The Disciple remains on the edge of the well of musicianship

The Disciple, now showing on Netflix, engulfs you in its web of paradox and irony

Chaitanya Tamhane makes me jealous. Like the protagonist Sharad in The Disciple, my induction into the universe of Hindustani music was one of rapture and awe at the depth of the tradition. Many years passed before I identified the surprisingly homogenous — and disillusioningly pedestrian — subcultures it consisted of. Tamhane latches on to one of these — the Marathi Brahmin subculture of Khayal music in Mumbai — and presents an astoundingly faithful representation of its textures, timbres and contradictions. After the debacle that was Bandish Bandits, much was expected from the director of the incredible Court and Tamhane does not disappoint. From its unostentatious settings to its often stiflingly closeted worldviews, from its endearing music schools to the lovely music itself, Tamhane conjures up a world that is almost too familiar. In this sense, Tamhane is practically an ethnographer. Like the many ethnomusicologists who have studied this music, Tamhane is less interested in stardom and glory and more in the peculiar shapes the music’s human ecology takes. The Disciple plays out like a mehfil, a languorous soiree that takes its time to engulf you in its web of paradox and irony. The contradictions the film grapples with are at the heart of the music’s recent history. Hindustani Khayal was historically practised in royal courts across north India by various musician castes, often of ambiguous religious affiliation. But the British divided the populace into simplistic categories for administrative efficiency, effectively obliterating the religious diversity and syncretism of South Asian culture. In the universe of Hindustani music, this pitted a ‘disruptive’ Muslim present against a romanticised Hindu past. Colonial scholars proclaimed that the music they heard around them wasn’t India’s ‘real’ music. That, they contended, was lost and could only be found fossilised in ancient Sanskrit texts. They deemed the living music around them vulgar, corrupted by falling into the hands of ‘illiterates’ and ‘prostitutes’, a claim even musicians of the time often bought into.