Sarod maestro Rajeev Taranath turns 90

Sarod maestro Pt Rajeev Taranath of Maihar Allauddin gharana turned 90 on October 17.

A disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, he received the rich assimilative world-view of his illustrious father, the senior Pandit Taranath, who shaped the Kannada consciousness during the early 20th century.

Rajeev’s multifaceted personality has been shaped by his diverse engagements, with English literature, language studies and Hindustani music. His mother Sumati Bai, a gifted orator and writer in English and a feminist, fed him with the joys of Tamil culture.

Rajeev espouses honesty, compassion, pluralism and secularism as the most enabling values of life, not as mere embellishments but as a mode of being. He inherits the open culture of Maihar gharana pioneered by the saint-musician Allauddin Khan, which he acknowledges with great reverence.

In his music room, which resonates with sarod music every day, Taranath spoke eloquently about his life experiences.

As a composer of film music: For the classical musician, while the experience was novel, it was not “seriously enjoyable”. “Background-music that supplements the visual is the truly relevant music in films, rather than songs, which can be attached or detached easily. A simple distinction between connotation and denotation operates here. Language maximally denotes meaning, while music suggests moods—loneliness, vacancy, happiness,” he says. Admiring the breadth of A R Rahman and the musicscape of composers like Ilaiyaraaja and Hamsalekha, he says “they know the possibilities of every instrument and instrument-combine, and the potential of such sounds in music composing, while my shortcoming is that I know only the sarod, with which I connect”, he says.

In Lankesh’s movie ‘Pallavi’, Taranath imaginatively explored a romantic raga of folk-origin, Manjkhamaj. He employed different instruments including the veena and the sitar. The movie had no songs; it bagged the National Award for music.

‘Shringaramasa’ created evocative melodies based on ragas like Hemant and Charukeshi to depict the sentiments of love and melancholy. Taranath’s singing of poet N S Lakshminarayana Bhat’s composition ‘Shankeyemba benki soki’ captures the essence of melancholy.

Taranath is known for his evocative background scores for the pathbreaking film ‘Samskara’ (1970), Lankesh’s ‘Khandavideko Mamsavideko’ (1979) and ‘Kanchana Sita’ (1978) in Malayalam, that reinterprets the story of Sita in the Ramayana.

On music-teaching In his words: “My kind of music is most successfully taught individually. One plays and the other follows. The benchmark gradually moves higher with a gentle and not-so-gentle pushing, similar to the art of cooking, wrestling and language-learning. I do not know much about Western-music training. I know of excellent institutions. Skills and techniques are taught individually under the close attention of the trainer, and then the artist joins an orchestra. Western musicians depend on notations, unlike us. Most of our big musicians of the past were illiterates. We depend more on the ear while the Westerner depends on the eye. Also Western music is successfully more writable than our music.”

On overlapping cultures: “India is a creation of the British. It is a subcontinent, with many cultures. We all share our culture and influence our neighbours, like in Europe or anywhere else. India and Pakistan eat the same food, speak the same language and listen to the same music, just as in Europe they use similar cutlery and follow the same table manners. Our illiterate grandmothers are the same everywhere. We are out of touch with a large section of our society- farmers, labourers and the poorer sections who do not fight in the name of religion. But quarrels are deliberately planted, for specific purposes and that is not difficult.
Shades of culture are too diverse and complex. In India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Yemen and Egypt, people want to know your personal details, of marriage or divorce and children, which they wouldn’t ask in France or Switzerland. Asian communities freely extend their hospitality covering food and bathing. Yet, in caste-ridden societies, that privilege is not extended to everyone. But in the Arab society such discrimination doesn’t exist; the servant shares his meal with the owner in the same plate.”

On marriage, love: “While I have witnessed difficult marriages boiling down to marital rape, I have seen my own parents enjoying a beautiful companionship. One shouldn’t hurry and I don’t know if patience always brings success. Life is highly dynamic and notions of chastity, virginity, etc. do not have much meaning for me. In living-in partnerships, the process of moving out is less harsh. To me, caring and worrying about another person, caring for someone weak, dirty and poor, is vital; almost a test of one’s love. The feeling of love for a woman, a child or your old father are not very different.

On his guru’s teaching: “I knew music but not the sarod. My guru began from the basics, taught me gats in ragas Alhaiya Bilawal, Yaman and Bhairavi. He insisted on teaching Bhairavi, his favourite raga, my favourite too. When we played Puriya together, Khansaab’s daughter Sridevi remarked, “I can’t make out who is playing”. That’s enough for me!
Literature doesn’t teach me to create a poem, it asks me to look at a poem. But a music class teaches me to create music. That’s the fundamental difference.

Honour in Mysuru

Friends, students and admirers gathered to celebrate Rajeev Taranath’s 90th birthday at JSS women’s college auditorium in Mysuru.

Sarangi maestro Faiyaz Khan spoke eloquently about his music. A Sarod ensemble of Taranath’s disciples presented raga Mishra Kafi as a loving tribute.

So what next?

At 90, Taranath says he looks forward rather than back: “When Khansaab moved from one musical note to another, my heart missed a beat. Music is the best thing that happened to me, it’s his blessing. Since a man called Ali Akbar Khan lived, Taranath is living today. Khansaab gave me things to do, so many things, that I have to play today and practise tomorrow. So I live, to perfect some things”.