VARANASI—Supriyo Maitro is an A-graded vocalist in Dhrupad, the most ancient tradition of classical Indian music. He has performed on both television and radio and is no stranger to large audiences. Yet he hasn’t experienced what the best in his field have described as sadhana, or practice on a divine path in India’s ancient yogic traditions.
Sadhana simply means the cultivation of one’s spirit for self-realization, and Dhrupad—a form of music that can be traced back to one of the oldest Hindu scriptures, the “Sama Veda”—can be seen as a meditative tool.
For Indian musicians like Maitro, who wish to continue learning even after seeming to have mastered everything about their craft, this aspiration for self-realization—for improvement in his spiritual cultivation—is natural. It’s this wish that brought him to the ghats, or banks, of the Ganges River in the ancient city of Kashi—also known by the modern name of Varanasi.
Kashi—an ancient city of paradoxes where people come for death, knowledge, and enlightenment in the Buddhist and Jain religions, as well as Hindu systems—is replete with stories of meditators, classical musicians, Sanskrit scholars, and even Western artists and seekers who sought similar self-realization. The latest such group the Indian media has flaunted are appreciators and aspirants from Hollywood.
How does one have the nerve to dare to risk one’s successful career and leave behind most comforts in search of the spirituality of classical music? Maitro sees a rational link, one he expressed to The Epoch Times in a metaphorical Hindi style: “If the mango doesn’t have skin, how can it hold the flesh inside? Some people limit their comprehension by considering the mango to be just its skin.”
In other words, what’s learned superficially is never the truth, which can’t be realized by mere surface-level comprehension.
On the iconic Assi Ghat of Kashi—which is either crowded with devotees or those performing death rituals—Maitro has a noted companion: Ravishankar Shukla, a priest who plays the pakhawaj, a barrel drum shrouded in antique traditions that is believed to have been originally played by the god Ganesha, the Hindu god of knowledge personified by an elephant-headed form.
Shukla explained that the first generation who followed Dhrupad believed that the musical form was created by gods. Maitro added: “Long back, it was practiced in the mandir [temples]. Only the Vedas were chanted, especially the Sama Veda. Music was not the motive then—chanting was the motive.” He explained that traditionally, chanting was done with technically defined meters, intonations, and swaras, or musical notes. “It was systematized. You see the Sanskrit meter, very disciplined.”
The Vedas—the oldest classical Sanskrit literature—were transmitted in their original forms orally, and this oral tradition was highly codified and refined. Today, to a non-practitioner, these chants may sound musical, but that’s how these scriptures were originally passed down.
At that time only three musical notes (swaras) were there, and this was followed by the sama veda, which was followed by “prabandh” (composition written for gods, based on stories from mythology), according to Maitro, who quoted from an ancient musical treatise of India.
Maitro and Shukla sit in a small room of 10x10 feet linked by a narrow staircase stretching like a spine through many floors that temporarily house the devotees who come to Shukla and his family of traditional priests for death and after-death rituals.
India has mystic music traditions. There are existing temples where music is embedded into carved stone pillars that play varied classical instrumental music when stuck, a music-architectural technique that has no known practitioners today.
When reminded of how the kneaded wheat dough of the density that makes bread is used to tune a pakhawaj and how matter and music could be interchangeable, as is visible in the musical pillars, Shukla smiles and nods in affirmation.
With tanpura’s hymnic resonance and pakhawaj’s deep bass picking up, Maitro’s voice breaks into raga Yaman, a classical melody sung specifically at dusk and one of the first to be taught to learners of Dhrupad.
Raag Yaman by Supriyo Maitro:
Culture of Music
Outside Shukla’s home, there’s always the hustle-bustle of an Indian pilgrimage town—amidst traffic honking, a flute seller plays melodious music, while every evening priests line up on the Assi Ghat for prayers that include Sanskrit chants, massive lamps, bells, and cymbals.“That flute player you see near the tea shop plays ragas. I asked him if he has learned, and he told me he has learned just by listening to exponents in the city. It’s not common to learn ragas by listening to classical music. In this city, classical music is embedded in every home, in everyday life,” said Maitro. These untrained people are not even aware that they have such high musical consciousness, he said.
“They have no egoistic pride. Here even a boatman knows musical ’taan',” he said. Taan is a technique used in the vocal performance of a raga. It is extremely technical and requires training.
Half a mile from Assi Ghat, Shukla’s fast-paced steps march within the long cotton “dhoti” (loincloth) he was wearing, the end of which he holds with one hand as he ascends the steep steps of the Tulsi Ghat.
The Tulsi Ghat, lined with many small temples and homes, holds the legacy of the 16th-century saint and poet Tulsidas, who wrote Ram-charit-manas, a retelling of the Sanskrit epic “Ramayana.” He spent most of his life on Tulsi Ghat and passed away at the Assi Ghat.
Mishra is the head priest of the Sankat Mochan Temple, a 16th-century shrine established by Tulsidas. He is also an accomplished pakhawaj player and the current organizer of the century-old classical music festival about to happen in the city in the first week of May.
Khan wasn’t a Ph.D. in music, but if you asked him anything about raga, he could demonstrate to you in detail, said Shukla. But if you would ask him to write about Raga, he wouldn’t be able to—he was much more than a professor because he was trained in a “parampara” (tradition).
“Dhrupad has a culture, without culture nothing is possible. Music is a sadhana, in sadhana the more you cultivate, the more you'll know it. That person will be quieter and there’s a light visible in that person,” said Shukla. Kashi is a spiritual town, and since the audience arrives at the town with devotion, their perception is not ordinary, he said.
Classical traditions of music according to him are in some way also like today’s schooling. As an individual graduates from grade one to grade twelve, that person grows in knowledge and comprehension.
“But classical music isn’t about degrees, it’s about tradition. The more you do it, the more you gain clarity. It’s like other classical traditions of learning like ‘dhayana’ (meditation) and ’sanyasa' (renunciation)—the more the person is devoted, the more the person gains,” said Shukla.
Maitro left Kashi due to a COVID-19 lockdown in the second week of April after spending eight months there. Shukla whom he calls “bhaiya” (brother) is happy that Maitro could practice in temples. “He could practice for a week in the Ram temple and during one such practice he composed a ‘bandish’ [poetry] in raga Basant.”
“I was trying to compose something in raga Basant for the past five years but wasn’t satisfied with what I composed. That day I was practicing in the Ram mandir and at about 2 pm the whole composition came to me,” said Maitro.
“I played it to Shukla Ji that evening and asked him about the composer. And he answered that it’s traditional. I consider it an extraordinary blessing that comes from these holy places,” said Maitro who plans to return to Kashi when the lockdown is lifted.
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