Translation 1

My first attempt at translation. This is an excerpt from the foreword to a certain book that my dad wrote in his hyper-poetic and equally fluid hindi - and translating it for the english edition of the book had me trying to keep it as poetic and as fluid while coming up with english parallels to natively hindi - hindustani (musically, not patriotically) - terms. Was one hell of a task. Am not too unhappy about how it turned out...for now...

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Music is a fluid structuring, as opposed to the stasis of the painter’s canvas or the sculptor’s stone. The flow of the raga has its own narrowings and widenings and with its ephemeral transformations from a multitude of shimmering rivulets to a vast, all-encompassing ocean, it rivals the many avatars of the Narmada; but our raga-river keeps returning to its source to begin its journey again and again, instead of flowing on into oblivion.

The society that our swaras dwell in has its own codes of conduct. The swaras have their own relationships – they have their unions and their separations, their own gaits of coming and going and are very vulnerable to the influence of the aesthetic values that great artists confer upon them.

The sustenance of these concepts during a performance brings a raga into being. The bandish is the medium through which the raga is presented and embellished. The singers of the Agra gharana loved these bandishes -these raga-personifications - limitlessly. An attempt to define the bandish would go something like this: A well structured note-composition which contains somnolent, unarticulated indications of the improvisation possible in a particular raga, but never a complete representation of the raga can be called a bandish in the realm of Indian Classical Music. A raga on its way to realisation, and its entire aesthetic, can only be safeguarded by putting it into the indicative cast of the bandish. 

The ambiguity of a bandish’s dormant suggestiveness can be reconciled only by unveiling the bandish improvisationally so that the facet of the raga hidden in it shows forth. The artist’s mood decides the temperament of this unveiling – sometimes of measuring the possibilities of grammar and sometimes enthralled by some indefinable music-induced emotion.

Unveiling a bandish imrovisationally requires a series of avartans (rhythm cycles). Both the avartan and the gait of the raga believe in being reborn and also in reaping what was sowed in their previous existences. Each avartan’s destiny is inevitably decided by all the good and evil done in the preceding avartan.

Classical music is essentially this process of using a sequence of avartans to examine and unveil a bandish. This sequence of avartans does not fetter the creative abilities of the artist or, for that matter, the raga. 

The rules and the restrictions of raga-tala have their own grammar, but the realm of artistic creativity lies, enchantingly mysterious, at the very periphery of this grammar. The inspired artist walks this mute, ambiguous, flexible borderline tightrope with his procession of avartans, oscillating between these two realms in his eternal quest for balance – for the golden mean. Beyond art’s veiled confines, this process gives the immortal traditional principles of art a subtle elasticity and protects them from the threat of stasis. This is the domain of art, of creation, of improvisation.

The bandish is the khayal’s only medium of expression. 
The three primary constituents of the bandish are:

1. The swara interactions characteristic of the raga.

2. Rhythm, with its connotations of rhythm-work (the manipulative exploration of rhythm), rhythmicness (the condition of being rhythmic), lilt and syncopation. 

3. Words – their language meanings as well as their auditory, phonic meanings, their sonic resonance, their ability to provide cadence and the drama hidden in their pronunciation.

The vocal specificities of pronunciation also add their own colour to the singing of a bandish. The pronunciation of the vowels and consonants of a word adds meanings of tonality and cadence to it, apart from its language meaning. Artists, most notably those of the Agra gharana, have adorned and enriched music by creatively incorporating these concepts into their renditions.