The sounds of sacredness

No country has harmonised cultures derived from the great religions the way India has

IT must have been a bleary-eyed Amjad Ali Khan who responded to my phone call past midnight. I have known the great sarod maestro for 35 years but have seldom woken him up at unearthly hours. On this occasion I was desperate.

Continuous jagrans and kirtans, an indescribably unmusical cacophony, had kept us awake for days. When the jagrans began to fade towards the wee hours of the morning, muezzins from numerous mosques, presumably fresh from their slumber, began their azaans, amplified through such cracked loudspeakers that we needed tranquillisers to survive the discordant decibel levels.

Now, you might ask, if I was being deafened by the sounds of worship, why did I have to wake up Amjad Ali Khan? Frankly, in my state of near nervous breakdown, I was seeking his help in breaking up the sounds of the jagran, which was the very antithesis of melody into its musical notes.

The idea was I would gift the organisers of the jagrans with cassettes of religious songs set to appropriate ragas. I hummed for him, ‘Om Jai Jagdish Hare’ the way it was being transmitted over the public address system well before the cock crowed. To my utter surprise, Amjad said the distorted way in which that kirtan was rendered ensured that some notes of raga Tilak Kamod had crept in. Considering that it was a sensuous evening raga, it was little wonder introductions of its notes in a clumsy, faltering sequence gave one a headache.

Amjad began to hum Jogia, which he thought, was the appropriate raga for those hours of the morning when the organisers of the jagran had decided to inflict warped tones on our sensibilities. In fact any morning raga, Ahir Bhairav, Sohni, Lalit, Asavri, Jaunpuri would, even if imperfectly hummed, not disturb the soul.

The azaan is a completely different kettle of fish. Kabir, great poet though he was, had completely misunderstood the purpose of the azaan: paather eenta jor ke mahjid/Liyo banaye/Tapar Mulla baang de ka/Behra hua khudae (of brick and mortar you created the mosque from where the mullah screams his azaan: is God deaf?)
The azaan is not meant for God at all; it is a call for the believers to join in prayer. Legend has it that when the slave, Bilal, and one of the Prophet’s earliest followers climbed the Kaaba to recite the azaan, ‘‘hush fell over the noisy congregation below’’. Since that day, the recitation of the azaan, five times a day, has been refined into an art form.

First, the voice of the muezzin has to be melodious and of sufficient strength to carry without any amplification. The loudspeaker kills the azaan’s soulfulness. There is no room for the lower, base tones in the delivery of the azaan. It must start in the upper octaves and a trained muezzin can cast a spell by occasionally touching the high C.
The role of the muezzin in a Muslim country is relatively simpler: to call the faithful to pray. In a country like ours, where people of all faiths live cheek by jowl, a huge responsibility rests on the muezzin. First of all he should have no business to wake up others. In tonal quality, melody, pauses, the azaan must have all the ‘‘soulfulness’’ so as to induce tolerance, even enjoyment, among those accustomed to other forms of worship.

Surely it is in the interest of leaders of different faiths that they codify and monitor the aesthetic quality of the jagrans and azaans. The problem is probably more sociological than political. It is the uprooted rural and mofussil sensibilities asserting their identities in the sprawling ghettoes on the margins of metropolitan colonies.

So you have mosque upon mosque in close proximity pointlessly clashing with each other and the neighbouring jagran not in the service of the faith but in a mood of defiance. In other words persuasiveness is required to prune the mosques and the jagrans to one per mohalla before any aesthetic improvements can be contemplated.

Great religions have inspired architecture, painting, music, poetry and dance. Michaelanelgo, Bach and Handel represent the highest point of the Christian civilisation. Purandardasa, Thyagaraja, Syama Sastri and Muthuswamy Dikshitar and their rendering by M.S. Subbalakshmi, in my view represent as high a point in Hindu civilization, as Tulsi, Sur and Mira do. Islam has inspired great architecture, calligraphy and poetry.

No country in the world has harmonised cultures derived from the great religions the way India has. All cultures have thrived and been transformed in the civilisational crucible of Hindustan. Civilisation entails the flowering of the multicultural ideal, the coexistence of faith. Jagran and azaan enthusiasts must understand the basic point: sounds of faiths must mingle, not clash. That is the beginning of the realisation that civilisations, too mingle, merge with each other. They do not necessarily clash.

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