BHAIRAVI: THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF INDIAN MUSIC By Peter Lavezzoli, HarperCollins, Rs 450

For someone with very little patience for fusion music of any blend, I found myself enjoying the first few chapters of Peter Lavezzoli’s book. There are two reasons for this. First, “heard melodies”, whatever their effect, can always be made to sound different in writing. So, you may not exactly feel enchanted by Ravi Shankar’s Sitar Concerto No. 2 (also known as Raga Mala) conducted by Zubin Mehta, but reading about its complex structure and playful intricacies, you may be persuaded to think otherwise. Second, though Lavezzoli focuses a great deal of attention on the evolution of mixed genres like Indo-Jazz or on the collaboration of Indian and Western musicians, he is also deeply aware of the impact of Indian classical music in its purest form, of the nuances of ragas and talas, which makes even his most rudimentary account of an Ali Akbar Khan performance worth reading.

Lavezzoli begins with the first LP of Indian classical music recorded in America in 1955, featuring Ali Akbar Khan on sarod and Chatur Lal on tabla, introduced by Yehudi Menuhin. Uday Shankar and his troupe had been on a tour of Europe much before this; even earlier, in 1838, some South Indian devadasis had performed in the Continent. But Ali Akbar’s recording not only opened the floodgates of publicity in an unprecedented scale, but was also “preserved for its own sake, with nothing extraneous added”. This “pure” classical form was heard by, and influenced, numerous Western musicians, among them the American composer, La Monte Young, who rushed out to the nearest store to buy the LP after hearing a “six second fragment” of a tanpura droning on the radio in 1957. If this LP was the “seed”, it “bore fruit” in 1967, “the annus mirabilis”.

In that fateful year, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi arrived in the West with his transcendental meditation; the Beatles sang the glories of LSD in Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, with George Harrison strumming a sitar in the same album; the Ali Akbar College of Music opened in California; Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha performed at the Monterey Pop Festival, while Yehudi Menuhin joined them at the United Nations in New York on December 10, Human Rights Day. Lavezzoli is excellent with history: he knows how to make the oddest connections come alive. He moves to and fro across the years, but can zoom in on what happened in a single year or even in as short a span as a month. Such a movement, combining the diachronic and the synchronic, also reflects the typical elaboration of scales in a raga.

Curiously, it was Ravi Shankar who had been invited to the historic tour in 1955, but tied down by domestic duties, he sent along his brother-in-law. If such selflessness made the sitar maestro forego a golden opportunity, he would be generously recompensed in the future. The later chapters are spent on assessing Shankar’s enormous influence on the Western sensibility, although the effect that his exodus had on his homeland is barely glimpsed at. We read about fascinating collaborations or adaptations: Mickey Hart, John Coltrane, Terry Riley, Alla Rakha, Zakir Hussain, Philip Glass, John McLaughlin and George Harrison get a chapter each. Most of these are solidly researched but structurally predictable, and therefore tedious. Lavezzoli begins with a short anecdote, moves on to a mini biography, adds more comments, and sometimes an interview with the musician himself. More often than not, the answers that are given have been either paraphrased in the earlier sections or else they are accepted uncritically. One wonders, for instance, if it ever occurred to Lavezzoli that there is a striking absence of female Indian musicians who have made it big in the West. Or, for that matter, why was Western classical music not as susceptible to fusion as Indian classical ragas — why Malkauns rather than Mahler? In this sense, is Western classical music then better preserved, or is it simply more insular or inflexible, than the Indian variety?

There is also the invariably Western urge to turn Indian classical music into the medium of universal peace — music that inspires, for example, the jugalbandi of a Hindu (Ravi Shankar) and a Muslim (Ali Akbar). Despite Lavezzoli’s sharp musicological sense and his understanding of Indian culture, one cannot help wincing sometimes when his adulatory tone brings to mind Incredible India in all its exotic splendour. It appears that Lavezzoli could never distance himself enough from his subject to present a critical history of the reception of World Music (a concoction of oriental and occidental styles). He seems too much in awe of the accumulated greatness of the big names to break the mould and risk being adventurous.