Rasikas sit far apart safely, get more soul room

AHMEDABAD: The select, double-jabbed group that comprises the audience of Saptak 2022 would have pleased John Milton. In Book 7 of “Paradise Lost”, he writes: “Still govern thou my song/Urania, and fit audience find, though few.”
Perhaps some will imagine Milton sanitizing his hands with snobbery when he calls for intellectual fitness.
But Saptak rasikas, both the connoisseurs and the tentative tasters of classical, have the necessary cultural qualification: being human.Raga carries in its meaning “colour”, “mood”, and “passion”. Aficionados have more sensitive receptors for those three raga ingredients than beginners. But like Shakespeare, classical music can be unravelled for wealthy surprises at any level.
At this year’s Saptak, fitness bears a clinical load rather than the weight of aesthetics. The organizers have acted responsibly by restricting the audience size to 400. In the pre-pandemic era, more than 4,000 people usually came for the acme of the festival’s offerings. The new arrangements make no difference to Dr Ashwini Bhide-Deshpande, scheduled to perform on Monday. When TOI asked her what she thought of the possibility of sparser shouts of acclaim, she said: “I never aspired to the ‘wahs’ and the buzz.” She added: “I aspire only to the grace of God and the grace of the raga.”
In the 2013 Saptak edition, Bhide-Deshpande offered both forms of grace by presenting “Mahadeva Shankara” in Raga Jhinjhoti. Some took a dose of devotion from this doyenne of the Jaipur-Atrauli Gharana, others enjoyed a shot of purely rational pleasure of music.
Yet another section of the audience, one suspects, received an emotional booster from a combination of both the jabs.