Musical jab: Immunity against urban ennui

Ahmedabad:

Ustad Shujaat Khan

, the sitar titan from the Imdad Khani Gharana, “contains multitudes”.

Walt Whitman

used that phrase to reconcile contradictions, but in

Ustad Khan

’s case the multitudes assimilate artistic asceticism, the gift for annotating musical complexities, and a philosopher’s range of concerns. He performs at Saptak on January 4, Tuesday.Talking of philosophy, Ustad Khan told TOI: “Music is something for your soul. You cannot live without it.” Ustad Khan’s devotees will immediately realize that he is not dealing in abstraction. Socrates maintained that philosophers were doctors who prescribed treatment for souls which felt under the weather. But, as John Sellars says in “Lessons in Stoicism”, soul should not be thought to be “immaterial…supernatural.” Instead, Sellars writes, from the philosopher-doctor’s perspective we should “understand it simply as mind, thoughts and beliefs”. And Ustad Khan’s music repairs and fortifies all those three elements.For instance, when he rendered

Jhinjhoti

in the 2020 edition of Saptak, Ustad Khan not only presented the raga, but he also offered ruminations, banter, and commentary. Young rasikas were charmed and the aficionados felt the art’s stethoscope on their souls. Jhinjhoti can sound like dusk appraising the meaningfulness of all that it has been able to accomplish before its bedtime. But the raga can also radiate the thrill of sunrise that is looking forward to its long drive across mountains, oceans, deserts, and torrents of commuter traffic. Jhinjhoti’s effect perhaps depends on the condition of the listener’s soul. At any rate, Ustad Khan’s playing will offer a shot of immunity against urban life’s infection, the symptoms of which include consumerism, office rage, and pop-culture fog.