I was getting more and more interested in chutney music and located a lot of samples on the Internet, some of which I could download and listen… I enjoyed listening to the swinging rhythms and the West Indian accented Hindi lyrics sometimes interspersed with English lyrics… I wanted to know more about this wonderful music from India which had taken root in alien soil and had grown into a totally fascinating flowering tree… happy to incorporate influences and yet retaining its basic core… my friends helped me in acquiring books on Chutney Music…and so I read Helen Myers’ Music of Hindu Trinidad: Songs from the Indian Diaspora (The University of Chicago Press)…but unfortunately, I was not able to get the CD of songs which accompanied this book…
The next book that I read was Peter Manuel’s East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan Singing, Chutney, and the Making of the Indo-Caribbean Culture … as is my usual practice, I had harangued my friend Vijay in the US to send me this book, as I didn’t want to miss the CD that accompanied this book… the book was riveting and I read it in two instalments…Peter Manuel has given a detailed historical and musical account of chutney music and his writing style is very engaging…but the most enthralling part was in the music in the CD…Manuel has written about and included songs that are part of what Indian-West Indians call Tan singing…this is a repertoire of songs, basically religious, that the Indians have nurtured and developed into a kind of ‘classical’ music, as opposed to the more ‘popular’ chutney music…
The next book that I read was Peter Manuel’s East Indian Music in the West Indies: Tan Singing, Chutney, and the Making of the Indo-Caribbean Culture … as is my usual practice, I had harangued my friend Vijay in the US to send me this book, as I didn’t want to miss the CD that accompanied this book… the book was riveting and I read it in two instalments…Peter Manuel has given a detailed historical and musical account of chutney music and his writing style is very engaging…but the most enthralling part was in the music in the CD…Manuel has written about and included songs that are part of what Indian-West Indians call Tan singing…this is a repertoire of songs, basically religious, that the Indians have nurtured and developed into a kind of ‘classical’ music, as opposed to the more ‘popular’ chutney music…
So, you have Trinidadian/Guyanese/Surinamese thumris, bhajans, tillanas, holis, dhrupads, and ghazals as part of this Tan singing…for people familiar with Hindustani classical music, these genres mean something specific, but when you listen to Tan singing, you realise that these genres have taken a life of their own with little or no connection at all to the genres of the same name in Hindustani classical music…they have built a separate repertoire of ‘classical’ music with remembered music and developed these genres as years went by…Manuel quotes Trinidadian sitarist, composer, and music authority Mangal Patasar, who once remarked about tan-singing, “You take a capsule from India, leave it here for a hundred years, and this is what you get.”
More to come...
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