Despite his many accolades, Ravi Shankar is a humble man. Dressed in simple white garments, he bowed in respect to the crowd. For someone who has performed and composed with the likes of George Harrison of the Beatles, Andre Previn, Yehudi Menuhin and Phillip Glass in major musical capitals like New York, London, Woodstock and Vienna, his smile radiated not pride, or distance but an aura of quiet confidence and warmth.
When I sat down to listen to him in the Spaulding Auditorium at the Hopkins Center of the Arts on October 20th, I honestly did not know what to expect. I’ve experienced only isolated performances of Indian music. In high school, a Bengali friend was very involved in traditional Indian dance. My experiences with Indian music were limited to the modern hip hop, dancehall and techno infused variations found on albums like DJ Rekha’s Basement Bhangra. But unlike DJ Rekha, Shankar opened my eyes to the roots of Indian music.
Shankar’s musical contribution to the world has been met with honor and appreciation. In his homeland India, he has won three of the nation’s civilian awards including the most imminent prize, the Bharat Ratna or “Jewel of India” in 1999. Shankar was awarded the Commandeur de la Legion d’Honneur, the highest civilian award of France in 2000 and the Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2001. Additionally, he is the recipient of three Grammy Awards, and the International Music Council UNESCO award in 1975.
Onstage, Shankar was accompanied by Ravichandra Kulur on a tradition Indian flute, Tanmoy Bose on the tabla, a pair of hand drums, and Pirashanna Thevarajah on the mridangam, a large double-sided drum. Each of Shankar’s two young protegés played the tanpura, a North Indian lute that resembles a sitar. Shankar’s daughter, Anoushka, could not accompany him that night due to illness. It was, as he said, the first time in fifteen years that she would not be performing with him, yet Shankar was kind enough to still grace us with his performance.
Before Shankar came on, Kular and Bose wetted the crowd’s appetite with a dramatic South Indian hymn to the Hindu god Ganesh. As the tanpuras murmured wistfully in the background, Kular’s flute soared above us all, like bird surveying a grassy plain. Bose’s tabla galloped alongside us like a sure-footed gazelle. Basking in the sunlight of their music, we were carried between heaven and earth. Our hearts were in tune with the joyful ragas of the flute and the drums.
At the heart of classical Indian music is the raga, “a precise, aesthetic, melodic form” says Shankar in On the Appreciation of Indian Classical Music. Although Indian music is characterized as modal, the raga must not be confused as the scale, melody, composition or key found in Western music. A raga can be best characterized as the soul of a piece of music. A saying in Sanskrit translates as “That which colors the mind is a raga.” The raga colors the music, effecting notes and embellishments while setting the emotional tone of a piece. While music students in the West learn through the notation method, in India gurus pass their knowledge of the ragas to their disciples within the oral tradition of classical Indian music. Shankar himself trained under the renowned guru Allauddin Khan.
There are ragas for the nine rasas or sentiments, ragas for particular times of day, ragas for each of the seasons and ragas for every cycle of life. Each raga has a vadi , or principle note, a samavadi or secondary note, and a jan (life) or mukhda (face) which are the cluster of notes that truly define the raga. All these notes make up the characteristic note patterns of a raga. Over 6,000 ragas arise from the permutations and combinations of 72 parent scales.
Shankar breathed life into his ragas. Once on stage, he began the traditional recital with calm and slow exploration of the chosen raga. The immense sweeping song of his sitar ran like a river running through a dusty land. From this introspective beginning, Shankar moved on to the jor, in which different rhythms were used to elaborate and embellish the raga’s basic theme. He then reached the gat, 4 to 16 bars of rhythmic structure and fixed composition within the raga. Here Bose and Thevarajah entered on the drums. Bose also lent his vocal expertise to the piece. The gat culminated in the jhala, a partly improvised part of the raga. The piece reached its climax in the sawal jabab, where there was a beautiful, exhilarating and rapid interplay between sitar and tabla, concluding in a sensual, romantic thumri.
As I listened to Shankar’s sitar that night, the raga, the soul of the music synced with my individual consciousness, my own raga, and elevated my soul to a higher realm of awareness. The soul is a frequency of pure energy vibrating in the shell of our bodies. This frequency can harmonize with that of the universe, thereby enhancing our entire being. “Our ragas are the vehicles by which this essence can be perceived.” explains Shankar. The soul is a wave among waves. Like the sound waves of music or the electromagnetic waves of color, such waves are packed with energy that can be amplified, harmonized and synchronized. When all these waves resonate, when soul and universe harmonize, the subsequent release of energy is not only powerful, but also purifying. It is through this revelation do we realize of the true essence of our existence.
At the end of the performance, the entire auditorium jumped to its feet and applauded long enough for the musicians to bow three times. Shankar is indeed perfected through his music. It does not take a guru to appreciate his musical mastery.
