Hello everybody…
Early this week, I received two books that I had ordered from Indiaplaza. Actually, I had placed orders for three books…but the third one is out of stock and will take time to reach me… the two books that I received were not entirely new or recently released ones … The Music Room by Namita Devidayal (Random House, India) was released in 2007 to appreciative reviews in all major newspapers and magazines and was recommended by Pt Ravi Shankar as a must read for all musicians and music lovers … I wanted to buy the book as soon as it was released…and it took me almost 5 months to finally get it and read it…I love reading books on Indian classical music, especially the memoir and the socio-politico-cultural kind, and have a quite a good collection of them…I have this great ambition of doing some kind of research on Indian music, any genre…and this reading, I tell myself, will all go into this research…I don’t want to produce a tome or something like that…a couple of articles or research papers will make me happy… this reading has resulted in me buying and reading different kinds of books on Indian classical music…Two Men and Music: Nationalism in the Making of an Indian Classical Tradition by Janaki Bakhle (Permanent Black, ND); Ustad Alladiya Khan’s autobiography My Life (Thema, Calcutta); The Lost World of Hindustani Music (Penguin, India) by Kumar Prasad Mukherji; Pt Mallikarjun Mansur’s autobiography Rasa Yatra: My Journey in Music (Roli Books, New Delhi); Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern: The Post Colonial Politics of Music in South India by Amanda Weidman (Duke University Press); Between Two Tanpuras (Popular Prakashan) by Vaman H. Deshpande; Indian Musical Traditions: An Aesthetic Study of the Gharanas in Hindustani Music (Popular Prakashan) by Vaman H. Deshpande … and many more…anyway… I enjoyed my encounters with these stalwart writers and gained many insights into this great art form… in more than one instance, the human beings behind the artistes and performers are revealed and we see them in turns as temperamental, egotistical, mischievous, funny, etc., like any one of us…Vaman Deshpande’s Indian Musical Traditions gave me a sound knowledge of the inner workings of the gharana system and his evaluation of Jaipur gharana as a complex amalgamation of the two pillars of Khyal music – swara and laya – got me hooked into taking a slightly deeper interest in the khyal gayaki of the Jaipur gharana … somewhere during this listening and reading, Thema of Calcutta released the autobiography of the founder of Jaipur Gharana, Ustad Alladiya Khan, My Times. In my humble opinion, this is a landmark book for those interested in the growth and development of Hindustani music…and so, when I heard that The Music Room was about the Jaipur gharana, I was intrigued … and I started reading it the day I received and finished it in two days…it is an intensely moving story of one of the unsung stalwarts of Jaipur gharana – Dhondutai Kulkarni. The book is mainly structured as the author’s musical journey, where she weaves in the stories of Dhondutai Kulkarni, her guru the irrepressible Kesarbai Kerkar, and Kesarbai’s guru, the great Ustad Alladiya Khan…and in spite of this impressive lineage and also having learnt music from Ustad Alladiya Khan’s second son Ustad Manji Khan … Dhondutai never becomes the concert star that her guru Kesarbai was famously was…the poignancy and the sense of being sidelined and the pride of belonging to this impressive lineage are all wonderfully narrated by Namita Devidayal, herself now a part of this grand lineage…Namita Devidayal never comes out with reasons for Dhondutai Kulkarni’s destiny as an unrecognised gem of the Jaipur gharana…but enough hints are interspersed throughout the narrative for readers to reach their conclusions…I wish many more readers for this wonderful book…and best wishes to Namita Devidayal on her music career…don’t stop singing…both of you…guru and shishyaa…
Jayasrinivasa Rao
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