha Khaitan Foundation and Jaipur-based literary consultancy, Siyahi. Excerpts...
Arpita: So tell me, where did it all begin?
Vikram: It’s wonderful to be back in Calcutta… it feels like homecoming. There’s a book that is very popular these days, The Accidental Prime Minister [by Sanjaya Baru]. If I were ever to write an autobiography, it would be ‘The Accidental Writer’ because I never dreamt or planned to be a writer! Serendipity, I think, rules my life.
Many years ago there was a television series called The Sword of Tipu Sultan by Sanjay Khan. I was a child of Class VI or VII then and there was a particular representation of the Mysore royal family in that serial. The king was shown as a retard who was dancing around with court dancers and the queen was shown as one of those typical Ekta Kapoor vamps with one eyebrow raised, scheming and conniving and so on.
There were lots and lots of protests in different parts of south Karnataka about this representation. Even 60 years after Independence, the Mysore royal family is held in high regard because of the good work that the dynasty had done. I think the foundations of Karnataka were laid during that period. And so for somebody to represent them in that way, it ruffled a lot of feathers.
As a child for whom history was a very, very boring subject... seeing these protests, these voices, somewhere something was kindled within me and I decided to go to Mysore on completely self-motivated, self-funded trips every vacation and visit the palace archives and the libraries.
Arpita: Do you think teaching of something really makes a difference?
Vikram: It’s particularly true when it comes to history. India is a land of storytellers, we love our grandmothers’ tales of kings and battles and victories and all of that. Our epics are great stories. So if a lot of young people in India don’t study history, there is a problem. Now slowly I think there is a reversal of the trend, where writers like Ramachandra Guha do impeccable research but at the same time make it accessible. For a lay audience, I think a story makes for a lot more important medium.
Arpita: How long did your Mysore research go on?
Vikram: It lasted for 10 long years. It was really some sort of an obsession and unless you’re obsessed with the subject, it’s very difficult to continue for so long. Never, ever did the idea of a book occur. After 10 years of research I realised that there was not a single book written in English or in Kannada on the Mysore dynasty.
They [the Wodeyars] have ruled Mysore for about 600 years, one of the longest reigning households in India and within this period there were also the famous stories of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan. It had gone unnoticed because I think a lot of Indian history gets restricted to the Mughals, the Rajputs and the Marathas. The south of India is somehow a black hole. Many friends also advised me to put all of this together in the form of a book. And that’s how my first book came about.
Arpita: You moved from Mysore to Gauhar Jaan because of something you found in your research...
Vikram: I think the subject in each of these books, more than me going looking for them, they have come looking for me. Gauhar Jaan was someone I really didn’t know of, though I used to be a student of music. There was this huge box of files in the Mysore palace archives with a lot of documents and letters from several visiting musicians who had come to Mysore. And the Mysore state was progressive in the way that it invited Hindustani musicians, Carnatic musicians and Western musicians to the durbar.
One of these box files said “Gauhar Jaan, the first gramophone celebrity of India, Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta.” That kind of attracted my attention and when I went through her files there were lots of letters that she had written to the Maharaja’s government pleading, ‘Don’t cut my income tax, increase my salary,’ or she had court cases hounding her from all over India, so she’d ask for help. And in typical bureaucratic fashion there was a jotting saying “rejected” by the deewan’s office.
And then suddenly she’s dead... her hospital bills, all of that was there. That really intrigued me as to why someone who was called the first superstar of gramophone in India, why did she have to come from distant Calcutta to Mysore and die there in anonymity? I even went looking for her grave but couldn’t find one because she lies in an unmarked grave. She didn’t have children as she was a tawaif. Her memory was completely lost.
So Mysore became the trigger to start off on this journey and then I literally chased her through the length and breadth of India — from Azamgarh in UP, where she was born to Benaras to Rampur to Ganga to Calcutta, where she spent most of her life.
Arpita: Why did you name the book My Name is Gauhar Jaan?
Vikram: The book came out around the same time as Karan Johar’s My Name Is Khan and people thought I did it as a publicity stunt but actually, no. Actually she would end all her recordings with this very loud and flirtatious announcement, ‘My name is Gauhar Jaan’. There was a reason for that. The recordings were made in Calcutta but the manufacturing was done in Hanover in Germany. For the technician there, it was an anonymous voice, so the idea was to identify the artiste by this announcement.
Arpita: And S. Balachander... the subject of your last book?
Vikram: Again it was serendipitous because as a student of music I’ve been lucky to be trained under Shrimati Bombay Jayashri and Jayanthi Kumaresh. Jayanthi Kumaresh is the niece of Lalgudi Jayaramanji and she was the student of S. Balachander. So, in most of her classes she would keep talking about her teacher. She also showed me some of his letters and some of his speeches. There’s something about letters getting me attracted to write a book on its subject!
One particular speech that caught my attention was an address at Sur Shringar Samsad in Bombay... very, very forthright and upright, where he said it is the responsibility of every musician to remain honest to his way of life... he stood up for causes of classicism and honesty in music, which very few people in the fraternity did. He dragged his fellow musicians to court....
These episodes were something that really attracted me. Here was an artiste who had the courage and conviction to take on the establishment despite being a very, very accomplished musician. And because of causes that he fought for, he almost became a pariah in the music world. Twenty-two years after his death, nobody talks about him, his work goes unnoticed. Nobody perpetuates his style of playing the veena. It was something that he taught himself.
He was the first Carnatic musician who took Carnatic music to the West. Till then it was Hindustani music that was known outside, with Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Ustad Vilayat Khan. In 1962, he went coast to coast in the US and also cut the largest number of LPs.
Arpita: You need to eat to survive, and you need to write. What else do you need to do to be the person you are?
Vikram: Well, I think music and literature, these are the two things that define my life and I really thank my parents and my grandmother. I was a single child and having nobody to play with, music and books became my constant companions, unquestioning friends. And very early on in life my grandmother put me in music class. Initially there was a lot of protest but slowly when the bug bites you, you know, you can’t give it up.
Arpita: Why did you want to have an archive of old music?
Vikram: Everything that has happened in life has been serendipitous, like I said. So after Gauhar Jaan, I had been to Berlin on a visiting fellowship and keeping Berlin as a base, I travelled to all these sound archives in different parts of Europe. And two things hit me there. One, every country there had a national sound archive, which was a central depository of all vintage recordings of the country. The other aspect was that all of them had huge holdings of Indian recordings, not only of music but also voices of common Indians. One question that everyone asked there was, doesn’t India have a national sound archive?
As a student of music, history, as an Indian, I think it was deeply embarrassing to admit that we did not have one, that we allowed our treasures to rot in all these shops and chor bazaars near Dharamtala mosque and that entire area where we find all these 78 rpm records that are our heritage.
So that was the whole idea of setting up the archive of Indian music as a private initiative. I tried it with the government but finally it was T.V. Mohandas Pai who came to my rescue, funded the project and we have now collected about 15,000 gramophone lists from all over India. And this includes classical music, folk music, early cinema recordings, speeches of leaders like Gandhi, Nehru, Subhash Bose, Tagore and others, and all of these have been digitised and are accessible for all of you sitting in the comfort of your home, free of cost at archiveofindianmusic.org.
Sundeep Bhutoria [of Prabha Khaitan Foundation]: What do you think is the future of Indian classical music? Also, why do you think so many musicians are shifting abroad to open academies?
Vikram: In Chennai, every December there is a music festival where there are 3,000 concerts held over a span of 25 days. It’s the world’s largest classical music festival. It starts at nine in the morning, lasts till nine in the night, starting with academic sessions. I had presented at 8pm and I was wondering who would come, I’d probably be speaking to some chairs. But believe you me, the hall was full. Another thing, in South India there is this sabha culture. They play a major role in not only keeping the music alive but also the neighbourhood children come and pick up some music. Everyone need not and should not become a performer, we need educated listeners also.
Of course for Carnatic music there is a huge market abroad, which is mostly run by the diaspora. Like any other reality show, there’s a Carnatic Music Idol and now there’s a Carnatic Music Idol USA, which is for students in the US. Why should Indian music be localised only to India? I think it’s good if a lot of them go abroad and seek collaboration.
Nandita Palchoudhury [social entrepreneur]: What do you think about the Indian classical performer deteriorating in the way it is? Even when we were growing up, there was a Bhimsen Joshi who we could always refer to. What do I tell my daughter to go and listen to?
Arpita: I don’t agree with you if you say the average performance is deteriorating. I think it’s probably also related to the number of performances. In our childhood we didn’t have so many Hindustani classical music performances happening on a regular basis. If a great ustad came, it was a baithak at somebody’s house. So if you were lucky to be known to those people you were invited.
Vikram: What you say, to some extent is right, because in Hindustani music, the second generation of ustads has not been nurtured and hasn’t come up, whereas it’s exactly the opposite in the case of Carnatic music.... Carnatic musicians in the south are in their prime. They are all in their 30s, 40s and very tech-savvy and are doing pretty great.
“An Author’s Afternoon is a wonderful exposure for avid readers. Vikram Sampath’s My Name is Gauhar Jaan is such a wonderful take on the musician’s life, which has not been recorded earlier. I am looking forward to reading this book,” said corporate communication consultant Saira Shah Halim.
Text: Trina Chaudhuri
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