The making of a Rudra Veena

Kunal Joshi and Bahauddin Dagar are restoring a 50-year-old rudra veena, and also working on a new one

At a three-day workshop that delved deep into what ‘tradition’ stands for (the first of a series that has been flagged off by Bhaitak Foundation and Dakshina Dvarka Foundation), participants were immersed in a gamut of practice, processes and parampara. The idea was to experience how tradition is a flowing river and not a frozen lake (to put it as briefly as possible) across all arts and crafts.

Artistes, master-craftspersons and scholars across three generations led participants to address questions about aesthetic structures, social locations, knowledge transmission, codification and embodied practice, philosophical and ethical continuities. Each day began with involving the body in a craft, however raw you were to it. The day ended with invigorating performances by dancers and singers.

One of the streams of thought was about the subtle and shifting line among tradition, experimentation and transgression.

In one of the sessions, we sat transfixed as we watched (slides as well as in person) the reverse-engineering of a rudra veena. What kept me rivetted was the fact that while the instrument and music form (dhrupad) has a generations-old history, and the contemporary practitioner, Ustad Bahauddin Dagar, is the scion of a 20-generation lineage, the veena maker was a young man with no prior experience with instrument-making of any kind. He did not come from a long line of craftspersons who had been traditionally making instruments for the Dagars. That line of Kanhaiyalal in Calcutta, shut shop some decades ago, as the Ustad informs us, as markets, audiences, and patronage for this imposing instrument shrank.

Through a series of serendipitous events, a young art student, Kunal Joshi, and Bahauddin Dagar, crossed paths. Interestingly, if we look at Kunal’s journey through the lens of tradition, one can say that one particular tradition had simply evaporated and let him down. He had come to a dead-end at the celebrated, decades-old national art school that he had joined (and he is not alone in this experience, other aspiring artistes tell the same tale). Nothing was being really taught or transferred, no real training was being imparted here anymore — with the school, once a premier institution, having simply given up on its own rich legacy of art training and exposure.

Kunal, seeking to learn sculpture, took a break, found himself a real teacher, Ravindra Sharma in Adilabad (Maharashtra) and gained in four months what a year at the art school did not give him. From here, he began to experiment with wood craft (Kunal’s father had worked in stained glass, and was encouraging of his son’s pursuits.) Around this time, Bahauddin was looking at getting a new instrument made, and also restoring a veena made in 1963 that had been played by his father. To start with, he asked around for a wood-worker, who might make him two beautiful end-pieces — the peacock or mayur at one end and the serpent vasuki at the other. This is when Kunal and he were put in touch, and the rest is a story that is a fine example of tradition meets exploration. Seeing how well Kunal had worked on the two pieces, Bahauddin ventured to ask him if he would like to source the wood for the central ‘dandi’ or neck and work on hollowing it.

At this juncture someone may well ask: Why not turn to the more prolific sitar and tanpura makers, rather than to an unknown untaught youngster? Again, the reply that Bahauddin provides is located at that crossroad where tradition meets experimentation. The sitar and tanpura makers have a set formula, which has worked (or sometimes not) for long, and most are unlikely or unwilling to give the majestic rudra veena the kind of gestation time (three years in the making) that it needs. Interestingly, Bahauddin has often said that having and playing a veena is like having an elephant – one must respect and work with its sheer strength, its gait and its mind.