“I don’t understand when it is said that Indian music is abstract. All I can say is that it takes an Ali Akbar to create the immediacy of the sensual, the dark, the extremely sad and desolate and the vibrant gold peace, each of which comes with the uniqueness of touching one’s love in the darkness .

I wrote these lines in 1988. I had recently become a sarod student of Ustad Pt. Then Rajiv Taranath. Some of us – disciples, friends and admirers – wanted to organize a felicitation ceremony for him on the occasion of his 56th birthday. As a part of this event, we planned a souvenir draw. We also asked RajivYes To give us an article (he didn’t like writing, he talked and someone wrote it).

This time I was given the task of writing. I remember well how he sat on the big cane chair and spoke. And I kept writing. The whole article flowed like a perfect, flawless and always-already-perfect piece of music. RajeevYes The amazing journey of his life was captured in two rare and wonderful pages. In short, what he says about his master in this article goes to the heart of his musical thinking. RajeevYes He believes that Indian music is not abstract. It appears when body, mind, emotion and spirit all come together. It’s that solid feeling of wholeness that you feel when body and music become one.

agnosticism and devotion

RajeevYes Such metaphors of musical embodiment are often invoked. For example, when he narrated the first instance of meeting his guru Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and hearing his music, he described such a moment of embodiment. The interesting thing is that RajeevYes They called their Guru as “Ishtadevata” (their personal deity). Among the many rich contradictions that were part of his personality, this tension between agnosticism and devotion was important. His rationalism in other areas of life was influenced by music and a deep sense of devotion to his guru. It is no wonder that he sometimes used religious analogies to depict the finest moments of transcendence he experienced in art.

This is clearly visible in an interview conducted with me on Doordarshan in the 90s. He spoke of the lasting impact of hearing his mentor’s music at the Town Hall in 1952. [Khansaab’s] Music, I imagined it. It’s like labor…pregnancy. That kind of expression and that kind of experience you find in the Bible. You are filled with the Holy Spirit. At that moment everything comes together. This is a song of wisdom!” RajeevYes This sense of embodiment was awakened when he spoke of his guru’s teachings, “Khansaab’s music flowed within me.” He also felt that when he played, Khansahab used to sit on his fingers.

Sarod player Pandit Rajeev Taranath. Photo Credit: MA Sriram

Eliot and Yeats

In fact, Rajiv’s important relationshipYes The interplay between music and body reminds me of two poets he worked with in his long and illustrious literary career as a professor, critic, and writer (although he claimed to move away from literature, But he always read anything from Shakespeare to Kambar) to Wallace Stevens to Ananthamurthy or Adiga. And even today, he is highly respected in Indian literary circles as an original thinker). One is TS Eliot, with whom he had no special attachment. But he wrote his doctoral thesis on this modernist literary giant. Another poet at heart was WB Yeats.

Both poets describe a luminous moment when the temporal and the timeless become one, a moment when the transcendent becomes tangible. According to Eliot, in this moment of illumination, “You are the music/As long as the music lasts.” Yeats presents this singular moment in a slightly different way. His famous rhetorical question, “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” highlights a similar experience of total inwardness with art. in Rajeev TaranathYes, You feel this sensation of music pervading the body. After all, the iconic image of the maestro – his head bent over the instrument in his lap, eyes closed and absorbed in some musical otherworld – is familiar to Hindustani music lovers. His life was filled with music and much more.

From literature, languages ​​(he spoke nine languages ​​with ease), poetry to poultry, cooking to sports – this man of brilliant intellect and deep understanding of life had an astonishingly wide range of interests and knowledge. However, neither his prodigious pursuit of musical excellence nor his deep preoccupation with things of the mind alienated him from the people. His social commitments, the political stances about which he was fearlessly vocal or his deep cultural concerns resonated deeply with him in his immediate contexts. His brilliant ability to connect with people, laugh and empathize with them was an integral part of his being. This multifaceted talent passed away on June 11 this year. But his music, literary and cultural work, social concerns and above all, his unforgettable love for the people are the great legacies he has left for us.

Perhaps this is why his lifelong friend, Chandrashekhar Kambar, declares, “Rajeev and his father are tall people who walk[ed] among us. They always appear in my imagination as larger-than-life mythical characters. Their contemporaneity is linked to something timeless.” The visionary-composer Chandamutta of Kambar set out in search of Chandrama Raga (perhaps reminiscent of the raga that Ali Akbar Khan composed and Rajivji played brilliantly – Chandranandan). Be it the young sailor who goes in search of the silver moon swimming like a fish in water on a flood night, the hunter boy who takes aim at the moon from his tree-shelter, Ninadi in Shikharsurya, or the rebel Chambasa who brings Shivana Dangura features many of the dreamers and myth-heroes of Kambar’s work – the new ways of thinking in his society, whom, the veteran Kannada writer says, were inspired by his musician friend.

Interestingly, there is another mythological character, Karna from the Mahabharata, who is called Rajeev.Yes Sometimes identified for different reasons. He was found to quip, “Like me, Karna’s life was also a series of tragic events. So, throughout all these centuries, it is this feeling of being failed again and again that we share. But the similarities between the two are certainly high. Karna, the extraordinary archer and son of the Sun God, did not get what he should have got in life. Yet his immense generosity did not diminish even a bit. Be it friend or foe, whoever asked him for something, he showed his generosity. Good-natured Rajiv also did the sameYesAnd he dispelled any feelings of malice by saying “Bakhsh Do” (Forgive). He was indeed a complex and unusual mixture of a dreamer in constant pursuit of an impersonal art, and, at the same time, a loving, caring and extremely generous person.

Incident on 19 October

On 19th (Saturday) of this month, Pandit Rajeev Taranath Memorial Trust is organizing an event to celebrate the birthday of this illustrious musician, litterateur and cultural thinker. The event at Rabindra Kalakshetra is co-hosted by Karnataka Sahitya Akademi, Bengaluru. In the evening, there will be talks by eminent musicians and litterateurs like Hamsalekha, Boluvar Mohammed Kui, Sarvamangala and Mukundraj. This will be followed by a Hindustani vocal concert by Pandit Venkatesh Kumar.

(The author is a student of Pt. Rajeev Taranath, currently Professor in the Department of English Studies, University of Mysore. She is a renowned translator working in English and Kannada languages.)