Musings! Of Reconciling God & Mammon[a la- ' In God We Trust'] or In
Music we must trust.
Worswick and everyone:
Here is an article I thought y'all might enjoy,or may be not.
Source: The Hindustan Times
Musings ,
(By V.N.Narayanan)
In music lies our secularism
Keeping oneself away from the deluge of verbal diarrhoea on India's nuclear tests on the print and electronic media and in public and private conversations is tougher than any sanctions that Clinton and Co can impose.
It must be tough on the President too. What a waste of time and energy to be talking of nuclear explosions when one ought to be gainfully engaged in copulation explosion without population explosion! So, I restrict myself to a passing reference to the Pokhran fallout and move on, like a good moving finger.
I was with this colleague of mine who thinks that the only relevant date in modern India's history is December 6, 1992, on the evening of India's last two nuclear tests. With a sense of secularism fine-tuned to distinguish between communal tea and secular tea (with liquor it's different; alcohol is the only uncontaminably secular thing, even if taken from the hands of a rank communalist), he was arguing that the Indian government - sorry, the Vajpayee government - had done something abominably wrong. It will set the world against us, ruin the economy and divide the country....
Divide the country? Yes, divide the country. Don't you see that it's a communal bomb? Why do you think the Pakistanis are against our tests? Not because we have done nuclear tests. They know we can do it and they can do it. These tests are unsecular and they threaten Islamic Pakistan. And when Pakistan attacks us, we should recognise that we have done something grossly unsecular.
Of course, I am exaggerating. But, I mentally reconstructed my colleague's thoughts. How could one ever look like supporting something done by the BJP and yet retain one's secular conscience? Look at the Leftists, crying hoarse about our inviting US sanctions. If only it were Gujral's days, oh, what flowery, freshly exhumed Marxist jargon would have gushed forth to celebrate India's nuclear independence!
Well, there are many things basically and unchallengeably secular about India, its people, its culture and its history. And the cast-in-the-Dec. 6 groove-fundamentalism of the Indian secularist and the BJP's Hindutva which is totally divorced from the basic ethos of the land and tenets of the religion are almost the only things which are opposed to our secular traditions. Sometimes, well, often enough, I am driven to the dismal conclusion that the casteist-communal politics of the past decade has given a fresh lease of life to the two-nation theory that should have remained buried since Partition. The Indian secularist and the communalist are two sides of the same coin. Both are rooted in the same religion and both are delinked from the same faith.
I think I know where this country's true secularism lies. It's not in the Constitution; certainly not in the government, Parliament or judiciary; it's not in politics or administration, it's not in our places of worship nor in our universities which can't even be called places of learning. It's in our music. And it's in us because our music is based on the divine. The common Indian is born secular but achieves communalism; the Americans achieved secularism through their currency - the dollar is divine. The dollar note proclaims "In God we trust", thus clinching the smoothest merger of God and Mammon. The Russians had secularism thrust upon them by the Marxist ideology. Religion was briefly sent to Siberia to bide its time as the opiate legally denied to the masses.
The divine secularism of music, I had often found in the concerts of M. S. Subbalakshmi, in Parveen Sultana singing "Bhavani, dayaani", in Pandit Jasraj singing Sankara's "Chhidananda roopah, shivoham.." (I am the embodiment of pure bliss, I am Shiva), in the Singh Bandhu exulting in Kabir's "Soora soi, jo ladai deen ke het" (The true warrior is one who fights for his faith) and the Wadali brothers of Punjab swaying audiences - quite thin in Delhi, but swarming everywhere else - with sufi hymns "Mein nahi, sate too" (I am nothing, you are all).
I saw this secularism bursting forth recently at a packed Siri Fort auditorium rising as one human entity to give a standing ovation to Pakistani sufi singer Begum Abida Parveen who mocked at all types of fundamentalism through her anecdote of a 'darvesh' who claimed to be God and was stoned by people wherever he went; and he sang: "Arre, deewano too kya jaane, mein janoon, mera khuda jaane" (Oh, you fools. What do you know. I know and my God knows). I also witnessed Pandit Jasraj appealing to an elite Delhi audience hurriedly leaving the hall barely half an hour after the concert to stay back for ten minutes to listen to one bhajan and then he said he sang before packed audiences in Pakistan and enthralled them to an extent that at Karachi, they asked him to go on and on, on the plea that "aapne bhajan gaake hamein Allah ko dikhaya" (By singing bhajans, you showed us Allah).
Hearing is the most difficult and last of the senses that all species acquired in the process of evolution. It was forged through hundreds of millions of years of natural selection as countless lineages perished because of failure to detect in time a predator's arrival, or to find a mate or a mobile meal nearby. "Hearing was a late-bloomer, following upon already well-developed senses of vision, taste, touch and smell." Yet, we take sound for granted; the experience that our ears provide as self-evident. But "for most of nature's countless billions of ears, sound is something much less than what it is to us humans."
I am just now savouring the insights of two extremely interesting books - 'Music, the brain and ecstasy' by Robert Jourdain and 'River out of Eden' by Richard Dawkins. The first traces music's progress from "atmospheric vibrations to the experience of a complex symphony" and the second seeks to explain modern life through a Darwinian eye-glass. I see delicious bits of insight common to both.
The music lover, perhaps, is the ultimate stage of evolutionary development because for the physicist sound is nothing more than vibrations. For the psychologist, sound is a kind of experience the brain extracts from the environment, but for the music lover, it is vibrations, awareness and emotions. Where the physicist finds energy, the psychologist information, the non-specialist listener runs through the gamut of emotions from horror to ecstasy. When music dissolves into ecstasy, as it often does for me, it transports us "to an abstract place far from the physical world that normally occupies our minds." It contains secular germs of the physicist's vibrations, the chemist's air molecules and the psychopath's rationalisations. One must have a good mind for music and true secularism too demands that. Kalidasa experiences that ecstatic state in
Sa-ri-ga-ma-pa-dha-ni rataamtaam Veena Sankrantakantahastantaam.
(The bliss and peace of celestial music from the dainty fingers of Siva Kanta moving on the veena strings). And Robert Oppenheimer, watching the first US atomic test at Los Alamos, had no confusion about the bomb's secularism. It reminded him of Lord Krishna's Viswarupa darshana which was "divi surya sahasra" - brighter than a thousand suns. And the same Krishna to Radha, according to Jayadeva, was "Padmavati charana chaarana chakravarti". The lilt of words, the blinding majesty of sight - the Gita and the Gita Govindam - find their ultimate blend in our music.
If the nation is looking to restore its pride, its secularism and its soul, it need not have to explode bombs. It can find all and a lot more in our music - in Bankim Chandra's 'Vande Mataram', not in A. R. Rahman's, that is. |
