On the occasion of the sitar maestro’s 100th birth anniversary, composer and santoor player Pandit Bhajan Sopori shares some interesting aspects of the virtuoso’s music that he came across on his many meetings
I met Panditji way back in 1970s on several occasions in Delhi, Kashmir and Kolkata but somehow he had never heard me perform live. He then invited my wife and me for lunch and also to hear my santoor at his residence in Lodhi Estate, Delhi, in the winters of 1986. He knew my father, the great master musician Pandit Shamboo Nath Sopori, since 1954 when he had come to Kashmir for a concert. He had great reverence for my 300-year-old Shaivite-Sufi santoor tradition, which was visible from his fatherly love for me. He would call my wife ‘bahu’ (daughter-in-law).
I still remember he asked me to leave Kashmir and shift to Delhi for better accessibility and movement, but I had a lot of responsibilities regarding music and culture of Kashmir on my shoulders and I couldn’t neglect it at that time as that was the phase of cultural development of Kashmir. We again met in Kolkata where my wife shared with Panditji that she had not ever witnessed his recital. He immediately invited us to his Bhaitak Concert at Victoria Memorial and when he saw us entering the venue, he from the stage invited us to sit closer to him near the stage.
Panditji and I shared some common aspects and music created this special bond between us. While I was the youngest conductor of the National Orchestra, the Vadya-Vrinda of All India Radio in 1970s, a symphony-style orchestra with Indian instruments, he was the founder and the first conductor of the same having done landmark compositions, which were influenced by his early exposure to Western orchestra as a member of his brother Pandit Uday Shankar’s dancing troupe.
While my santoor recital is immensely enriched with complex laya and chhand patterns, his mastery over laya was legendary and he played even the intricate patterns with great ease on the sitar. His dynamism extended beyond his instrument and Hindustani classical music, and it formed the core of his consciousness. While I introduced the ‘Dhrupad Ang’ (style) on the santoor, he was the pioneer in introducing this system on the sitar decades ago with beautifully enriched technicalities. He was well-versed in both khayal and dhrupad gayaki, and it was evident from his recitals. He was one of the leading stalwarts and pillars of the sitar of his time.
Panditji’s work as a composer also is unparalleled. As the 13th century Indian musicologist Sharngadeva says, a composer is expected to be a competent performer who knows his audience and understands their minds, and rises above his own likes and dislikes in order to bring delight to everyone—I consider Panditji a complete composer. He had immense knowledge with deep insight into regional, national and international musical genres, be it Indian folk music traditions, Hindustani classical music, or world music. He went on to compose beautifully structured ragas and compose music for commercial movies as well. The greatness of his composition was that even in films they had a distinct identity.
Panditji enlightened the West about Hindustani classical music with the great cross-cultural fusion experiments that he carried out in his collaborations with musical greats such as the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, George Harrison and The Beatles, or jazz legend John Coltrane and made them play Indian music retaining the distinct identity of our music and instruments thereby globalising our music yet not homogenising it.
Panditji, having learnt from the great Baba Allauddin Khan sahib, represented the Maihar Gharana but went on to create a trend of his own. He even modified his sitar giving it a unique tone which was different from his contemporaries.
Since Panditji had composed and conducted ‘Taal-Vadya-Kacheri’ a number of times featuring Indian percussion instruments both from the north and the south, his solo playing also reflected that aspect with rhythmic elements of Carnatic style in his recitals. His understanding of a raga was very clear with regard to its shartra (grammar) and its practical and aesthetic presentation. This was the reason that in a couple of strokes itself he would bring out the essence of a raga.
In this process, he could beautify and decorate the raga with thrilling layakari (rhythmic variations) and other requisite technical aspects forming a melodious flow of his rendition. His performances displayed his virtuosity with a sense of completeness that was influenced by his work as a composer. Though he never named it as a new baaj (style), I call it the ‘Ravi Shanker Baaj of sitar-playing’, which stands tall in its individualistic uniqueness. Pandit Ravi Shankarji will continue to live through his music and we shall celebrate his life and music forever.