So now we have one more name there. Pt Bhimsen Joshi. He's been conscripted into the gilded hall, to join the most exalted in India's official Book of Lists. We note this protocol moment with all the deference due to the man. To him we owe at least this—an honest attempt to separate the event from the man. It's conceivable the young Bhimsen too, as he ran away from his home in the Deccan all those decades ago to join a life-long circus of exaltation, did not count the highest civilian honour in the land among the risks his journey might entail.

What is ati-vilambit if not the stricken, trance-like, super slow motion of the bullock cart, the very nucleus image of India's self-loathing?

And yet, the grand old duke of Kirana gayaki has taken the news of the Bharat Ratna manfully, graciously—"on behalf of all Hindustani vocalists".

There is, of course, nothing horribly remiss here. A state that honours its artists is a darn sight better than one that believes in executing them. And every generation of artists distils from among itself, through the magical processes of gene selection peculiar to art, a self-knighted aristocracy. In the early days of jazz, in the absence of official certification, they went right ahead and literally named themselves King, Earl, Count, Duke, Prez and Chairman of the Board. But that by itself does not falsify the existence of true nobility among them. There simply are artists who rise above the mediocre and the merely artisanal.

You could try and trace the end of the Blue Period in the singing life of, say, a Mallikarjun or an Amir Khan to see when they passed through the mirror into that rarefied air—or wonder whether Bade Ghulam Ali indeed arrived readymade, sweeping in like some force of nature. You can lament truly blessed practitioners who went unwept into oblivion, even quibble whether this or that alleged beenkar is worth the greatness that is thrust on them. Yet, once someone is irreducibly, ineluctably great—and society has partaken of this greatness—everyone knows it.

It's striking how, for all the sharp dissonances you expect in matters of taste, so many of our formal investitures are attended by a near-universal consent. In lining up our Hall of Famers, only the order of priority among them remains unclear. Since there is no scientific means to determine an exact hierarchy of the sublime, we can safely leave that to fate and the laws of caprice that move the spheres. But Pt Bhimsen Joshi is certainly a name that belongs among, to borrow a phrase from the Indian Penal Code, "the rarest of the rare".

Why does it then feel so strangely flat, this goody-goody spectacle of a maestro being smothered with a sarkari shawl? Ah, there it goes again, we say, that little red blip on the Culture Sensex.... It's vital that we harness our tacit cynicism into something more positively irritating and ask questions. Can official honour express, leave alone exhaust, society's sense of gratitude to those who touch the base metal of life with a hint of gold filament, who animate the subtlest of fibres? Can it ever rise above the necessary follies of selection and exclusion? It inevitably privileges one set of values over others—you don't need Macmohan to be on the jury for judgements to be subjective. In any case, in comparing a Multani on slow simmer from Abdul Wahid Khan to say a Sanjay Subramaniam javali, do we not need to make the basic error of relativising the value of absolutes?

Maybe there's a still deeper 'false connection'. Something fundamentally askew in the equation between—if we must put it so grandiosely—the State and the arts. The classic liberal position says it is essentially a misalliance. This does not stem merely from the fear of the artist being coopted, the aesthete's distaste at the alacrity with which they can get down to business and mint a Raag Priyadarshini. One suspects it goes beyond, to its root credo. If every individual is to be deemed a model of self-government, every artist must necessarily be an autarky! There can be no movements, no genres or genealogies, no sources of inspiration. Ragtime cannot take from minstrelsy, Debussy must never have heard gamelan, Abdul Karim Khan never wandered Southwards, nor did Dikshithar go to Benaras. There can be no pre-existing structures too, no blue notes, only the random distribution in humankind of a mystery substance called genius.

Okay, that's exaggerating—but only just so. It's plain that a primary distrust of too much consensus and a preference for solitary splendour—for the stark, raving artist-in-his-attic—is a running theme that has left its mark even on the mainstreams of criticism (which are, delightfully, movements in their own right!). Thus, we come to savour bursts of creative violence: the modern feeling that art, to be vital, must be a disruptive force and periodically annihilate received categories. The idea of art's transgressive moments receiving official sanction is laughable. The Marquis de Sade was in no danger in his lifetime of being conferred with the Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur. No one would have given Ornette Coleman the Pulitzer in 1960, when he actually cracked a genre wide open. Bird and his bebop friends were thought to be peddlers of a disreputable musicianship, elder jazzmen would keep a distance from them. Lawrence, Lolita...the connection between scandal and art seems intimate, even necessary. There is no way of resolving this, short of saying that the only true relationship that ought to exist between the State and the arts is one of censorship....

Ramachandra Guha, whose interest in history segues smoothly into the contemporary, offers us visions from a sun-drenched antipode. A happy marriage, no less. He has written that he was once coaxed (without too much difficulty) into publicly recommending the Bharat Ratna for Subbulakshmi and Lata Mangeshkar; only, he added the names of Bismillah Khan and Ravi Shankar. All four, he noted with satisfaction, duly got the award. His choices are, of course, unimpeachable: the very best, very centre-of-centre, very elegantly Nehruvian.

Guha also wished to see the thing rescued from politics, restored to the authentic soul of India. If he planned for us a collective escape to a realm of grace and purity, it was thwarted by the arrival of pettiness and ego on this blemishless landscape. Blame our flawed, axiomatic treatment of greatness. For, there exist (a) borderline cases, and (b) those unfairly denied club class privileges. Kishori Amonkar (b) had serious issues with co-Goanese nightingale Lata; Jasraj (a) couldn't fathom how the public estimation of Ravi Shankar could exceed his self-image. To them, Guha must cite all the world eminences who narrowly escaped the infamy of a Nobel. Such contretemps mustn't detain spokesmen for the silent majority—they serve a modern, benevolent strain of political thought, a reformed Platonism. The poets are to be rehabilitated in the republic; those spotted butterflies being blown around in divine afflatus are to be netted and seated in ordered ranks, in the service of an ordered society.

It's the tradition of the poet laureate. In a land where the master culture is still not that of the literate but the oral—rather, sruti or the heard—the honour has gone four times to musicians, not even once to a litterateur (unless you count the near-miss of the millennium, A.B. Vajpayee, as a poet). Could the non-argumentative nature of music have something to do with this? I remember someone who had difficulty adjusting to Indian classical music because, he said, unlike other art, it did not seem to have any subversive, revolutionary potential! Not being a keen student of the applied arts, the thought hadn't occurred to me. Generically, it does have a harmonising, balance-restoring effect (which helps sell CDs). And what is ati-vilambit if not the stricken, trance-like, super slow motion of the bullock cart, the very nucleus image of modern India's self-loathing? In whose passage only the faintest distinction exists between motion and a creeping stillness—a most distilled form of status quoism!

Happily, there's a converse too. A critic (from the South but musically bilingual) once wrote on the kernel difference between Hindustani and Carnatic as he saw it. He demarcated them not on musicological grounds, but on spiritual territory. The northern strain had the potential to lead a person astray, he said (approvingly), while the southern engendered decorum and obedience. If a personal relationship to music can be beset by unforeseen complications, why deny the public sphere its share of ironies? For a trope that nails power, art and their mutual destabilisation, try Mohammed Shah Rangeela. In political history, there is resounding consensus on him being the biggest joke of the Mughal era—and indeed he has all the black magic of the joker. It's the sheer number of khayal bandishes that sing his praise; in them, hear a genre being forged in his decadent court. In more innocent times, Rajendra Prasad asked Amjad Ali's father Hafiz Ali (Padma Bhushan '60) if there was anything he could do for him. The gentle Khan, with a touching naivete unimaginable today, said: "Please take care of the Darbari raag." Our loop is completed with Bhimsen singing—not the Mile sur anthem—the title song for the political satire, Raag Darbari.

Darbaris get well taken care of. The rest must get by on messy, real music. Moments of bathos—I've seen Bismillah do Goonj Uthi Shehnai on request for an audience of police top brass, sipping whisky with napkins wrapped around the glass; a friend claims to have seen Kishori come on dais one merry evening and plonk down back to the audience. And occasional epiphany—chancing upon a late-night bhajan mandali in a Goa village temple, people who looked like they drove trucks for a living, sing piece after piece in perfect raag; an extended session with desert troubadours on the sidelines of a kitschy mela; Dewey Redman, a black Texan shaman with a Chinese musette, blowing respectable Delhiites into a deep funk. And yes, the glory of Bhimsen Joshi al-fresco, in the rain, summer of 2000, Nehru Park. That pure dawn, colts and silver-haired minxes standing in wonderment on those grassy knolls, getting all wet and raptured, a mountain of a man boxed into a wheelchair, still the very picture of leonine dignity against that huge tree, the ficus religiosa, an image at which sarcasm finally deserts me....

---

This piece first appeared on the website