Kesarbai Kerkar and Omkarnath Thakur

Some Hindustani Musicians: They lit the way! By Ashok Da. Ranade, Promilla, Rs 750

Ashok Da. Ranade is an eminent musicologist, performer and teacher of Hindustani classical vocal music. He has a certain way with English prose, if you are willing to bear with the occasional bout of tedious pedantry, and does not shy away from offering daring, sometimes polemical, opinion. So, this collection of 19 potted biographies of a few luminaries of Hindustani classical music is worth sifting through, if only for the glimpses of original insight and incisive commentary.

There is, of course, the usual quota of amusing anecdotes, without which any popular historical survey of Hindustani music can hardly be complete. In a handful of passages — such as when he likens the appeal of a straight taan of Gwalior gharana to a perfectly executed straight drive in cricket, or Pandit Omkarnath Thakur’s histrionics to Laurence Olivier’s dramatics — Ranade does leave a mark of his personal sophistication. But such instances are few and far between, interspersed with pages of densely overwritten analyses thrown pell-mell at the reader without any semblance of order or coherence.

Even the anecdotes are seldom scintillating; they read more like occasions for name-dropping. He never tires of reminding the reader of his enviable musical pedigree: that he has been taught by the much exalted Gajananbuwa Joshi, one of the modern masters of the Gwalior style. Predictably, Ranade’s encounters with Kesarbai Kerkar are the most memorable. Apparently, the Iron Lady of khayal broke out in giggles on being compared favourably to Mrs Gandhi by Ranade in a speech he delivered at a felicitation ceremony organized for Kesarbai. Coming from the mercurial nightingale of the Jaipur gharana, such a gesture signified warm approval, if not high praise. However, next to the mischievous tales that the late Sheila Dhar had to tell of Kesarbai, including those concerning the latter’s infamous flights of temper, Ranade’s episode sounds almost anodyne.

There is also a weakness for hero- worship in Ranade, which sometimes tends to get the better of his generally progressive approach to music-making. For instance, when Pandit Anantbuwa Joshi, his guru’s father, rebukes Ranade for daring to make the simple offer of serving him tobacco, Ranade feels duly chastened, almost thrilled, to be put in his place. “Thus was given to me a lesson in courtesy and protocol that enrich Indian musico-cultural spectrum,” he gloats. The more appropriate response, in this case, would have been a polite, if not amused, dismissal of such a snappy reaction, as a gesture belonging to another time — a kind of behaviour that would be held as gratuitously out of form in our times. Time and again, such thoughtless adulation tends to dull Ranade’s sharpness of judgment, which does take a great deal away from the substance of his arguments.

He dwells at length on Pandit Vishnu Digambar Paluskar’s appropriation of the Ramnaam in the alap section of khayal, but fails to mention the possibility of a covert Hinduization of Hindustani music in Maharashtra from the late 19th century onwards. The opening chapter, devoted to Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande’s project of establishing Hindustani music as one of the exact sciences, does not make a clear link between nationalism and music pedagogy, a theme that is taken up by the historian, Janaki Bakhle, in her seminal study on Bhatkhande and Paluskar, Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition (2006). Ranade also prefers to keep his blinkers on in a more obvious way. Almost all the musicians discussed in this book either hail from Maharashtra or were trained in and around the state. Some of the names are simply baffling: why Manik Verma and not Mogubai Kurdikar or Kishori Amonkar? Verma’s presence looks odder still in the august company of Kesarbai Kerkar and Heerabai Barodekar, the only other women who get substantial attention in this book. Roshan Ara Begum and Gangubai Hangal merely get a few cursory comments appended in the end like an afterthought. Other kinds of prejudice are palpable as well. For instance, the high priests of the Bengal renaissance get their comeuppance — perhaps not entirely undeservedly— in the hands of this proud advocator of Marathi glory.

Ranade takes his parochialism a step further by giving a great deal of prominence to the followers of the Gwalior style, which he is principally trained in. He seems to be less tolerant of the Kirana artists’ relative indifference to tempo as opposed to the fastidiously robust talas preferred in the Gwalior gayaki. However, to his credit, Ranade makes a near-heretical, though not exactly unfair, evaluation of Abdul Karim Khan’s ethereal style. In Ranade’s estimation, the Ustad blurred the boundary between thumri and khayal, and left “only one deep hue of anguish all over in all ragas”. A reasonable opinion if any, although one that is spiked with two potentially destabilizing provisos. The first point pales into insignificance if one considers the sheer aesthetic brilliance that informed the Ustad’s style. The second point appears less convincing, especially when one finds that Ranade has unqualified praise for Kumar Gandharva, another genius who could also be faulted for becoming predictable, if not gimmicky, in his later years.

All said and done, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Ranade’s book is its typographical oddities. I would not be surprised if there are more exclamation marks in this book than full stops. Nor would I be taken aback to learn that whoever copy-edited this book, assuming someone indeed did such a job, forgot to run the spell-checker. Seldom have I come across a book where there is, on an average, at least one howler per page. Some of these mistakes are probably unique even in the history of errors. Sample these: muscial (p.91), errect (p.103), wss (p.111), endowd (p.141), strudent’s (p.192), lucnh (p.252), closley (p.272), rendereing (p.318). And this for the princely sum of Rs 750. A better idea would be to spend it all on some great music CDs.