Genius opens Hindustani sanctum for all

AHMEDABAD: Marigold on the Saptak stage was never brighter than at the climax of Day 3, on Tuesday. Marigold lights up wedding venues, and Raga Malkauns — specifically, its shehnai rendition by Ustad Bismillah Khan — is the anthem of nuptials in India. On Tuesday, Pandit Ajoy Chakrabarty, the titan of the Patiala-Kasur Gharana, explicated Malkauns.However, the raga did not gather wedding evocations alone. Sure, many of the notes wore jewellery and silk sarees. But Panditji made Malkauns, in all its finery, deliver a spiritual discourse. So, after offering a few festive pleasantries, the raga heeded Panditji’s direction and tempered its power into meditation.“Patiala Gharana is known for its presentation of pentatonic ragas,” Pandit Sajan Mishra told TOI. “Ajoyji showed his expertise in the presentation of Raga Malkauns by creating a sombre mood.” Pandit Sajan Mishra and his brother Pandit Rajan Mishra are Banaras Gharana notables.As for the term “pentatonic”, it describes ragas that use only five notes. In Hindustani music, these are called ‘Odav’ ragas. Of course, art rewards seekers at every level of comprehension. Artists, such as the Mishra Brothers and Pandit Chakrabarty, illuminate truths with the same generosity regardless of a rasika’s acuity. Naturally, the better prepared a rasika, the greater the scope for enlightenment. Take for instance, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by William Butler Yeats. This 1880s poem could easily retell the fantasy of today’s cubicle warriors — to escape to a rural retreat from the maze of workplace battlefields.“I will arise and go now, for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore/While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey/I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”The closing stanza, cited above, has been built on dreams of a garden and a serene lake. But “roadway” and “pavement” show that the speaker is marooned in an urban desert. Experts say that the poem contains rhythm schemes called hexameter and tetrameter. But melancholy of “the deep heart’s core” embraces the expert and the general reader with equal tenderness. Similarly, Pandit Chakrabarty’s Malkauns impartially held everyone to its thrall of majesty.