East-West Vignettes

Several years ago, in a Manhattan jazz club, a shy little man in white homespun shirt and pajamas sent a written request to play with the band. The leader of the jazz band read the note and asked the waiter who had sent it. The waiter pointed to an Indian gentleman at a back table. The leader peered through his reflecting dark glasses and beckoned the stranger to come onstage.

            The Indian left the table with some difficulty and bumped his way through the curious audience to the small raised stage. His progress was hampered by a pair of Indian drums he was carrying in his left hand.

            “What’s that?” asked the leader.

            “My drums, sir,” answered the Indian. “If I am to play with you I must use my own instrument, the tabla.”

            “Oh yeah, the drums. So you want to play with us,”said the jazz musician. “Well, whaddya want to play?”

            “Myself, I would like to play in Teen Taal,” said the Indian diffidently. “That is your three times.”

            He explained his plan. “You please play in this basic rhythm. And I shall accompany on the tabla with seventy-two beats from my right hand and twenty-four beats from my left hand and then increasing with the improvising.”

            The Indian cleared a space on the ground for himself, untied his shoelaces, took off his shoes and placed them neatly under the piano. From the cloth bags on his shoulder he extracted a small silver hammer. With this he began to hit the pegs on the sides of his instruments.

            The jazz musician grinned at the crowd, leaned over and asked the little man, “Seventy-two and twenty-four, huh? Okay. Say, what are you doing down there with that hammer?”

            “I am tuning, sir. May you ask the piano to tell which key you will prefer?”

            The leader turned to the pianist with a shrug and said, “This guy’s crazy. Give him a G and get him out of here.”

            The piano player, with exaggerated formality, played a G octave. The Indian nodded and hit the pegs on his drums harder.

            “Yes. Pa. Pa. Pa,” he sang to his drums the Indian words for the G note.

            “I think he wants to play “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” said the pianist, winking broadly at the appreciative audience.

            The leader sat down behind his drums in resignation, nodded to the vibraphone player, picked up his sticks, and shouted “Well all right!” and the jazz band broke into a fast blues.

            The little Indian beamed with pleasure. His hands began to move over his drums. A hollow bass emerged from his left drum, his other hand was almost invisible as it moved over the right drum. After a few minutes the leader put his sticks down and shook his head in disbelief. Then the bass player stopped to listen. Now it was a duet between the piano and the Indian. The piano would play a melody and the tabla would reproduce it in double time, then in triple time. The leader came in again using his drums to create a solid three-beat backing to the Indian’s intricate rhythms. The Indian and the piano player were laughing with pleasure. The pianist jumped up and down as he played his instrument, the Indian shook his head in an ecstasy of invention. On each downbeat he would crane his neck around to look at the leader and then bring his head down sharply so they could hit both of their drums in unison. The pace got faster and faster, the crowd was on its feet, cheering and whistling.

            When the performance came to an end the jazz musician took off his dark glasses and wiped his face.

            “Who are you, man? Where did you learn to play like that?”

            “That was most enjoyable, sir,” said the little man. “I learned my art in Benares. UNESCO has brought me here to make it popular in the West. I hope it gave pleasure.”

            The Indian collected his shoes, bowed in deep namaste to each member of the band, picked up his hammer and drums and left. He didn’t know that he had just played with the most famous jazz drummer in the West. The jazz drummer didn’t know he had accompanied India’s most distinguished tabla maestro. But they’d had a beat encounter.

           

           -- (Gita Mehta, Karma Cola, 1979).

           

            A young woman of  “good family” was terrified when six Delhi constables arrived at her parents’ house at three o’clock in the morning to arrest her for the murder of a Dutch millionaire.

            “We know you and your friends are responsible,” said the Delhi police.

            “But why?” she asked, while her parents stood by stunned into silence. “He was a friend for two years. What motive could we have?”

            “How should we know why you killed him? That is for you to reply. All we know is that you had dinner with this man. You left the house at midnight. Two hours later the servant found him dead in the bathroom. Dead.”

            “But he was perfectly all right when we left him,” whispered the girl.

            “If he was alright, then what was the dead man doing in the bathroom, naked in front of the commode?” asked the senior police officer sternly.

            “Naked on the commode!” exclaimed the girl’s mother in horror.

            “Not on the commode, corrected the officer. “In front of it. Fallen forward onto his knees and chin, holding a book in his left hand.”

            The young Indian woman abruptly took the interrogation into her own hands.

            “Now look here! If I had wanted to kill my friend, Iwould not have bothered to undress him. And I certainly would not have put a book in his hand. Kindly tell me what he was reading at the time of his death.”

            The police, thrown off balance by this unexpected aggression, looked hurriedly through their notes, and passed the relevant page to the officer in charge.

            The officer cleared his throat and read: “The deceased was on the bathroom floor with a volume in his left hand, opened to page thirty-nine. The title of the volume is as follows, The Tibetan Book of the Dead.”

            “There you are!” said the Indian girl triumphantly. “Who would leave such incriminating evidence in their victim’s hands?”

            The police officer was not listening to the girl. He was peering at the note on the file. Finally, he looked up and asked, “Was this Dutch millionaire by any chance Hindu-minded?”

            “He was very interested in our philosophy,” confirmed the girl.

“I see,” said the officer, and signaled his men out of the house. As he reached the door, he turned around and addressed himself to the young woman’s parents.

            “If the deceased was Hindu-minded,” observed the officer morosely, “it is the probable cause of death.”

                     --  (Gita Mehta, Karma Cola, 1979)

Our Perso-Arabic Roots--Part II

I've already talked about the legacies of Arab and Persian cultures on desi culture, and though I'm not covering this in great detail like you would expect someone writing a book on the whole array of influences, I like to show some more of the interconnectedness of these cultures in some aesthetic light, particularly the Persian connection. Sometimes it amazes me to see how deeply Urdu derives from Farsi (Persian), with everyday words borrowed from Farsi used so often that we forget where they come from. But I really shouldn't be so surprised, as it is that Farsi was the language of the Mughal courts, and people with any type of status were supposed to be able to quote Persian poetry, especially in the courts of the Mughals. Not only that, but Urdu was born out of Farsi influences mixing with local desi languages, notably in Lucknow (which is a far ways away today from the post-Partition official residence of Urdu, in Pakistan). So Urdu speakers today use words borrowed from Farsi such as chashm, buzarg, gul, janaab, fizaa, behtar, bahaar, jang, khush, mehman, nawaaz, etc. In addition, the structure of Farsi grammar is similar to Urdu with some differences, such as placement of prepositions, but the sentence structure is still the same: subject-object-verb, which is a far cry from how Arabic structures itself (sentence structure of verb-subject-object, no definite markings of possession, complicated word structures based on the order of consonants and placement of vowels (the structure H-f-D ( ح - ف - ظ) meaning to "to protect" so: muHaafiD م ح ا ف ظ (guardian), HifaaDah ح ف ا ظ ة (protection), maHfuuD م ح ف و ظ (protected), etc)). In poetry, the Persians thought of beauty as symmetry, which is reflected in the quatrain styles of poetry (think of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which was in the quatrain (ruba'iyat) form), as well as in the charbaagh style of decoration, reflected in the layout of the gardens surrounding the Taj Mahal. In music, there is so much that has been brought over to Hindustan that has been mixed in with desi influences, particularly instruments such as the dafli (round frame drum), and the santur (zither). Mixed in with some Afghani influences, we also have the dhol (a type of drum used a lot in Panjabi music), the rabab (Afghan lute), and others. If you can understand Urdu, and you need some audio-visual proof of Persian influences on desi culture, watch the video below. This is actually an Afghani video, but it is in Farsi (as opposed to Pashto), and if you listen to the words, even  if you don't understand it completely, you can pick out the words we share in Urdu.

Najma Akhtar--True Star of Ghazals

Early in this year, I rediscovered the magic of the ghazal, a genre of music I generally don't listen to, but this time, it was not just Jagjit Singh, the master of this poetic music that caught my ear, but a voice I'd heard earlier on in my college days, a voice that had a type of velvet in it that made my ears shiver in pleasure. To listen to Najma Akhtar, for me, is to surrender to a smile, but there is much more to her music than this.
One of the things I most appreciate about this pioneer of the ghazal is her ability to fuse ghazals with other types of music, and in the case of my newly-favored old album of hers, titled Qareeb (Nearness), she absorbs jazz into play with the standard tabla and vocals; saxophone (which I'm told is Ray Charles himself) plays around with the strums of bass and the regular taal (beat) of the tabla to produce a  type of music that could be considered phenomenal back in 1988, especially as this was before the huge globalization of music in the following decade. The beauty of the ghazal is partly to be able to incorporate a wide range of emotions while having the lyrics in the style of rhyme (aa, ba, ca, da, etc.), and some of these startled me at first, once the meaning of the lyrics strikes you. Soem of the lyrics, such as those for Zikr Hai Apna Mehfil Mehfil (Remembrance is One's Own Festival) contain lines such as "soch samajh kar dhoka khaana, bachtana tera pyaar nibhaana " (Conciously, knowingly be cheated, and regret the fulfillment of your love), which made me wonder what kind of hidden message is here in the song, that too in a song talking about being close to a lover through memory. Other ghazals that struck me were Dil Laga Ya Tha, whose melodic lines stuck in my head and Karun Na Yaad, whose lyrics touched in their own sensitivity to love. All of this delivered in the velvety voice of Najma Akhtar, whose ear for musical soundness continues to inspire me. And as a last note on the music, the fusion brought in through the instruments makes me feels as though the title Qareeb hints not only at the nearness of one to her beloved, but also a nearness of East and West, attained through the jazzy background of these largely romantic ghazals.

Here are a few samples of Najma Akhtar: