Freewheeling with Rajeev Taranath

The sarod maestro, now a sprightly 92, prides himself on his ‘chutzpah’ as he chats with Sandhya Mendonca about classical music and film music, love and marriage, and what endures in literature

I am at the home of the internationally acclaimed sarod maestro Pandit Rajiv Taranath in Mysuru. He is 92, and I am afraid of tiring him out with the interview. When it draws to a close after an hour, he says, “It’s time for a drink.” I start laughing as those were the exact words he used when he visited us at home several years ago. Edited excerpts:

You were a vocalist, you learned the tabla, but then you took to the sarod. 

Have you fallen in love? Why did you fall in love with so and so? Can you give a reason? You can’t, right? Same way there is no reason. It just happens. It just happens. I did fall in love. Later I have fallen in and out of love so often. So now I have lost count. I did fall in love and got into a wrong marriage, you know, after I met a fantastically talented woman. But we were not meant to be husband and wife. So we spent 12-13 years in mutual misery. And finally we got a divorce. 

Finding love, losing it, longing, belonging. Is it all part of the artistic journey? 

These are all terms. Belonging, longing. What is your journey? If you are alone with your instrument, go and play. Practise a thousand times till it shimmers and shines. That’s it. Oh, my longing, my belonging. I want to belong. I don’t know to whom I belong or who belongs to me. I love. I’m a friendly fellow. I like some bright reading, bright talk… not who married whom, who quarrelled with whom.

You were a writer and professor. You made such a profound impact on the world of music, on art, on literature, on cinema. Does it have something to do with your upbringing and the influence your parents had on you? 

My parents were radical people. My mother, a Tamil lady from Pondicherry… she was a mix. Her father was a tremendous scholar and a man who enjoyed reading Burton, Russell, Ingersoll, Shakespeare and Robert Browning. My mother had been married off when she was a child to some relative of hers. Much later she came to know a tremendous man called Pandit Taranath. I would describe him as a giant of history. And he was into various things. He was a philosopher, Ayurvedic physician, a great humanist. It was a short marriage. He was 42 when he married and he died when he was 52. Oh, and I was exactly 10. 

He got you started on your musical journey. 

Well, the last conscious thing that he did was accompanying me on the tabla. I was singing Bhairav. And then he said, I am feeling a bit chill, let me go lie down. He asked his younger brother, who also played some, to continue playing for me. I went to him a little later to see how he was. He had lost consciousness, and never came out. 

But you continued your musical journey. Your mother encouraged you.

My father used to have in-house music teachers for me. And in fact, 10-11 days after he died, I gave a public performance at the Sahitya Parishat. A 10-year-old boy giving a performance 10 days after his father’s death! From the beginning, my father had eminent north Karnataka musicians (to teach me) – I had the great privilege of studying from the great rishi Panchakshari Gavai, and Venkata Rao Ramdurgkar, the most senior student of Sawai Gandharva. Shamanur Krishnachar. He was my earliest teacher. He would ask us to make kites and fly them; the kites would make our hands sticky but he told us he would sing only if our kites could fly.

But you loved literature anyway, even now you’re always quoting… 

I do. Look at that book. (He points to a book of poems by W B Yeats, where he has bookmarked a poem, ‘The mother of God’). See, that’s how I’m involved with English literature. Although I have a PhD on Eliot, Elliot is a cold person. Yeats is not. He had a colleague, a lovely woman called Maud Gonne who rejected his proposal and married his friend. Many years later he was travelling on a boat and his companion there was Maude’s daughter. He told her, “I wanted to marry your mother but she married your father. Why don’t you marry me?” That kind of eternal optimism. But there are also insights into sadness, into old age. Insights into life. Which is why he is a poet. I am not. You are not. 

You also composed music for award-winning films.  

Well, you know, I have because I was guilty of having been one of the progenitors, or what was called Navya (modernist) movement, which now I think is not valid. 

Why do you say it’s not valid? 

Because it derives all that from you know where. On the other hand, writers like (Chandrashekar) Kambar are namma writers, rooted in the soil. A hundred years later, Rajeev Taranath and Ananthamurthy will not be known. But Kambara will. We became fashionable but my music was bad. The man who knows what to do with music in films is not Rajeev, but Rahman. Rahman steeped himself in that music for all kinds of historical reasons. So he knew the possibilities of each instrument and how each instrument gelled with another and came out. Ilaiyaraja, Rahman — these are the people who know music (for films).

You have been teaching people from different parts of the world sitting here in Mysuru, so technology has enabled a kind of a liberation of musicians, right? 

I do online teaching, and I’m a fairly popular teacher, you know why? I hector people. I don’t cajole them. I’m not that kind of fellow. So you know that word chutzpah? Well, I believe at 92, this old man had some chutzpah. Would you agree? But online teaching for my kind of music — Hindustani classical music, is difficult. I think I succeed sometimes. The most satisfactory way in which you learn, in which you teach, is guru mukhi vidya (learning in the presence of the guru). 

Can you elaborate a little bit? 

Western classical music is eye based. Script notation lies there on the piano. Ours is ear based, you get me? It’s a shift from the eye to the ear.  People like Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande and Ramamurthy created notations for Indian classical music. But this notation thing does not adequately, satisfactorily, fully bring out what you want. I am a good teacher but I am not happy. 

There seems to be some kind of a conflict sometimes about who is the artist and the brand. Have you ever felt that about yourself? 

I don’t think about that. I just want to sing decently. Play. Remember my bald old man? (Ustad Ali Akbar Khan). I used to call him Baba. He was not particularly fond of me. I said to him once, “You must have played sa-ri-ga-ma-pa-da-ni-sa thousands of times. What did you want to do with this?” And he said, “I am trying to find how to move from the real ‘ni’ to the real ‘sa’. I’m still learning. Maybe two or three times I felt like I was able to get it right…” With that kind of answer, you just shut up and throw away your wretched, arrogant, impudent (attitude).

That pushes you back on a dreadful kind of silence. You know, these fellows talk about Hindus and Indians. The greatest thing about India is the humility that our great writers have had. Kalidasa had it. Putting down somebody else in order to show my importance is a wretched Western habit, not Indian. The Indian habit you find in Kalidasa. And Thyagayya, (he sings): ‘Endaro mahanubhavulu andariki vandanamulu’. That is India. That is Hindu. 

There are thousands of things we don’t know. Today I want this movement, sangati; tomorrow I might be playing something else. Do you know the next line of your poem? Now you don’t. If you are a good artist, you have a thousand things to say and you don’t know how to say them. 

(The author hosts a podcast called Spotlight with Sandhya)