The last two books I read were both about Indian Classical Music. My mom got them when she came from India in August. They both have a lot to say about the sociocultural history of Indian Classical Music, besides focussing on specific artistes.
The first book was The Music Room by Namita Devidayal. A very lucid and expressive work, this book is about the tradition, practice, culture and the history of Hindustani music, woven around the stories of two specific artistes, Kesarbai Kelkar and Alladiya Khan. It also talks about a third supposedly very talented artiste, Dhondutai, the author's music guru, who for reasons not easy to fathom, never made it big as a professional singer. The story also speaks of the life of a girl who like me, was educated in classical music as a kid. That made it interesting to me as I could well relate to how one tends to take something like music for granted when one is just "plugged" into the field almost from the time they're born. For that reason I somehow never took it seriously and that was exactly the case with the author.
The second book was MS : A life in Music by TJS George. After reading The Music Room which was about the history of Hindustani music, I realized that I already knew most of it, whereas my knowledge of the history and evolution of Carnatic music was limited. For instance, I knew about the evolution of Hindustani music from pure devotional Drupad style of singing to the Khayal style that is centered around the human spirit and is often romantic. I had always wondered why Carnatic music on the other hand had Bhakti as the central ideology, and why it was lyrically heavy unlike Hindustani music which gives the artiste a lot more freedom to boundlessly explore the essence of the raga. Although MS : A life in Music is meant to be a biography I suspected that the life of such a musician and the path of their professional life was inseparabale from the history of the art/field itself, and decided to read the book to see what it had to say. Sure enough, the book did deal with Carnatic music itself, its evolution and the culture around it. It does not answer all the why-questions about Carnatic music that I mentioned above; and I am not sure one can answer them since the way any field evolves is purely a product of the entire sequence of specific circumstances at different points in time, but the book helped appreciate better the Carnatic ideology/point of view.Though this book is a biography of Ms M.S Subbulakshmi, the thing that you'd be quick to notice is that it is as much a biography about her husband Sadasivam, and I can kind of understand why. Sadasivam was MS's "lord and master", and practically ruled her professional and personal life.
The aspects that were most interesting to me were the family and background that MS came from, and some of the anecdotes from her life in her 20's that project a completely different persona from the usual image that the name "MS" makes one conjure up. I saw a young woman, vulnerable and human, rather than a poised, mature woman who is an image of piety and divinity.
Some of the things the author says about MS's aura and her fan following brought back memories. The bit about her being a big fashion icon and a legend, after whom the term 'MS blue' was coined (refering to the color of a saree she once supposedly wore during a performance), and the fact that women of those days loved to dress like her and emulate her, reminded me of my grandmother who's no more, who was an ardent fan of MS, and who would sometimes wear her Bindi like MS did, with a big red dot on top and a little one underneath! The description of MS later becoming the very symbol and personification of Bhakti reminded me of what the same grandmom once said: "MS is the Goddess Saraswati incarnate of Kali Yuga"!
It was interesting to note that the two books agreed with each other perfectly and didn't contradict each other in any way with regard to the history of classical music in India and the social view and the status of musicians. In this regard, I used one book as a corroboration of the claims in the other. It was also interesting to note that both the North and the South went through the same social complexities and developments with regard to the musicians' status quo, the society's perception of artistes and the controversial Devdasi tradition.
After having spent the last month and a half reading about Indian Classical music in the social context, I am now ready to move onto something different; magical realism, perhaps...
We'll see how that goes, with the newborn hogging most of my time. :-)
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