Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music
by Amit Chaudhuri (Fabar & Faber, 2021)
Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, academic, singer and composer who has woven an extraordinary and intimate book. Through the warp of his memoir of discovery of North Indian classical music and lifelong study of singing in this tradition (for which he is renowned), runs the weft of deep musical history, musical structures and culture. It is also, true to the subtitle, an “improvisation” (a concept that surprisingly has no direct translation in the vocabulary of Indian music). He weaves a sinuous pattern through a wonderful tapestry that, without such a guide, could look like a confusing mass of threads. “What am I listening to? How do I begin to makes sense of it?”
When I began to read Finding the Raga, I was hoping to discover a way into better appreciating some of the music I love to listen to. Indian classical music has intrigued and confused me. It is absorbing, sometimes almost overwhelming, exciting or calming, but often so complex and (to my Western ear) unfathomable. Chaudhuri’s book begins exactly as I had hoped, as he describes his own discovery of it, the structures, scales, patterns, instruments and history. I made pages of notes to keep up with the many technical terms and definitions he introduces, as well as of noted players and singers and key historical figures and innovators, many of whom were women of the Indian royal courts.
I enjoyed several lightbulb moments or at least glimmers of understanding which change the way I experience this wonderful art form: the raga is not a scale or a mode; there is no “representation” in the music – it’s not about anything – even though the thousands of different ragas each belong in a time and season and mood; there is no harmony or counterpoint: there is no transposition to other keys but the foundation of an ever-present drone and unhurried exploration of melody. What sound to my ears like “ornamentation” are the shruti (microtones and glissandi) which are as fundamental to a raga as the notes. Another framework is the tala, the cyclical pattern of a fixed number of beats. Typically the tabla may overlay mind-bogglingly complex rhythms within this frame, but unerringly land back on the first beat.
And despite our peripheral familiarity with the sound of sitar and tabla in particular, the author brings out how much this extraordinary music is to be experienced rather than performed. It is not written down, but still passed from guru to disciple. He writes movingly about how the singer’s morning practice becomes a discipline of life, and a meditation. He has himself been part of a cross cultural collaboration to share this music more widely (in the footsteps of others like Ravi Shankar) but he feels that the full experience of this art is only truly appreciated in India, with the street sounds and ceiling fans and monsoon rains as a backdrop, rather than in the sterile atmosphere of a concert hall.
So this was exactly what I had hoped for until about a third of the way through the character of this book seemed to change. There was more memoir, telling of his uprooting from high-rise Bombay to study in London and of his relationship to his teacher. The sections became choppier in style, shorter in length, jumping topic from one to the next. My impression was that the narrative and theme of the book had become unhinged. There were more digressions into the history, and other discussions on art, literature and family recollections.
I was unsettled but it slowly dawned on me that this was exactly the effect the author intended: it embodied the unsettled period of his life and art as he negotiated life between two cultures: one in the Western mode of “Canadian” singer-songwriter; the other as a classical singer. He was trying to chart which directions his life would go in, into academia or writing or both. (The change of style and unsettling feeling reminded me vividly of Bruce Chatwin’s brilliant book The Songlines which dissolved into note-form passages on the theme of of humans being fundamentally nomadic, and song being the root of language.)
Then, for me, the penny dropped. I think Finding the Raga is partly structured in the form of a raga and telling his life story draws the reader into an immersive experience of improvisation and complexity. One clue is that the first “chapter” is called Alaap, the name of the long free-form introductory section of a raga performance and Chaudhuri admits he wanted to call the whole book Alaap. This “introductory” chapter occupies nearly 70% of the book! A passage late on reveals another key for appreciating the raga: the point is … to delay getting to the point! The journey is everything, the art is in keeping the listener (here the reader) on board.
In summary, this is a beautifully crafted book. It is not all “easy” reading, but worth the effort. It is written with candour in his recollections and clarity in his explanations. Reading it has been a journey in itself and a doorway through which I feel I now have a better view of this wonderful, and still mysterious, music.
Links
- Anoushka Shankar’s Journey Through Indian Classical Music (BBC Sounds, May 2022) – this wonderful series of 3 hour-length programmes is an accessible introduction, with wonderful musical examples.
- Bruce Chatwin “The Songlines” (Franklin Press, 1987) – I compare the immersive experience of reading Chaudhuri’s book with that of first encountering Chatwin’s (The Songlines – Wikipedia)
- Image of lady playing tanpura – credit: by (Rajasthan, Kishangarh) – metmuseum.org, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17104902
Listening differently elsewhere on the bookshelf
- Eric Siblin The Cello Suites: In Search of a Baroque Masterpiece (Vintage, 2011) This is another immersive book of musical discovery – the author’s own infatuation with the J S Bach masterpieces, and their history of being brought out of obscurity by Catalan master cellist Pablo Casals.
- Oliver Sacks Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Pan Macmillan, 2011) These are tales of how music operates in our brains, how it connects us with memories and dance, provides shortcuts to emotion and infuriates us with unshakeable earworms.
- Ross Duffin How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (W W Norton, 2008) Another book that opens our ears to how music works, and how instrument tunings have altered our brains. This looks at the development of the 12 notes of our Western musical octave, and how much was lost after the era of Bach and Mozart.