Listening to Hindustani Music

Chetan Karnani's "Listening to Hindustani Music" was the first of its type to be keyed to the LP records of the musicians so that the reader can access the music being written about. But he resorts to facile generalisations & is not quite accurate in a few places, besides being opinionated.

Sandeep Bagchee's "Nad" starts from the fundamentals & dives deep into the subject. Meticulously researched, the fundamentals are presented exhaustively, before analysing the unique "Gharana" system of both vocal & instrumental schools. The icing on the cake is however the eight popular Ragas selected for detailed analysis, each being illustrated with a recorded performance on LP, where the writer handholds the reader throughout the performance, as it were.

Rajiv Nair's "A Rasika's Journey through Hindustani Music" succeeds in transmitting his infectious enthusiasm for the genre to the reader. After a general introduction to the various forms within the genre, short bio-data of the leading practitioners are given, highlighting their specialities. But unfortunately, here also the author (like Karnani) allows his prejudices to get the better of him, depriving the reader of an objective value-based analysis.

Even though the following does not bear directly on the subject of this essay, it may help to set the record straight on the Ravi Shankar & Vilayat Khan controversy. (The following info. is from Namita Devidayal's "The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan.") Despite Vilayat Khan immodestly advertising himself as "The World's Greatest Sitar Player" in posters, his concerts in USA were never housefull, unless he was accompanied by Zakir Hussain. The fact is in the Alap & Jod portions of serious ragas, none were in the same class as Ravi Shankar, not even Nikhil Banerjee.