The Score Magazine September 2017 issue! | Page 21

SHREYA BOSE
The court of Indra, king of the gods is populated with
gandharvas (celestial musicians) and apsaras (celestial
dancers), from whom numerous classical musical gharanas
and practitioners trace their holy lineage.
When W.B. Yeats called Indian music “not art, but life
itself” he possibly signalled the insistence within classical
traditions of music on treating the art as an instrument of
obtaining liberation or moksha. Nadopasana (the worship of
sound) is revered as a means to the atman’s enlightenment.
"Even if he be an expert in the Revealed and the traditional
scriptures, in literature and all sacred books, the man
ignorant of music is but an animal on two feet."
"He who knows the inner meaning of the sound of the lute,
who is expert in intervals and in modal scales and knows the
rhythms, travels without effort upon the way of liberation.
- (Yajnavalkya Smriti III, 115).
Most vividly, music becomes a godly tool in the worldview
and world-play of Krishna. In a poem composed by Chandidas
Radha describes the enchantment of her lover thus “How
can I describe His relentless flute/It pulls virtuous women
from their homes and drag them by their hair to Shyam/ As
thirst and hunger pull the doe to the snare?/Chaste ladies
forget their wisdom, and clinging vines shakes loose from
their trees, hearing that music./ Then how shall a simple
dairymaid like me withstand its call…”. Before he led the
Pandavas to victory in Kurukshetra, the lord with blue skin
was termed Murlimanohara (The Lord who enchants with
flute play). The sound he breathed into his flute made him the
pivot of the Rasa lila, a dance of devotion and spiritual union
accomplished one night when the Gopis of Vrindavan were
drawn out of their houses to participate in the act of worship
and love. Stretching the night to one ‘Night of Brahma’
(4.32 billion years as per Hindu belief), Krishna’s rasa lila
is considered the supreme metaphor of the most elevated
form of love – that which emerges from the soul’s ecstasy on
encountering God.
Innumerable such examples abound in the devotional and
metaphysical cultures of Indian life.
Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest violinists of the 20th
century said in Indian and Western Music - Yehudi Menuhin
/ Hemisphere : “We would find all, or most, strands beginning
in India; for only in India have all possible modes been
investigated, tabulated, and each assigned a particular
place and purpose.” He adds in Unfinished Journey that the
purpose of such music is “is to unite one's soul and discipline
one's body, to make one sensitive to the infinite within one,
to unite one's breath of space, one's vibrations with the
vibrations of the cosmos” Perhaps such an occurrence was
made possible by the easeful and natural penetration of
melody and rhythm into the spiritual life of every individual
in a country where a 500 year old myth can still persist in
every turn of every road in the middle of every small town,
lost hamlet or too-busy-to-breathe big city.
(Writer’s Note : I apologise for not including non-Hindu
and non-Aryan mythologies. My own sparse knowledge of
such influences are to blame, and I certainly did not want
to include information resulting from shoddy, hasty google
searches).
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