The story starts with a child prodigy. (It is something I have often wondered about in tales of art; there is always focus on talent, raw and glistening, whose unmistakable glow everyone submits to. Yet, most art is about hours and hours of riyaaz, keeping at it even when there is no validation and no audience. But you don’t want to hear a rant about the cult of the individual, you want a story. So coming back.) This child prodigy’s name was Shivputra Siddharamiah. Everyone knew this child could sing and how. Was taught music, and in a few years became a teacher himself. Such prodigious talent is almost divine, and so, the little boy was named after a sprite, Kumar Gandharva.
Tradition is like mousse. It looks well put together, and seems stable, but all it takes is one prod, and the whole structure folds onto itself, and oozes out uncertainty. Anyone with a mind with a mildly questioning nature, will want to prod, and the greatest con job is why so many people insist on blindly accepting that the mousse is rock solid. Of course, Kumar Gandharva had to prod, and he questioned a lot of what was considered sacrosanct, and his approach was described by that boring adjective — maverick.
It would have been a story of an iconoclast were it not for the entry of a disease, tuberculosis. TB too has a story. Did you know TB infection causes most number of deaths worldwide? India leads the world in the number of deaths from TB. It is a disease that has a long history, and in fact, there is a book coming out soon, Phantom Plague, that charts the journey of the age old infection.
Coming back to our story. Kumar Gandharva was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease as the cover above points out so helpfully attacks the lungs. And for a singer, lungs give life breath in ways more than one. There was a period of time when Kumar Gandharva remained silent; unable to sing. Pause a while. You have been a musician, a singer for all your life, from childhood. And suddenly someone tapes you across the mouth, and says you can’t sing anymore. I don’t wish to think about it; maybe it was a bad idea to pause.
In early 1950s, a drug came to India, and that was a lifeline, but Kumar Gandharva had lost the use of one of his lungs. He started to sing again, but now, everything was different. On the one hand, there is the story of craft — how does a musician retrain themselves to sing with one lung? And on the other, is the more curious question — what do they choose to sing about after this rebirth?
Kumar Gandharva started singing Kabir’s ‘Nirguni Bhajans’. A gun means an attribute; what one is endowed with. How does one sing about an entity that defies any attribute? Even to call it an entity is to describe it in some sense; and that in itself is an error in comprehension. We then describe what that entity is not — shapeless, formless, beyond the sensory realm, defying cognition. It is still an exercise fraught with potholes in reason, you will keep falling into faulty circular logic, but thankfully, we are still in a story. So we shall leave epistemological loops for someone else to untangle.
On an aside, haunting the interwebs to read more about him, I saw that a book by Linda Hess, ‘Singing Emptiness’ is now again available from Seagull books.
Why did Kumar Gandharva choose nirguni bhajans? During that period of enforced silence, why was he drawn to meditating on nothingness? These are perhaps silly questions, but I find myself wondering, as I keep listening to his voice sing every morning for the past few years now.
“Aave naa jaave, mitai na kabahun, sabad anahat bhogi
I neither come nor go, I cannot be destroyed, I revel in the sounds of the anahat”
The frailty of our material reality is evident all around. A loved one is sinking, slowly, but surely. The bedrock of stories she is made of is melting, one memory at a time, and the body, the vessel of all these stories is becoming a sieve. Many loved ones are infected with COVID. The trajectory of carefully plotted life stories are ruptured, all the data points scattered by a tiny, tiny virus.
We have a medical system that is now focused on materiality; the care for the body does not really translate into care for the human being residing in that body. Questions like, “Who will talk to ma in the COVID ward?” don’t have any answers; rather, they don’t even seem valid.
In ‘Simulacra and Simulation’, the book that is supposed to have seeded the idea of the Matrix, Baudrillard speaks of the logic of the museum in a material society. The museum preserves the material, and privileges it in a way. This is important, we seem to be telling ourselves — these stories, these lives, these beings are important. We will preserve them, stock them, and display them, so that we can witness ourselves what materiality means. “Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view.”
Perhaps, Kumar Gandharva, watching the Amaltas trees blossom and fade thought of ephemerality. He had to move to Dewas in Madhya Pradesh for the health of his lungs. If we let go of the anchor that our embodied reality provides, what then? I don’t know if he did, but I wonder. As the evening darkens, I listen to him singing of the chadariya jheeni, his voice like a lamp flickering across a river, there now, only for the now.
Jheeni Jheeni jheeni bini chadariya,
kaahe ke tana kaahe ke bharani,
kaun thaar se bini chadariya
Jheeni Jheeni jheeni bini chadariya,
What of the warp what of the weft
with what thread was the cloth woven?
This is such a movingly beautiful newsletter S! I am hoping the ailing feel better soon!
You have captured the ineffable reality so beautifully, and meaningfully to our realities. These two renditions by Kumar Gandharava have been most moving for me. But until now I couldn’t think into this moving feeling. Thanks