A vocalist’s vocabulary – Leisure News

Compiling terms, concepts and the everyday language of teaching, listening and musicianship, this dictionary is ethnographic in spirit and one of its kind. Most music dictionaries on the other hand eschew practice and are obsessed with explicating the ‘shastriya’, canonical texts and raga grammar.

Amarnath came from the music tradition of pre-Partition Punjab. This was a cultural zone that extended from the courts of Afghanistan to Kashmir, Jammu and the adjoining hill states. Muslim ustads and courtesans dominated the scene and the epicentre from the early 20th century was Lahore. Reformist Hindus were keen connoisseurs and eager learners. Amarnath, like his more celebrated elder contemporary Prannath (he went on to influence American avant garde music in the 1970s), came under the spell of a school of music called the Kirana, exemplified by Ustad Wahid Khan and younger maestros like Amir Khan. An approach to vocalism that adopted a meditative, unhurried style, it was also closely tied to performance that showcased discipline and dignity.

The dictionary is imbued with this ethos. Hindustani terms and phrases related to the Sufi culture of dargahs and shrines and the relationship of the ‘ustad’ to his ‘murid’, abound. The themes are mostly pedagogy and appreciation. Mischievous humour and sarcasm abound, badkhabraa (ill-informed musician), haano (hollow musician). Values associated with listenership, nikasi acchhi hai (clarity) and the marvellous legend about Wahid Khan’s rendition when the grateful patron said that Lalit ki Khairat bant rahi hai (Raga Lalit is being distributed as a sacrament).

Not just idiosyncratic terms and phrases, the dictionary is also a careful and comprehensive record of all the standard vocabulary that is used in raga music, both in the melodic and in the rhythmic traditions. Out of print for many years, kept alive as an e-book by enthusiasts, no one has done more for this legacy than Amarnath’s daughter, the late Bindu Chawla, whose memoir is included in this edition. The new editors Rekha Bhardwaj and other disciples have inserted bionotes on contemporary musicians, but a more useful addition would have been Devnagari renditions of terms to clarify the phonetic which English spellings do imprecisely. A typo has turned a key term like Asthayee into Asihayee, this needs to be urgently corrected