Vanraj Bhatia’s extraordinary, multi-faceted oeuvre

The composer’s transcultural experiments were always intense and persuasive

“The Brahma-rakshasa needs more lines!” “The chorus can’t drown out the High Priest!” “The duet works, now shorten the moonlight aria!” For six years, between 2003 and 2009, enigmatic communications like these would fly across Mumbai — by phone, by fax, and by courier — between Vanraj Bhatia’s studio and mine. During those years, I worked closely with the legendary composer and music director on an opera, Agni Varsha (‘The Fire and the Rain’), based on Girish Karnad’s play, which the playwright had translated into English from his original Kannada. While I developed the libretto, Vanraj composed the music. In the process, I spent many delightful — and sometimes exasperating — hours with the maestro, listening as he played passages from our evolving work on the piano, imbibing a series of masterclasses on tempo, orchestration, polyphony, and the seemingly impossible project of creating an opera entirely through a choreography of Hindustani ragas. Trained in Western classical music at its wellsprings and also in Hindustani classical music, Vanraj Bhatia (1927-2021) was that rare figure — a composer whose transcultural experiments were always intense and persuasive, never perfunctory. Constantly experimental, curious about how musical systems could come together in convergence or counterpoint, he always sought out fresh challenges of scale. Whether it was an advertising jingle, a tune or score for a film, or a formal composition, Vanraj brought the same degree of artistic engagement to the occasion, resulting in a vivid and memorable body of work. His vibrant tune for ‘Mero gaam katha parey’, the signature song of Shyam Benegal’s 1976 film, Manthan, sounds as fresh and vital as it did when we first heard it, 45 years ago. His magnificent opening music for Shridhar Kshirsagar’s Khandaan (1985), India’s first TV series, still commands attention. His sonorous score for Benegal’s TV series, Bharat Ek Khoj (1988-89), inspired by Vedic chanting, remains compelling, decades after the series was first screened on Doordarshan. As does his brooding, ominous score for Govind Nihalani’s 1988 Doordarshan mini-series based on Bhisham Shahani’s Partition novel, Tamas.