Pilgrim of the swara

Remembering Dr Raghava Menon

RENUKA NARAYANAN

DR Raghava Menon, one of India’s best-known music critics, died last Tuesday in New Delhi. We younger ones in the field of art have good reason to remember him with affection. His manner was always affable and he gave gladly of his knowledge of Indian and Western classical music to anyone who asked. I met him first at the India International Centre while I was a seventeen-year-old in Delhi University. A European ensemble was to play that evening, I can’t recall what.

That afternoon I was deep in some teenage sorrow. The last golden part of the November day stretched ahead and I spent it in floods of tears, playing and replaying a precious LP of pianist Dinu Lipatti’s last concert at Besancon in France. The Bach partita was full of spiritual melancholy, rippling with pain and beauty. Dinu knew he was dying of leukemia. That recording was like the last song of the nightingale as the thorn pressed deeper into its heart. By the time I walked down to IIC that evening, I was, to put it without any face-saving pretence, completely hyper with emotional fatigue. Dr Menon, whom I did not know then, sat next to me while the Europeans scraped away. After divine Dinu, their playing was such torture that I whispered impulsively to this stranger, ‘‘Aren’t they awful?’’ Instead of glaring as elders often did, he nodded conspiratorially. Pleased to have my teenage opinion ratified, I smiled at him when the lights came on. ‘‘Why didn’t you like them?’’ he asked. ‘‘I’ve been listening to Dinu Lipatti all afternoon’’, I said. ‘‘Ah, he played like an angel!’’ he exclaimed and we chatted a bit, before I slipped away.

Through the decades after that, at many concerts and musical gatherings, Dr Raghava Menon would always share little gems of insight and information. Every now and then, I would find him waiting for lovely Mrs Menon to join him at the dim, friendly IIC bar where I would turn up with my father or a friend. We often got into a little huddle and had marvelous chats about music. When I began to write on religion and spirituality, he said several kind things, especially how quirky it was that a ‘party girl’ in jeans kept finding God in music and dance. He was amused that my audio and visual did not tally.

It was he who first told me that Indian classical music was believed to be the surest pathway to God, for it compounded the Ashta Seva or Eight Services that a true devotee must perform. We reveled in the thought that Guru Nanak, a musician, founded a religion in which music is the medium of worship. Dr Menon preferred Hindustani to Carnatic music, which fact I lamented because each had such eloquent charms and we had such splendid access to both as our birthright. But we were agreed on South India’s preference for the strongly ‘mathematical’ triad of European composers, Bach Senior, Beethoven and Mozart in preference to Romantics like Debussy. As far as I know, Dr Raghava Menon wrote at least five books on his subject, including the Penguin Dictionary of Indian Classical Music.

My favourite, however, was ‘Pilgrim of the Swara’, a bio of Kundan Lal Saigal, whose voice I am as defenseless against as Dinu Lipatti’s playing. I particularly loved a moving passage about the Sufi in Jammu who had given Saigal a beeja mantra when he lost his voice. Dr Menon teased me about my instinctive sift for ‘spiritual quotient’. ‘‘You have a tendency towards vairagya’’, he warned. ‘‘And Yamini Krishnamurti said I was a born mendicant!’’ I laughed, recalling the time I had co-authored her life story for Viking. ‘‘A mendicant who loves music is the richest person in creation’’, he said conclusively. I did not know Dr Menon beyond such encounters. But don’t you feel that perhaps the swaras themselves would have welcomed the soul of their sincere sevak?