Pandit Jasraj's recent passing has elicited many lyrical and scholarly tributes but only one ignorant and prejudiced response. Oddly, it is from a professional writer who claims to himself be a Hindustani vocalist. What explains this outcome?
The answer, it seems, is that Amit Chaudhri, like many Indian origin academics, thinks Hinduism is very evil. Globalisation too is very evil- because it's like Neoliberalism, right?- and Neoliberalism is the pits.
It seems Chaudhri, whose Daddy was a box-wallah, had a privileged childhood, equally protected from Hinduism and Neoliberalism, back in the Sixties and Seventies, when everything in the garden was lovely. Then some bad shit started going down. Hindutva and Globalisation occurred. This fucked everything up. Sad.
Amit writes in Scroll-
In the mid-’80s and onwards, the voice required to do justice to the peculiar finesse of Jasraj’s imagination – to the delicate, oblique, but difficult aberrations that comprised his style – was never wholly present.
Apparently, Jasraj had had a heart attack and it took him some time to recover. But, if so, then, like Kumar Gandharva, he had obviously found a way to turn his physical disadvantage into an artistic advantage. His reputation grew because he continued to develop his signature piously romantic style while imparting a thorough musical education to his students. Amit might disapprove of Jasraj's religiosity, a constant feature of his life since the age of 14, and may believe it was somehow imbricated with Globalisation and Neoliberalism and Narendra Modi and Fascism and Nazi Vampires from Outer Space but the truth is, Indian Classical Music has always been closely tied to Religion and Spirituality.
What of Amit's allegation that there were 'difficult aberrations' in Jasraj's oeuvre? Is there any truth to it? No. The Chandogya tells us about Sama Veda. Everything else- including the soundless lament of things no matter how abandoned or forlorn- tells us about Vajd-e-Sama. No aberration occurs where but abreaction is imputable. प्रत्ययलोपे प्रत्ययलक्षणम्. Reception- 'lakshana'- is not affected by what is elided- and, the plain fact is, nothing 'aberrational' was received from Jasraj save by way of commercially convenient elision. But HMV & AIR had imposed that constraint before Jasraj's career took off.
This is not a criticism. Every artist – especially every classical performer – has a period when they’re at their peak, and at their most creative.
Jasraj became more creative precisely because his physical peak had passed. But this is true of most great artists.
Then family and livelihood take over,
The guy was 50 when he had his heart-attack. He had a family and an excellent livelihood. He could have rested on his laurels, taking a few very wealthy students and producing the occasional album for prestige labels which were guaranteed money spinners.
and subtle changes come over the human body: for the singer, this is particularly important - singing, however disembodied and transcendental it may sound, is as much a physical act as walking.
But Jasraj was more than a singer. He created new musical forms and opened new markets for Classical Music. In the mid Sixties, when he began recording, he represented the new generation of singers. They were as good looking as matinee idols and had voices dripping with honey. But their talim and riyaz was just as good as that of their seniors whose voices were stentorian and leonine because they had come of age before microphone technology had properly developed. The younger generation's music was romantic, sensuous, yet modern in the sense of appearing a zestful facet of a youthful zeitgeist. Jasraj, who had married into Bollywood Royalty- his father-in-law was Shantaram- cultivated a cool, languorous, glamour which allowed his fans to dream their own dreams. Puritans, or purists, might denounce 'Banditji' of the 'Viagra gharana', but this was like pretending Princess Di was trailer trash rather than an aristocrat to her fingertips. Jasraj himself promoted a narrative of his musical genealogy in which equal weight was given to his 'ishtadeva', or self-chosen idol, Ghazal Queen Begum Akhtar who had been a film actress, as well as his 'kuladeva'- i.e. family Guru-Shishya parampara. He sees his own development as occurring in the big Musical Conferences where, he tells us, he received accolades from the likes of Omkarnath Thakur. In other words, Jasraj understood the middle class 'aspirant' as well as the philistine 'consumer' of high culture. Some fat fucks would want the musical wall paper of his LPs to boom out of the stereo as the khansama poured them another whiskey-soda. But elsewhere in that household, a child or a grandmother would tremble enthralled on the threshold of the realm of the Gandharvas.
Amit speaks of the older style as 'rustic'. This is false. It was vigorous but courtly and reflected the highly correlated, theurgic, 'maryada bhakti' of the Age of Faith whose equal but opposite poles were the King and the Ascetic. But, as Jasraj showed in his later years, it was equally at home with the 'pushti bhakti' of the 'haveli'- i.e. the richly endowed Temple kept up by householders of the mercantile castes. However, prior to his heart-attack, Jasraj had already given us a wonderful rendition of the Sur Das's padavalis. There was nothing unusual about this. Classical singers produced Religious L.Ps for the Hindu mass market. But then, classical singing had been a feature of the older theatrical as well as religious repertoires. This played a part in their legitimation and acceptance as elite cultural forms.
There were no rustic elements in Jasraj’s singing, no overt insistence of bhakti:
Nonsense! He was a marvellous exponent of padavalis and other such theistic compositions. His early discography gives a misleading picture because it reflects the taste of Recording Company executives some of whom published memoirs or magazine articles which enabled fans to get an idea of the constraints faced by musicians of that period.
Jasraj, like every other professional, was trained to sing everything. As a Hindu, he sang bhajans at home and in the Temple.
he treated singing primarily as an art, and gave us a deeply idiosyncratic, original, and modern version of the sophistication of court culture.
This is nonsense. Jasraj wasn't 'idiosyncratic'. He was a master of his art who understood his audience and what new technology had made possible. Court culture was not sophisticated in the modern sense. It was feudal but highly correlated with everything epistemic. Bombay and, back in those days, Calcutta were modern and knowing-too-knowing. Jasraj built a bridge to this metropolitan audience some of whom were indeed 'sickular' cunts of Amit's description.
By modern I mean secular, but not in the Nehruvian sense:
Nehru was a Kaula- i.e. a hereditary follower of Abhinavagupta's esoteric aesthetic philosophy. His family had moved down to Delhi three hundred years ago and pursued secular careers. But they were not cut off from 'developments in the arts'. They were very much part of it.
I mean a 200-year-old development in the arts, preceding Nehruvianism and the Constitution, which emphasises art as diction, texture, and detail rather than just as tradition.
Some 'sickularists' claim that Hindu dhruvapad music had stagnated and that Amir Khusro revived it 700 years ago by getting rid of Sanskrit texts and substituting meaningless syllables to create 'taranas'. However, subsequently, no one has suggested that North Indian Music stagnated. On the contrary it peaked in the early eighteenth century when a libertine Emperor appointed sarangi players as Governors of Provinces. Nadir Shah's calamitous depredations may have lowered standards but Music had certainly revived by the middle of the Nineteenth Century. It is foolish to speak of stagnation when competition across such a wide geographical area was so intense.
Amit is babbling nonsense. What wonderful thing does he think happened in 1750 such that Music revived? Contact with Europe? But that was restricted to Calcutta and does not seem to have achieved anything much. Indeed, Bengali music was retarded not advanced by its fascination with very boring instrumental pieces and the rhapsodisation of vacuity. The rest of India has no interest in Amit's Mummy's 'Rabindra Sangeet' and 'Nazrul Sangeet' and so forth. We will listen to Ajoy Chakroborty and his daughter. Both have the authentic Hindustani theistic vibe. They aren't screechy or meretricious. I recall hearing Amit try to sing 'bin Guru gyan'. His voice faltered. He failed. It seems he lacks Guru bhakti and thus every other sort of bhakti. The result is, he expresses bizarre and puerile views about Hindustani music.
In the mid Sixties and early Seventies, Jasraj, a very handsome and skilled singer, was competing with popular crooners. He understood the need for a 'light classical' repertoire that could go head to head with the Pakistani ghazal singers (nurtured by the legendary Z.A Bukhari who ran Pakistani Radio) and their Indian imitators, who were capturing market-share by rebelling against the rigid All India Radio aesthetic. Sadly, the Indians neglected their own Qawwali tradition with the result that the first 'Global' Hindustani Vocal star was Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. With hindsight, we agree with Fareed Ayaz that the distinction between 'popular' and 'classical' Hindustani music was merely a matter of affectation. Let Haryanvi wrestlers turn into vocalists like the Wadali Brothers. Music belongs to the people. Let Merit make its own way.
Jasraj came of age in a highly inegalitarian milieu. His genius was to nurture musicological excellence in popular styles- perhaps because he had had to teach singing to the metropolitan middle class and understood that he needed to keep things simple. Technique was a gradus ad Parnassum. It mustn't present itself from beyond an esoteric barrier. Indeed, his oeuvre served to remind us that the lighter styles had always co-existed with the theurgic rigors of dhrupad's legitimate heirs. But he was not alone in this. North Indian Classical music completely eclipsed Carnatic Music, even for Tambrams like me, because it was fed by so many diverse streams.
This is a temper to which Ustad Amir Khan and Kishori Amonkar and Jasraj come in various ways, as much as any modern Indian poet or filmmaker did.
This is misleading. Film music had already lifted the horizon of artists. Amir Khan evolved his own style and the use of his songs in superhit films firmly established him as a popular favourite. But, D.V Paluskar, too, featured in Baiju Bawra. Even Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, whom we Indians had managed to entice away from Pakistan, consented to contribute a song to Mughal-e-Azam.
Kishori Amonkar, a beautiful and charismatic performer, came from a female lineage which straddled the Konkan-Maratha theatrical tradition and the courtly Classical tradition. But this could also be said of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha's Bhosle's father! It was inevitable that this crossover, which had occurred in 'vernacular' languages would finally be reflected even in P.W.A (i.e. Leftist) dominated Bollywood. Amit's distaste for Hinduism and 'pre-modern' vernacular jibber jabber, blinds him to the organic manner in which Jasraj's career developed. He thinks there was a 'leap'.
The leap Jasraj is making when embracing this temper is clear from a comparison of his older brothers Maniram and Pratap Narayan’s treatment of the khayal and his own.
Maniram, who is superb, has the old stentorian style. Jasraj has the melodious, honey dripping, style which is microphone friendly. There is no hiatus. It is usual for the Elder to display strength while the Junior displays grace in responsiveness.
It isn’t just talent that separates the younger brother from the older ones (who are considerable performers), but Jasraj’s contribution to the ethos of artistic modernity.
This is nonsense. Young people are supposed to look nice and sound sweet. That is traditional. Modernity is for the elder to wear a toupee and try to sound like a mincing catamite.
Amit's hatred of Hinduism leads him to write nonsense
It doesn’t matter what kind of religious beliefs Jasraj believed himself to subscribe to;
What you believe in religious matters is your religious belief. It is not the case that your belief about your religious belief is different from your actual religious belief. Amit is a fucking cretin. Jasraj's religious beliefs matter because much of his oeuvre is religious. Indeed, the older he grew the more all his singing- or indeed his instruction- was suffused with spirituality of a type univocal with his own declared beliefs. One might say the same about Abida Parveen.
I’m concerned with the person he chose to be when he sang the khayal.
This is foolish. He chose to be a professional musician concerned with spreading love of classical music. That's who he was when he sang khayal or anything else. It may be that an adept of the esoteric philosophy of Abhivavagupta can find more food for thought in Jasraj than, let us say, Bhimsen. Indeed, a 1971 documentary Amit links to suggests just this possibility. But Amit doesn't see that this documentary gives the lie to his central claim- viz. that the early Jasraj was unburdened by 'national or religious' identity.
This person is to be found most compellingly in what one has to now call the “early recordings”, though, when I came to classical music in 1978, these were the only recordings, and these were Jasraj.
Nonsense! Jasraj was found most compellingly in live performances at Sabhas and such like which many people, including myself, had witnessed in the Seventies. The truth is, Jasraj was handsome but he didn't come across as 'modern'. He was at ease with the 'maryada' culture of North India- i.e. he was gracefully deferential. Thuggish youngsters like me would be told to observe how people like Jasraj 'sit down and stand up'. That was North Indian culture. That was 'maryada'. Lack of it showed you were a nothing man with no 'aukat'. Some other great singers who had come up on their own were accused of lacking this courtly culture. But, once they gained great disciples, it was seen that they had 'maryada'. The test was 'sampritti', transmission of 'Voice'. Without it there was no oikeosis, no maryada, no indefeasible anchor for bhakti. For Jasraj, as a devotee of MahaKali instructed by the Philosopher-Prince Jaywant Singh Vaghela, there is something more. There is the notion of Kālasaṁkarṣaṇī- Time's 'strange attractor' as winnowing Will from Memory in the same manner that Melody winnows Reverie leaving but what Schopenhauer says must survive its own Apocalypse.
Thus listening to Jasraj one can always find univalent foundations for Paravak- Voice which transcends the rending of the World's Veil.
Such deracination is inexplicable- unless one simply accepts that Amit is a cretin, not a buddhijivi at all- and does not understand an ethos other Indians have been familiar with since they became capable of wiping their own bum.
The ethos that I’m describing – the ability to sing in a particular way; the audience’s ability to cherish that kind of singing; the ability to take from one’s built and natural environment and from “tradition” in an open-ended way,
this ethos describes Ustad Amir Khan who was already a big star when Jasraj was beginning his career.
Amit, cretin that he is, thinks Jasraj was imitating Elvis Presley
relatively unburdened by religious or national identity
Hence Jasraj's 'Whose Sari now' and 'Crying on my chappal'. However, it was Jasraj's conversion to orthodox Judaism and his show stopping, Fiddler on the Roof, number 'Tradition' sung in Raag Neelambari which demonstrates how relatively unburdened the early Jasraj was by 'religious or national identity'. Indeed, the fact that Jasraj chose to dress like Marilyn Monroe, while singing 'Happy Birthday Mr. President' to Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, shows he was relatively unburdened by gender identity as well.
– was a delicate balancing act.
Nonsense! Jasraj was not a tight-rope walker. He was the inheritor of a great tradition. As a Hindu, he sang Haveli songs in the pushti tradition. What is wrong with that?
It’s a wonder that it sustained itself for as long as it did before it was largely destroyed by globalisation and its various manifestations, including Hindutva.
Hindutva, like Gandhianism, was autarkic. It opposed globalisation. It wasn't till Vaypayee's second administration that we realized that the RSS would sit quietly while phoren maal entered the country and got sold even in kirana shop. Chee! Chee! What's next? Kids getting kissy on St. Valentine's Day? How shocking!
To encounter the pre-globalisation Jasraj, the artist, go to his first recording, Nat Bhairav.
On what label was this recording made? HMV. His Master's Voice. Surely, that is a global brand?
The truth is Record Executive's dictated what was to be performed and how it was to be performed. A.I.R had created a particular type of consumer expectation which HMV served in typical 'box wallah' style. Jasraj sang differently in concerts. Later, once he had established himself, he could express himself as he wished. A friend of mine produced an album of his where he is highly experimental. But it lost money. That's the problem with great artists. They are 'loss leaders'. Still, they greatly expand the horizons of their craft and open doors for younger people.
Amit is too stupid to do an Adorno type analysis of Hindustani Music. This is not to say Adorno wasn't shit. The truth is, you need to know what happened in Carnatic Music to identify causal factors in Hindustani Music. You must compare like with like. Talk of Hindutva is foolish given that Tamil Nadu is innocent of any such thing. Globalisation has affected North and South Indian classical music differently because it is the composition and affluence of diasporas which has an outsize influence on the industry. The affluent Tamil diaspora is different, sociologically speaking, from the North Indian professionals and entrepreneurs who have settled abroad. But this is merely a function of push and pull factors in migration, not 'Neoliberalism' or 'Globalisation'.
By the Thirties, it was clear that metropolitan audiences had more money power than the Maharajas. Furthermore, even Princes watched movies- indeed the son of a big Zamindar, Pramatesh Barua, made the original of Devdas. Kundanlal Saigal was admired by many great classical musicians despite his 'kotha' style. As technology improved, a more melodious, honey dripping, voice was in demand. Jasraj helped supply that demand but never neglected the arduous business of creating the genuine spiritual article. Some, like Rajan Parrikar, may cavil at 'Banditji'. But he was a great man as is proved by the fact that he has great disciples. No doubt, many Hindus have found solace and instruction in his religious music. Amit may feel this is a tragic outcome. We think Amit is a clown.
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