the fading lilt - Sanjeev and Ashwani Shankar

New Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Bangalore Saturday, April 19, 2008 Vol. 2 No. 15
www.livemint.com
LOUNGE
THE
SHEHNAI’S
FADING LILT
A visit to the birthplace of Ustad
Bismillah Khan reveals the sad
decline of the shehnai and the way
of life it represents >Page 12
BUSINESS LOUNGE
WITH
SIVARAMAKRISHNAN
SOMASEGAR >Page 10
FOOTLOOSE
Delhi’s weekend sports draw? It’s not
on the cricket pitch or the polo field
>Page 9
DRESSED FOR THE PART
They may just be in the background of
a scene, but film directors struggle to
find extras who look the part >Page 15
Sanjeev Shankar serenades
the Ganga at the Assi Ghat
in Varanasi.
MANAGING YOUR CAREER
THE GOOD LIFE
JOANN LUBLIN
SHOBA NARAYAN
FROM THE FACTORY
THE SCIENCE OF
FLOOR TO A DESK JOB KISSING
C
hristopher Pearsall earned $170,000 (Rs76.50
lakh then) in 2004, a sizable sum for a blue-collar
millwright at a Ford Motor truck plant in
Norfolk, Virginia. But he toiled 12-hour days, seven days
a week, most of that year in the noisy and dirty factory.
He sometimes dreaded going to work. Today, the
34-year-old Pearsall is a $60,000-a-year product manager
for Concursive, a business software developer that’s also
in Norfolk. He wears slacks and polo shirts on the job
rather than coveralls. Despite his lower pay, he
says he is much happier at the desk job. >Page 4
PURSUITS
R
ecently, I came across a rather unusual
sight: a couple engaging in a lip-lock in
broad daylight right by the escalator in
Garuda Mall, Bangalore. My mother, who was
with me, turned away and said, “Chee, chee,
what is the world coming to?”I gently
reminded her that the world as we know it
would be finished if humans didn’t kiss. Not to
put too Darwinian a point on it, Mom, I said,
but kissing is a superbly effective way to select
WSJ
a mate and pass on your genes. >Page 5
VIR SANGHVI
INDIA’S VERTICAL
TAKE­OFF
AN ODE TO ADOLESCENT
FANTASY
Clichéd, sexy enchantresses populate
Salman Rushdie’s new novel; the best
parts leave them out entirely >Page 18
DON’T MISS
F
or nearly as long as I can
remember—from the early 1970s at
least—we have taken it for granted
that Indians do not know how to run
airlines. When foreign visitors came to our
country we warned them about Indian
Airlines. The flights will be late, we said.
Expect the most minimal standards of
service. When we needed to travel abroad
we steered clear of Air India. Everything
about the airline was wrong. >Page 6
For today’s business news
> Question of Answers—
the quiz with a difference
> Markets Watch
> Capital Account column
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SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 2008 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 2008 ° WWW.LIVEMINT.COM
MUSIC
THE
SHEHNAI’S
FADING LILT
Its magic has few takers today. A
visit to the birthplace of Ustad
Bismillah Khan, the greatest shehnai
player of them all, reveals the sad
decline of the instrument and the way
of life it represents
Torch­bearers:
(left) Sanjeev
Shankar (standing)
and “Murali”
Manohar Lal
practise within
earshot of the Kali
Badi Temple in
Varanasi.
Swansong:
(right) Mohammad
Safi and his son
Mehboob at Safi’s
shop; (below) a
bundle of
narkat stems
used to make the
reeds (bottom) of
the shehnai.
B Y S AMANTH S UBRAMANIAN
[email protected]
·························
VARANASI/OLD BHOJPUR (BIHAR)
O
Staying alive:
Ustad Bismillah
Khan’s shehnai—
70 years old and
still in tune.
n a ragged piece of
cardboard, in a disintegrating shop in Godhuliya, a particularly congested part of Varanasi, sits
Mohammad Safi. In a city that
was once home to Ustad Bismillah Khan and more than a
dozen shehnai makers, Safi
is one of the only two remaining craftsmen of the instrument—both ageing, both without apprentices to carry the
craft forward.
From this little shop, for
more than half a century, Safi
has made shehnais—for Bismillah Khan, for Pandit Daya
Shankar and his two sons,
Sanjeev and Ashwini, and for
shehnai players from cities as
far away as Mumbai and
Chennai. Safi’s father and
BHAIRAVI AT KALI BADI CHOWKI
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
A toy seller keeps tradition alive
HARIKRISHNA KATRAGADDA/MINT
Shankar calls
the wedding
shehnai players
‘Ek­do­teen’
types who make
upto Rs20­25
lakh per season
in New Delhi
grandfather made shehnais
before him, just down the road
in another shop. “There was
also an old woman in Koila
Bazaar,” says Safi, a shrivelled,
white-haired man of 85. “But
she died. So, now it’s just me
and Khalil in Daranagar.”
Safi, in a once-white shirt
and steel grey trousers, sits
amid a mess of files, cutters
and long, heated irons. To one
side, in a gloomy alcove, are
three bicycles and a dusty LML
scooter with a punctured tyre.
On a mat is a dried clutch of
slender grassy weeds called
narkat, used to make the
shehnai’s reed.
The narkat can be procured
only from a particular pond in
Old Bhojpur, a village in the
Buxar district of Bihar. Lying
next to Safi are three 8-inch
shehnais—one a prototype,
and two that he is making to
order. It is the first order he
has received in a month.
It takes Safi two-three days
to make a shehnai, and each
sells for Rs500. “When Bismillah Khan was at the height of
his popularity, some tourists
would buy souvenir shehnais,
but even that has stopped
now,” he says. It is not surprising then that Safi has a
day job; he is the founder of,
and the moving force
behind, the Bharat Band
Party. Behind him stands a
steel shelf full of drums, trumpets and grimy white band
uniforms; a yellowed photo
hangs on the wall, showing
him and his son Mehboob in
full band regalia.
Mehboob, the eldest of four
sons, helps out at his father’s
shop occasionally, and he says:
“My sons aren’t interested in
this at all. They want to do
their own thing.” A vocal
onlooker offers: “Everything
changes. Many people think
now that to sit in a shop like
who play only at weddings and
make, by his estimate, Rs20-25
lakh per wedding season.
“Maybe shehnai-playing is not
a dying art, but it is not a thriving art either,” he says. “It is
just stagnant.”
ASSEMBLY LINE
Living legacy: Nayyer Khan, son of Bismillah Khan, plays his father’s shehnai.
this, do a job like this, is
beneath their dignity.”
WHEN THE MUSIC FADES
The decline of the craft of making the shehnai has mirrored
the decline of the art of playing
it. “The shehnai is not like the
tabla or the sitar,” says Sanjeev
Shankar. “It remains restricted
to families, and people outside
the shehnai-playing families
do not want to learn it.”
Shankar comes from a family
of shehnai players going back
450 years. His own shehnai,
which he carries in a laptop
case, is 80 years old, and was
made by Mohammad Safi’s
father for Pandit Anant Lal,
Shankar’s grandfather. Shankar himself was inclined
towards the sitar until he was
nudged back towards his family instrument by Pandit Ravi
Shankar. “My grandfather
shifted to Jalandhar in 1949
and, during his stay there, Pandit Ravi Shankar heard him
play, wondered what such a
good shehnai player was doing
in Jalandhar, and invited him
to New Delhi.”
Even b ack then, Sh an ka r
admits, there would have
been only a dozen top-flight
shehnai concert artists across
India; that number has halved
now. Shankar, 30 years old
and the author of a doctoral
thesis on the shehnai, says
many of his younger peers
simply do not pursue the art
long enough to reach concertlevel proficiency.
Shankar also pointed to the
shehnai’s waning classicism;
there may still be shehnai
players around, in New Delhi
for example, but they are what
he calls the “Ek-Do-Teen” type,
Fabricating a shehnai involves
a surprising number of people; shehnai-makers such as
Safi do only the basic assembly. He lathes the wooden
body at home out of Burma
teak, attaches the flaring
metal pyala to one end and,
with hot irons, burns seven
holes through the wood.
“But, you can never immediately play a shehnai that you
buy,” says Shankar. “We take it
home, and with our own hot
irons and files, we fine-tune
the finger-holes till it sounds
perfect.” That perfect sound
may never materialize. At
home, Shankar has every one
of the 500 or so shehnais he
has ever bought, but only three
or four are good enough to
play in a concert. “The
rest—well, they just sit there
and gather dust.”
The mouthpiece, or reed, of
the shehnai is another matter
altogether. For more than 200
years, every reed of every
shehnai has been made out of
narkat. Nothing else will do.
In a spirit of experimentation, Shankar once tried
other materials. “There was a
palm-leaf reed, but it was
shrill and loud,” he says.
“Then there was this American grass, which sounded
good for only two minutes
before going flat. Narkat is
the only thing that works.”
The narkat is cut once
every year, in March or April,
dried for a whole year in Old
Bhojpur village, and then
sold to Varanasi’s shehnai
makers for Rs150 per fistthick bundle. Safi dries the
narkat some more on the roof
of his house, for six months to
a year. Once they are brittle,
pale brown, hollow sticks, he
sells them to shehnai artists
such as Shankar.
“We make our own reed out
of these,” says Shankar. This
involves searching for the
three or four promising narkat
stems out of 200, cutting them
into 2-inch reed segments, and
alternately soaking them in
water and drying them in the
sun. “We also polish its inside
by putting a metal stick into it
and rolling the reed around it.”
Finally, Shankar begins
testing each of these 40-odd
reeds in his shehnai. “We
play them for six months, to
break them in, to see how
they sound,” he says. “Out of
those 200 stems, we will
probably get two good, concert-worthy reeds. If we’re
I
n front of Varanasi’s Kali Badi Temple stands one of the
old residences of the Maharaja of Cooch Behar. A decrepit
building the colour of milky tea, it has a garden that tends to
overgrowth and a chowki—a broad arch topped by a single
room—standing guard over its gate. From that room, looking
across the property, one can spot the house where Pandit
Ravi Shankar was born in 1920.
“For around 200 years, at the time of the evening aarti at
the temple, the Maharaja would install a shehnai player on
top of the chowki ,” says Sanjeev Shankar. That practice,
along with its royal patronage, may have discontinued, but
Varanasi’s shehnai players still come here to practise;
Shankar remembers coming here as a child with his father.
Today’s unbilled performer is Manohar Lal, known
affectionately as “Murali” because he also plays the flute. Lal
is 45, and Shankar strongly suspects that the ownership of the
chillum lying in one corner of the chowki, until recently, lay
with him. In a white kurta-pyjama, a woven brown coat, and
a brown scarf tied around his head, he climbs the stairs,
unfurls a mat, shoots us a grin and sits down to play.
During intermission, Manohar Lal tells us about the six
generations of shehnai players in his family. He also tells us
about his day job—selling balloons and toys. There’s no
demand any more for the classical shehnai in Varanasi, he
says. That seems even more of a shame when, after the
interval, Shankar and Manohar Lal make the chowki resound
with the majesty of Bhairavi, taking it in turns to wander up
and down the scale at leisure, each note sure and sweet,
wafting out of the window towards the Kali Badi Temple.
Samanth Subramanian
Past present: Shehnai players still play at Kali Badi chowki.
TURN TO PAGE L14®
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In memoriam:
(clockwise from left)
Mohammad Sultan
Khan holds up a
treasured photo of
himself with Bismillah
Khan; seated under
the middle arch,
Bismillah Khan would
play during aarti in
the temple opposite; a
room in the house
where Bismillah Khan
was born.
® FROM PAGE L13
L12
THE SURVIVOR
In Tamil Nadu, a microcredit
scheme has come to the aid of
the nadaswaram reed
T
he south Indian kin of the
shehnai, the nadaswaram,
sources its reed from the banks
of the Cauvery river, in the
district of Thanjavur. The process
of making the nadaswaram reed
is much the same as making that
of the shehnai, but the musicians
do not make it themselves. In
Thanjavur, a cottage industry of
making these reeds still exists.
“One of the most famous
families making reeds today lives
in Tiruvavadudurai, the ancestral
town of the nadaswaram expert
T.N. Rajaratnam Pillai,” says Mylai
Rajendran, a nadaswaram player
in Chennai.
The reed is made out of a
river grass called ‘naanal thattu’,
harvested around the same time
as the ‘narkat’, between
February and April every year.
The grass is dried and aged over
six months or a year, but instead
of merely being soaked in water
to soften it, the dried ‘naanal
thattu’ is boiled in water or rice
gruel. After repeating this process
until it is pliable and soft, the
grass is ready to be shaped into
the reed, or ‘seevali’.
Rajendran buys 12 reeds at a
time, for a price of Rs1,000,
although he says that six of
the dozen can be counted upon
to splinter promptly. He plays
the remaining six for six
months before replacing them
with fresh reeds.
Over the last four years, some
‘seevali’­makers have turned to
the Microcredit Foundation of
India to expand their business.
“Right now, there are four
members of our microcredit
program from the
‘seevali’­making community,” says
Suguna Swamy, a consultant
with the Microcredit Foundation
of India. “A couple of them are on
their second or third set of loans.
They have a hard life, and these
microloans have helped them tide
over some tough times.”
really lucky, we’ll get five.”
From cutting the narkat to
finally playing the reed in concert can take up to four years.
Before every concert, the
musicians go through a twohour ritual of preparing their
mouthpiece. Shankar puts a
reed entirely in his mouth and
then moves it around as if he
were chewing gum, soaking it
with his saliva. He then slips
the reed into a slatted piece of
bamboo, to keep one end
pinched, and leaves it for 30
minutes. This process is
repeated three-four times
before the reed is pushed into
the shehnai. When he plays
raag Bhairavi with a reed that
is not damp enough, the sound
seems to be coming out of a
shehnai with a woollen sock
over its pyala. The entire process is an elaborate production. In fact, the shehnai might
be the only instrument made
as much by its manufacturer as
by its player.
THE SHEHNAI’S ROOTS
Old Bhojpur consists entirely of
a single crossroad, around
which is gathered a cluster of
huts and shops. Narkat-seekers
are taken to the hut of Paras
Chowdhary, one of the few men
in the village who cuts and sells
the grass to buyers. Chowdhary is a day labourer, doing
menial work for money; he
says, vaguely, that he is 40, but
he looks at least 10 years older.
To get to the narkat, Chowdhary leads a brisk 3km tramp
through fields of still-green
wheat, framed in the distance
Before concerts,
musicians go
through a
two­hour ritual.
It might be the
only instrument
made as much
by its maker as
by its player
by power pylons. “Most of the
narkat has been cut already,”
he says. “There will be some
younger shoots, though.” He
finally stops by a river called
the Nari, and says: “This is it.
This is where I cut it.”
A little distance away, the
Nari flows into a lake, and it is
on these muddy banks that the
narkat grows—tall, green and
slender—in the middle of
thorn bushes. “Those bushes
are a blessing. They keep the
narkat safe from foraging animals,” says Chowdhary. One of
the boys accompanying him
slips out of his trousers and
wades through the shallow
river to the opposite bank, to
uproot some young narkat
stems. They resemble a
younger version of bamboo,
with the occasional thorn.
“These are short now, but by
the time we cut them, they can
grow up to above your waist.”
Coincidentally, the greatest
shehnai player, Bismillah
Khan, was born in Dumraon,
3km from Old Bhojpur. The
house of his birth, down a tiny
street recently renamed Bismillah Gali, consists of an old
ground floor surmounted by a
newly bricked first floor. That
house has been sold, but Bismillah Khan’s family still owns
a little property two doors
down, with a cowshed and a
small house.
Mohammad Sultan Khan, an
informal caretaker for the family, wryly mentions how plans
had been drawn up for a
memorial to Bismillah Khan,
soon after his death. “The government sent an engineer and
Samanth Subramanian
Few takers: Paras Chowdhary holds fresh, young narkat, uprooted from the muddy banks behind him.
he looked over the area, and
then drew designs and showed
them to us,” he says. “But those
designs are still only on paper.
In Bihar, everything can be
accomplished on paper.”
Stretching back at least three
generations, Bismillah Khan’s
family used to play at the court
of the Maharaja of Dumraon.
“They were from a particular
community of Muslims, but
there’s nobody in that community left here,” says Khan.
“There is still a Maharaja,
Kamal Singh, but he is 80 years
old. There’s no shehnai playing
now. That’s all stopped.”
Many years ago, in an easy,
unforced practise of secularism, a member of Bismillah
Khan’s family played the
shehnai every evening at the
aarti in the Maharaja’s temple
in Dumraon. The temple is a
candy striped structure on the
grounds of the Dumraon palace; other buildings of the palace have been converted into a
branch of the Punjab National
Bank and the Maharani Usharani School for Girls.
The 400-year-old temple still
functions, and to its left is a little pavilion. “You see those
three arches in the pavilion,”
the caretaker of the temple says.
“Every evening, when he was
here, Bismillah Khan would sit
in the middle arch and play the
shehnai for the 6pm aarti.
When he left for Varanasi, his
younger brother, Pachkoudi,
continued the tradition.”
The temple, he says, has
been largely forgotten, scraping
through on the proceeds of the
Maharaja’s estates. Its lusciously coloured wooden supports, for instance, were judged
to be insufficiently strong as the
wood aged, so some pillarshaped concrete eyesores have
been added for extra strength.
As Bismillah Khan rose in
stature, he moved to Varanasi,
where his family still lives. His
eldest son, Nayyer Hussain
Khan, also a shehnai player, is
now 65, with watery eyes and a
leonine face that strongly
resembles his father’s. He still
plays Bismillah Khan’s shehnai,
an instrument older than himself, made in Koila Bazaar.
“Khalil and Safi must have
made thousands of shehnais
over the years,” he says. “But
there is nobody now who will
make them.”
The teak of Bismillah Khan’s
15-inch shehnai has been worn
smooth by fingers over 70
years. A thick clump of reeds
hangs from its mouthpiece.
Nayyer keeps it wrapped in
cloth in Bismillah Khan’s practice room—floored in raw
brick, with a skylight on one
side, four mountain bikes
stacked near the door, and
black banners displaying Arabic verses from the Quran
woven in gold.
“Mecca is in the direction of
that skylight,” says Nayyer.
“That was where my father
faced when he practised.”
Bismillah Khan, Nayyer
remembers, would sing a particular song in the evening during Moharram, when all Varanasi would gather to listen. “It
went like this,” he says, and
starts singing in a strong tenor.
But as he sings, overcome by
the memory of his father, he
begins to sob, his voice choking, and a single tear out of his
left eye courses down his face,
the face that looks so much like
Bismillah Khan’s own.