Embodying the music: A tribute to sarod legend Pt. Rajeev Taranath

Celebrating the life and legacy of Pt. Rajeev Taranath, a musician, literary figure, and cultural thinker on his birthday.

“I don’t understand when it is said that Indian music is abstract. I can only say that it takes an Ali Akbar to create immediacies of the sensuousness, of dark, of unutterably sad and desolate and of the vibrant gold tranquilities, each of which comes through with the specificity of touching one’s love in the dark.”

I wrote these lines down in 1988. I had only recently become a sarod student of the maestro Pt. Rajeev Taranath, then. Some of us — disciples, friends, and fans — wanted to put together a felicitation event for him on the occasion of his 56th birthday. As a part of this event, we planned on bringing out a souvenir. We also asked Rajeevji to give us a write-up (he did not like writing, he spoke, and somebody wrote it down).

This time around, the task of writing was given to me. I remember vividly how he sat on a big cane armchair and spoke. And I kept writing. The whole article flowed like a fine, flawless and always-already perfect piece of music. Rajeevji had captured the amazing journey of his life in two rare and wonderful pages. In essence, what he says of his Guru in this write-up is at the heart of his musical thinking. Rajeevji maintains that Indian music is not abstract. It manifests itself when the body, mind, emotion, and spirit are all fused together. It is the concrete sense of wholeness you feel when the body and music are one.

Rajeevji often invoked such metaphors of musical embodiment. For instance, when he narrated the first instance of meeting his Guru Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and listening to his music, he described such a moment of incarnation. Interestingly enough, Rajeevji called his Guru, the “ishtadevatha” (his personal god). Among the many rich contradictions which were part of his personality, this tension between agnosticism and devotion was significant. His rationalism in other walks of life was curiously inflected by a profound feeling of devotion towards music and his Guru. No wonder that he sometimes used religious analogies to illustrate those fine moments of transcendence he experienced in art.

This is strongly evident in an interview he did with me on the Doordarshan in the 90s. He spoke of the indelible impact of hearing his Guru’s music at the Town Hall way back in 1952. “I not only heard [Khansaab’s] music, I conceived it. It’s like birthing … a pregnancy. That kind of expression and that kind of experience is something you find in the Bible. You are filled with the Holy Ghost. Everything comes together fused at that moment. It’s an epiphany!” Rajeevji evoked this sense of embodiment when he spoke of his Guru’s teaching, “Khansaab’s music flowed into me.” He also felt that Khansaab sat in his fingers when he played.

In fact, the crucial connection that Rajeevji forges between music and the body reminds me of two poets he worked on in his long and illustrious literary career as a professor, critic and writer (although he claimed to have moved away from literature, he always read — anything from Shakespeare to Kambar, from Wallace Stevens to Ananthamurthy or Adiga. And even today, he is much respected in the Indian literary circles as a seminal thinker). One is T.S. Eliot, whom he was not particularly fond of. But he wrote his doctoral thesis on this modernist literary giant. The other was a poet after his heart, W.B. Yeats.

Both poets describe an effulgent moment when the temporal and the timeless coalesce, a moment when the transcendent becomes embodied. According to Eliot, in this moment of illumination, “You are the music/while the music lasts.” Yeats evokes this singular moment in a somewhat different manner. His famous rhetorical question, “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” highlights a similar experience of total inwardness with art. In Rajeev Taranathji, you perceive this sense of music permeating the body. After all, the iconic image of the maestro — his head bent over the instrument on his lap, eyes closed and rapt in some musical otherworld — is familiar to Hindustani music lovers. His was a life filled with music and more.