Reflections on Music
(written sometime in the 1960's)

Three main guts, thirty-three brass strings, an oversize heavy black wood bow and an ivory string tuner; along with it a well carved single red wood box in your lap. You could confront a very bitter sweet struggle for the rest of your life as a possible victim or master of this dreadful musical instrument. I have, of course, been one of the victims. In reality, nobody ever believes that you can play the sarangi. Your association with playing the sarangi often means that even your knowledge of Indian classical music is a vague statement. The subject would be changed promptly.

There are approximately nine sarangi players in the world, six in India and three in Pakistan. This four or five hundred years old romantic, erotic and obstinate little instrument known as Sarangi Saptarangi or Ravana Hatya will never yield its lifelong virginity to any raga or to that extent any ustad who happens to be her lover. If you could not tune the three main guts to the exact tones of the thirty-three resonating wires, if your bow is not properly balanced or has too much or too little resin, if the air is too humid or too dry or too polluted, if you do not have the freshness of early morning dew on a blade of green grass, if you are drunk, drowsy, stupid, invalid, in pain, nervous or tense, this will all be reflected immediately through the instrument as a neurotic, incoherent sound on a Panoramic Vista. A frightening sight for your ego and personality. The sarangi for that reason is like a distilled clear mirror of cosmic proportion that reflects every corner, every part, every shade and color, every curve of your body and mind and soul in varieties of perspectives at one and the same time like a painting of Picasso or Paul Klee.

With the exception of the vocal cord, there is no other instrument on the Indian continent or any where in the world that will let you understand innumerable color shades of the super structure of the Indian Raga system with all its seriousness. Ragas like Marwa, Darbari Kanada, Miyaki Mathar and so forth could be played very light heartedly (Thumri like) or very deeply on almost all popular musical instruments with the exception of the voice, rudra veena and sarangi. Sarangi and rudra veena resist light heartedness. The voice can be twisted around depending upon the quality, depth and intelligence of an individual mind. Not so with the sarangi. Beyond the light and shade games of its own, sarangi is like the Goddess Durgee. She is very much alive with too many hands, too many symbols and weapons, a necklace of chopped bloody heads and a tongue full of fresh blood. At all times all your ego, intelligence and personality is sarangi and nothing else.

A painting, modern or otherwise, despite its multidimensional perspectives and depths, remains confined to an area defined by the sides of the canvas. A sculpture of any size is trapped within the size of the stone. The sarod, veena and sitar are confronted with the automatic quick tempo limitations of striking fingers - DA, DID, DA. However, sarangi, vocal music and poetry resonate the sounds that carve the endless sky and timelessness, the Bramha. It is as though there appeared the endless picture of Lord Bramha covering the entire sky for a fraction of a second and then disappearing. Playing a well tuned sarangi is like creating a poem where the words are impregnated with dynamism and a volatile symbolic space in between them, almost like an explosion in time and space. The great forms of art are usually the direct manifestation of intense pain and pleasure related to the experienced human relation to the nature of a thing. The man who does not experience anything does not express anything. He is a masked man. Sarangi is a poem. It is beyond the range of a masked man.

In my school days while travelling from Devas to Indore in Madhya Pradesh early in the morning with my friend, we heard a very deep melancholy woman's soul in the form of Raga Ramkali. Everybody knows the December mornings in those regions which we call not the Ram Prahar but Amrit Hours of the day. One feels as if one's whole body and soul are being caressed by a distant, endless, transparent kinnaras of sound, earth and air. Ram Kalee seems to have been sprinkled in the air like jasmine scent. Not until we reached an old temple in the middle of nowhere did we find that it was not a woman singing but a man playing a sarangi, a very old blackened sarangi with some pictures pasted on the torn leather of the instrument. Essentially I am not a romanticist but I made up my mind then and there to learn to play that instrument. In fact I made up my mind to marry that eternal virgin, ever sounding, ever promising, ever unyielding, ever unforgiving, ever ferocious with her multiple hands with symbols that create and destroy all animate and inanimate, the eternal Durgee.

I do not practice sarangi. I play it every day as if I am in a concert, sometimes very well, sometimes very badly. Similarly, I don't practice painting with drawing and sketching. I just paint and if I don't like it I overpaint the same canvas twice, thrice, many times. I do not use drawings and sketches in preparation for the paintings, they are separate works altogether. There is a practical reality for an artist's loft life in New York or for that reason anywhere else. There is always a possibility of getting up in the morning with a feeling of confusion, cynicism, egotism or aggressiveness. However, one of the surest ways to start the day with pin point concentration is to start tuning the sarangi. Within two hours of playing it, an artist can very easily acquire one of the freshest moods for a good working condition without the use of drugs, pills or liquor. There is nothing so good as looking at one's own paintings with delight without a trace of ego. Internally, it is very pleasant. One feels one's motor is in full swing. This has been my experience for the last twenty years.

There are two distinct processes in the creation of poetry, music and painting. One is the achievement of near perfect craftsmanship (no disregard for that) and the other is an intense, painful, internal striving that reaches outward to culminate in forms known or unknown. This condition could be erotic and at times could create a very destructive tension and confusing madness but given a motor power of a great visionary artist, it could create a Mahakali in person. In fact there is no such thing as professionalism in a great work of art. Only craftsmen become professionals. There is no such thing that man does not understand modern art or indeed any art. It is like saying I don't understand English while saying it in a correct English language. Man refuses to accept any uncomfortable new idea. He would rathe r be comfortable within the confinements of the known rather than the unknown. Man is never unaware, even in his unconscious, of the subtle differences in the sounds of words harsh or soft, or sounds of musical notes cohesive or not, or all kinds of surface noises high or low. They all confront him in a great variety of mixtures on his ears. His mind detects all the differences.