Thinking through music

Amit Chaudhuri’s

world of sounds.

The personal or the ”I”, which is used repeatedly through the book, is in sync with the tone and texture of the khayal music that Chaudhuri appreciates. He, perhaps, has Ustad Amir Khan in mind when he associates khayal with calm. The writing is imbued with these dimensions too – a perfect synergy of the aural and the written, one influencing the other. This also amounts to a reading or interpretation of music that dwells upon the formal, immersive aspects as opposed to the dominance of the sociological, which has come to characterise much of contemporary writing about Indian music. Of course, the self or the personal could be sociological too.

Amit Chaudhuri is an accomplished fiction writer and critic. This knowledge cannot be dismissed while reading the book. I know him as a fiction writer first and then as a musician. While I am not attempting a hierarchy here, there are parts of the book redolent of his fiction – beautifully crafted sentences and an exposure to the private, intimate, ordinary which I couldn’t look away from. The combination of an exploration of music with memoir is a new experiment in Indian writing in English, otherwise populated with a prototype of sorts – biography, exploration of gharana, music history, and reminisces of the great maestros. These works, however, leave little space for the introspective.

Chaudhuri’s introspection also grows out of the isolation that classical music created for him. In this isolation, he thought, practised, created. This should be seen as Chaudhuri’s process however, not a prescription of music or how musicians ought to operate and function. And this is also experiential manifesting in the interconnections that Chaudhuri establishes between music and film, liter

Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music

Amit Chaudhuri 244pp, ~499, Penguin ature, philosophy, linguistics. Here, music facilitates a wide range of thinking across disciplines.

Raga, after all, is another way of experiencing the world. And the writer brings these experiences to his readers through the book. About listening, he says it becomes “indistinguishable from longing”. He further associates listening to a state of distraction. He also attempts to connect listening to the world outside. For instance, the text of the bandish often makes sense with a visual setting. He explains how a word like bhavsagar made complete sense to him in “Cuffe Parade, where featureless water extended endlessly on the left”. Listening to classical music also made him inattentive to other things or sometimes it helped to listen to the world around better. Such as when in London, while listening to a cassette of his guru’s music recorded during a practice session, he also heard the sounds captured from the street where they lived. The unintentional also becomes musical.

Sound thus is an observational germ of a thought. Listening therefore defies the implied simplicity of unidimensional focus. About riyaaz, Chaudhuri writes, “Anyone partaking of the arts must partake of riyaaz. Art is an acquired taste: our first experience of it is foreign, our approach to it sceptical. Over time, we may begin to take pleasure in it. This process – of outgrowing resistance and beginning to savour – is a kind of riyaaz.” While this is no historical undertaking to explain riyaaz or how it is done, which cannot be normative, I am most excited by the array of thoughts that the writer brings to practices that are sacrosanct to the music system. He gives us a new way of seeing as well as voicing these observations. More than the discovery, it is what he says about the discovery that is rewarding. Chaudhuri finally concludes that all sound is music. I am glad that a book like this exists. It shows that writing about music can be inventive, ingenious, interconnected and imaginative, and a deeply felt sensory experience.

Kunal Ray teaches literary & cultural studies at

FLAME University, Pune