Finding the Raga by Amit Chaudhuri: Beauty of digressions
Finding the Raga by Amit Chaudhuri: Beauty of digressionson May 14, 2021 Amit Chaudhuri’s new book, Finding The Raga, is an ode to the khayal, a genre of classical music that traces its provenance to the ancient cultural repositories of the subcontinent. However, much like the meandering whimsy that the word evokes, his narrative also takes frequent detours into areas not conventionally associated with Indian music: into the realms of world literature and linguistics; jazz and blues; rock ‘n’ roll; Western classical musicology; and, above all, the inflections of ordinary life—birdsong, traffic noises, the hum of energy that is emanated by the everyday, what the poet John Keats called “the world of circumstances”. In a sense, Chaudhuri valiantly rises to the ambition he outlines for himself in the subtle pun of the subtitle, An Improvisation On Indian Music. Like an unfolding khayal, improvisation is written into the letter and spirit of the book. It’s there in the eclectic, often esoteric, asides that Chaudhuri launches into, delighting the reader with the theories he formulates, the range of sources he cites, textual and otherwise. This improvisatory energy is palpable even in the typographical experiments he embarks on to convey the elephantine swagger of Ustad Amir Khan’s badhat—the exceedingly slow grandeur with which he delineated a raga. But the foundation of all his musings is sown in autobiography, which is, as it were, the tonic in this bravura performance. Ironically, autobiography is also a slippery slope in this otherwise deeply insightful book, written as much for the curious and novices as for connoisseurs of Hindustani classical music. Chaudhuri isn’t interested in a historical survey or anecdotal pastiche, both of which were the foundations of the late Kumar Prasad Mukherji’s peerless book, The Lost World Of Hindustani Music. Instead, Chaudhuri prefers to draw his inferences from his lived experiences, a welcome strategy to write about an abstruse, widely misunderstood and inadequately appreciated genre like the khayal.
Finding The Raga: By Amit Chaudhuri, Penguin Random House India, 256 pages, ₹499.
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