Sawai Gandharva
Tomorrow, the 14th, is my birthday, and I got the perfect present in advance this evening. I got to attend the Sawai Gandharva concert, the annual three day classical music extravaganza. Started by the doyen of Hindustani music Bhimsen Joshi in honour of his guru Rambhau Kundgolkar, a.k.a. “Sawai Gandharva”, the festival has been the pride and joy of the city of Pune for the past 56 years. I never missed it when I lived in India, and the last time I managed to attend was nearly a decade ago. This evening, Madhup Mudgal, a vocalist and student of the legendary Kumar Gandharva, sang the ragas Shree and Yaman.
Punekars (rightfully) think of themselves as connoisseurs of Hindustani music, and performing in this festival is both a challenge and an honour. People attend in the thousands, and an enormous public ground with a huge makeshift tent simply fills up with music and music lovers. But people also sit outdoors on both sides of the tent, bringing their own mats to supplement the ones the organisers provide. Pune’s well-heeled cultural elite sit on sofas or chairs (this is a very tiresome see-and-be-seen kind of arena) but thousands only buy “bharatiya baithak” (Indian seating) tickets, which are grab-a-spot-and-sit places on the ground. The actual stage is too far for most people to see, so nowadays they have large screens in addition to CCTVs. It nurtures the love of classical music in the city and attracts people of all ages and backgrounds. It’s really quite something, and I owe the little I know and appreciate in Indian classical music in significant part to it being there for me when I was in college.
Until a few years ago, the festival was held overnight, on the second Thu, Fri and Sat in December, with Bhimsen Joshi, also Pune’s most beloved local classical musician, performing last in the wee hours of Sunday morning. It used to be chilly then and we lugged shawls and blankets with us at 8.30 pm, spread a mat on the ground and parked ourselves till morning. New and upcoming performers opened the show every evening, and if you liked one you went to Alurkar Music House the following week and looked for albums. You took a nap when a boring sitarist or vocalist played late in the night, but always woke up, walked around the grounds for a bit, looking for friends or celebrities or other musicians here and there, had some tea and batata-wada and came back all fresh for the final artist of the night, usually a senior and famous vocalist – Rashid Khan, Parveen Sultana, Firoz Dastur, Jitendra Abhisheki, Jasraj, Kumar Gandharva, Prabha Atre…. the performance would draw to a close as dawn broke. Here, I attended Kumar Gandharva’s final performance, and it was here that the crowd refused to budge even after Rashid Khan was done, insisting that he sing at least another piece before he got up. The school whose grounds the show rents for the night, had to be postponed for an hour that morning, as Rashid Khan sang a beautiful thumri in Khamaj.
After an ordinance that banned loudspeakers in the city after 11 pm a few years ago, the festival, held in a crowded area of the old city, had to change its schedule and now it’s held from the late afternoon until 11 pm. Initially I was scandalised – Sawai at 5 pm!! How would we listen to early morning ragas? Whatever would happen to the sociality of the festival, with its late night tea stalls and the bleary-eyed analyses the following morning of this artist or that? Actually, it seems to have worked out better than everyone thought, because, like today, we now have afternoon melodies like Shree or Marwa or Bhimpalas instead of Lalit or Todi or Bhairav. And the festive atmosphere has remained quite the same. The only difference is that now I hardly know anybody in the crowd.
After Madhup Mudgal came two violinists, Ganesh and Kumaresh, who play in the Carnatic music tradition. They had the enormous crowd stunned and eating out of their palms for nearly two hours, especially with a ragam-tanam-pallavi that they also explained to the mostly Hindustani-knowing audience. (Don’t miss the macbook in the photo below, which he used to maintain a drone, I think – it was the cause of much discussion in our part of the audience.)
The violins just spoke to me, told me stories, cajoled me into believing their side of the story, made me weep and nod in sympathy and shake my head in disbelief at the wrenching sadness they conveyed. Both brothers were very rasik, and clearly enjoyed themselves as much as the audience did. You know, I think I have a crush!
I was so mesmerised I didn’t stay for the next and final performance by another famous brother-duo, the Hindustani vocalists Rajan and Sajan Mishra. I shall also miss tomorrow’s final show. But it was very overwhelming to come back to incredible music at this beloved institution. It really is the perfect birthday present!
