One-and- a-half years ago, Prabha Atre delivered a Carnatic raga towards the end of a concert she gave at Nagpur in her native Maharashtra. It’s not as if south Indian classical tunes never figure in a Hindustani concert (there are many common ones too), yet the veteran vocalist’s choice stood out for its distinct flavour. It was Sarasangi, a melody-type largely unfamiliar to the music-lovers north of the Deccan.
To be true, Sarasangi isn’t all too common in Carnatic kacheris, too. For all its vitality as a parent scale in the list of 72 such melakarta ragams in the southern idiom, Sarasangi is not one that most music buffs would recognise in the first (or second) phrase of its alapana. To export such a raga on to a Hindustani dais and that too in a place least known for a Carnatic heritage requires much more than fascination for south Indian classical. The artiste needs to have reasonably good idea about the interiors of the Cauvery-music courtyard.
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Which Dr Atre does have, undoubtedly. That too, when she has taken no lessons in Carnatic. It’s the Pune-born vocalist’s working stint in the All India Radio that exposed her to a lot of south Indian music, which she began finding fascinating. During her service with the Akashvani as an assistant producer of music, Dr Atre was thoroughly impressed by the Carnatic-style voice oscillation (gamakas) as well as the swaraprastaram, which is the rendition of solfas in a pattern much more ornate and intricate vis-à- vis its Hindustani equivalent called Sargam. “I wish I had some formal training in Carnatic music. It would have made my understanding of it easy,” the Padma Bhushan awardee notes in a lengthy interview, where she also touches upon a liking for
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Western Classical she cultivated during her days in AIR which had graded her ‘top’ grade as a
musician.
A closer ear to Dr Atre’s Hindustani music can take the listener to her occasional cooption of the gamakas the Carnatic way. Equally deliberately, and with an experimental trip bordering on adventure, she makes her sargam sometimes sound like the Carnatic swaraprastharam with its architectural splendour. Sargam was anyway the subject on which the musician came up with her thesis that fetched Atre her PhD.
Sargmam is a segment sometimes avoided and even criticised as a poor tool in Hindustani
music. Predictably, Dr. Atre holds a contrarian view. She notes that the oldest recording of singing the sargam at concerts traces to Abdul Kari Khan (1872-1937), the founder of the Kirana gharana to which Dr. Atre primarily belongs. Pertinently, a couple of other yesteryear Hindustani maestros, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Amir Khan, who Dr. Atre notes were sargam experts, did evince special interest in south Indian classical. “It is not clear why other senior artists of that time (Abdul Karim Khan’s) did not pay any attention to sargam singing. Did they consciously avoid it or was sargam singing banned in presentation?” she wonders in another interview, suspecting if sargam was not even taught because gurus perhaps “did not want hard-earned knowledge to go easily to anyone.”
This September 13, Dr. Atre completed 85 years of life, while 2017 also marks her seven-and- a- half decades of musical career. She is one of the very few Hindustani musicians to wonder if
everything is hunky-dory with the system’s time theory—something the Carnatic stream isn’t very fastidious about implementing in kacheri presentation. “Not everyone feels a morning raga should be sung in the morning. Everybody should feel the same, but it’s not like that,” she tells a music writer.
This week also saw classical danseuse Alarmel Valli, also a Padma Bhushan, complete 61 years.
The famed Bharatanatyam exponent (born on September 14), interestingly, had learned Odissi, though has—again contrary to Dr. Atre—seldom incorporated the eastern Indian dance’s techniques or aesthetics to its most famous south Indian counterpart. Chennai-based Valli, who also has a connection with Delhi where she spent some of her formative years and found her husband (senior IAS officer Bhaskar Ghose, who later headed Doordarshan), does give jugal bandies with dancers of other forms, but has resolutely stuck to her Pandanallur style of Bharatanatyam.
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Not surprising, thus, that many culture buffs don’t know that Valli learned Odissi from none other than its 20th-century patriarch Kelucharan Mohapatra and subsequently from his frontline disciple Ramani Ranjan Jena. Overall, for a decade. “I saw Aloka Panikker dancing at Theatre de la ville when I was 16 and I loved the style, I fell in love with the style and I wanted so much to dance that,” Valli reveals in an interview to a leading interactive portal.
“And when Kelucharanji came with Sanjukta Panigrahi, somebody went and asked him if he
would teach me Odissi, and he said let me see her dance first. “He came to my house. He had
heard of me but had not seen me dance. So he saw me dancing, my master was there, I
remember, and then he agreed to teach me…. And for my arangetram (debut), Guruji came again for another three weeks to polish everything up. I was so blessed and though I don’t dance, perform Odissi today, the enrichment that comes from studying under a great guru…”
So interesting are the labyrinths of artistes in the Indian classical performing arts scene—be it
music or dance.
