An English Play in Two Acts
Meet The Characters
Seven Notes, t0 describe the universe, seven characters that populate the world of the play..Due to their talent, or their lineage, or their lust for knowledge, each one in his or her way is pitted against the enormous corpus that is the INDIAN musical tradition.
Some imbibe from it naturally like a parched being, drinking from an eternal well spring, some shirk it like a cup of poison, some by sheer trick of circumstance are given a glimpse of its divinity, and can never go back. Each one while responding to its vastness, its timelessness, gets transformed in unpredictable ways.
Like an extra rim that gets added to the tree with each passing epoch , all leave indelible marks on the corpus itself, marks of their own styles, their struggles to imbibe, interpret and be transformed be the magic that we know as Hindustani Classical Music.
Walter Kaufmaan a Bohemian prodigy is all set to take the world of Western Classical music by storm. Then a war happens. A genocidal machine set to wipe all jews off the face of the earth. In a hasty attempt to save himself Walter flees germany. He lands in India to encounter the diverse and rich musical traditions of the subcontinent, and the path that he thought he was predestined to follow, changes permenantly. With an almost feverish passion for documentation of this diversity, he travels the length and breadth of India,trying to define the essence of the cultures musicality.
Archana,the only daughter of a musical genius, is a gifted and talented singer herself, The changing political systems in which singers like her mother were once lavishly patronized, by the royalty are in Archana's Lifetime reduced to struggling for their livelihood, not knowing what exactly is to be done with the immense knowledge that they posess, but that no longer has a following. Little does she realize, that the hardships and social ostracization that she faces while growing up as the only child of a single mother is ironically going to get repeated again as she singlehandedly raises her own daughter.
Kamal Mahajan wants to make an impact on the world of music one way or the other. He is keen on innovation and amazed at what new technology could do to music. What he lacks in terms of commitment or knowledge systems of the musical tradition, he makes up for by having an uncanny understanding of exactly what his audience would like to hear. It is these qualities coupled with his attractive debonair personality that swiftly carry him from the humble precincts of his guru’s house to the international dazzling realms of music circuits and glamor. Reconciliations of either musical philosophies or personal relationships that he left behind are now almost impossible.
Prema: Has the aptitude for music but hates it with a vengeance, what she perceives as rigidity of the discipline, the laws and rules, the many sacrifices, the lack of either remuneration or respect for her mother are things she has been witnessing since her childhood. Running away to another country under the pretext of higher education, is the only way she can put some distance between the messy fraught relationship she shares with her mother. A job as a waitress is preferable than the drudgery of the “taalim” (practice). When she reluctantly returns to visit her ailing mother what is it that she will return for?
Vikram: Dreams of the city of Mumbai, where a record can give you the chance to be a singing sensation overnight. By a quirk of circumstance, he gets to witness Archana’s performance by the shores of Ganga, and for the first time comes face to face with the magic and power of the musical art form. All previously held ambitions vanish, his lifes goals are now clear, the path is set. Whether he will achieve what he sets his sights on, only time will tell.
May the symphony Begin...
Most Indian traditions, may they be the spiritual, the social or the artistic, have their roots in the ancient and are yet complex living ones. They have most often than not been misrepresented or willingly distorted by the western gaze. The earliest descriptions of its many traditions available to the western world were conceived by the colonizers, with the explicit purpose of learning to rule them better.Not much has changed in the succeeding centuries. If op-eds in the NYT OR DEPICTIONS IN popular culture are anything to go by to most people alien to its culture, India is still a land of snakes and snake’s charmers riddled by poverty, illiteracy, and the caste system.Its hardly surprising then, that most of its traditions that are based on oral transmission of knowledge hardly find any mention, mush less an exposition of its complexity.
The musical traditions are a fine example of such confusions. Some of its masters were “illiterate” in the “modern sense of the word, yet they had the genius to render a single couplet and keep the audience in thrall for the entire night.
The Guru shishya parampara, in which the student went to stay with the grandmasters to get the requisite education, was the cornerstone of the preservation of such knowledge systems. It ensured that the amount of time a student required to master the various streams of thought from philosophy to cosmology to the spiritual aspects of the art form was spent regularly without disturbance and looked over and monitored with a sturdy sense of discipline.
The problems and changes faced by these art systems should have been rectified when india gained independence, but they went another round of radical changes, as kingdoms merged to make a republic, patronage shrunk, the recording studios took over, as did “jobs”, Institutionalizing education of that sort has been a mammoth task and though there have been several attempts, yet it is but a shrunken, vestige of the depth that the earlier systems had to offer.DID you get what you wanted? Asks a character to another, somewhere else in the play another firmly states “One always has a choice, says one character.Music in my blood tries to trace the havoc that changing times wreaks on tradition, the change in the purpose of why art should be pursued, What was once a free flowing medium used to describe the divine, infinite, how did it transform into a single rendition, copyrighted and sealed that can make millions? The play is a documentation of what happens when ambitions and genius are pitted against each other, when barriers constructed to shield and protect, become barriers that keep the loved ones locked out, and most of all what is that magical journey that makes its adherents stake everything they possess to try and attain mastery in this medium?It’s a humble attempt to also honor those masters of the tradition, mostly women of the yester years who vanished without a trace, for lack of documentation, they are the ones that kept the fire tended and alive. As Mahler rightly points out, “tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire”…
Come, witness the exposition...
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