The sarod has an interesting history. In a time long forgotten, Afghan-born horse traders and soldiers came to India. They brought along with them their cuisine and culture and a stringed instrument called the ‘rabab’ that reminded them of home. Some of these migrants settled in a sleepy small town called Shahjehanpur, approximately 100 miles from Lucknow.
Thus was born the Senia Shahjehanpur gharana—marrying the legacy of Mian Tansen and the Afghan Bangash tribe. But like many gharanas of their time, quite a few of the instruments that were in use in the 19th and 20th centuries, passed into oblivion. Now Kolkata-based sarod player Joydeep Mukherjee has embarked on an ambitious project to breathe new life, or shall we say, new music into the dusty strings.
In 2004, Mukherjee’s mother—a guitar player—inspired him to revive the use of the lost instruments. In fact, his ‘Dadaguru’ late Pandit Radhika Mohan Maitra was known to have introduced three new instruments into the gharana—the Mohanveena (or the Radhika Mohanveena), the Dilbahar and the Nabadeepa. However, he had to wait for 14 years to get permission from his guru, Pranab Kumar Naha, to start the project. Yet another of his gurus, Pandit Debashish Sarkar, advised him to work on the instruments’ tonal quality and sound system.
Elaborating on the process, Mukherjee says he works closely with the makers of the instruments applying much trial and error. “A difficult time-consuming project demanding 100 percent dedication with the added risk of failure,” is how he describes the process. So what exactly is the process like? First, he thinks about the type of wood—mahogany or Burma teak—required. He then resizes the ‘tabli’ (sound drum) for optimum sound production. To enhance better sound, he also experiments and often substitutes the deer horn bridge of the traditional instrument with other materials such as ivory and deer bones.
He then works with different gauges of string combinations, mics and scales of music for better resonance, sound sustenance and tonal quality. Once the instrument is ready, Mukherjee informs various organisers, who are ultimately responsible for its spread. In 2020, he performed the Radhika Mohanveena at two prestigious international platforms—the International Dhrupad Mela in Varanasi and the International Veena Mahotsavam.
In the last three years, the sarod player has composed more than 30 raag-based bandishes of classical instrumental music, metamorphosing Rabindranath Tagore’s songs. Not happy playing the usual Rabindra Sangeet on the sarod, the idea, he says, was to transform the songs into a proper instrumental bandishes and play them exactly like typical traditional instrumental compositions.
The experiment, inspired by Pandit Buddhadev Das Gupta, showcases how deep Tagore went inside a raga and then left it unhesitatingly whenever his musical imagination permitted him to do so. “While the taal (tempo) of the original song may change, its tone and feel are kept intact,” explains Mukherjee, who is also working on an album of the bandishes. At the moment, he is busy working on recreating the Surshringer, which will be complete in the next two or three years. Thereafter, he will focus on the Dilbahar and the Nabadeepa.