The world of Hindustani music is exceptionally territorial, says Amit Chaudhuri

Writer Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding The Raga is about discovering one’s music through a labyrinth of sounds and experiences

You will find the story. But if you see it as a story, you will miss all the moments. How these moments grow into experiences, how experiences reveal processes, and how these processes become not only personal truths but also a study of the nature of art — Finding The Raga (Penguin, Random House), author Amit Chaudhuri’s recent book, is an intense rumination. Stunningly expressive, the book has a gentle undulating landscape, but the underlying restlessness is palpable. The creative forebodings that come from different periods of the author’s life are not uniform in the narrative; however, what is uniform is the relentless contemplation on the essence of khayal music through its tools. For instance, sample this. “The alaap is a formal and conceptual innovation of the same family as the circadian novel, in which everything happens, in an amplification of time, before anything’s begun to happen. …. Alaap corresponds with my need for narrative not to be a story, but a series of opening paragraphs, where life hasn’t already ‘happened’, ready for recounting, but is about to happen, or is happening, and, as a result, can’t be domesticated into a perfect retelling.” The book is a ‘finding’ — finding one’s music and music itself — through literature, language, philosophy, other forms of music and more. “How do we understand the aesthetic whose response to the world arises from homage rather than the matter of representational fidelity to an inner or outer life?” While he investigates this, he takes us through Satyajit Ray, Mani Kaul, Tagore and Kishori Amonkar. The past, the author writes, “must be arrived at without pre-meditation, and met with, face to face.” Certainly among the most reflective books on Indian music, Amit Chaudhuri’s book is soulful, something you would want to keep returning to — like those postcards from the past. They are studded with memories, but you make meaning only through ‘authorial surrender’.