Hariprasad CHAURASIA
Pandit Hari Prasad Chaurasia is the pronoun of bansuri and the Hindustsani music today, and is my guru since 1987. The article as follows was appeared in "India Today", a quality magazine in India, in 1987.
Flutist Hari Prasad Chaurasia, 49, has brought a new emotional ambience to classical music. Audiences the world over Jampacking his performance. Features Editor INDERJIT BADHWAR met him for the continuing series of photo essays on the great masters of Indian art and music.
February 28, 1987 "India Today"
HARI PRASAD CHAURASIA
THE MAGIC OF HIS FLUTE
He is a free spirit. A man without a traditional gharana, without artistic prejudices, without a prima donna complex. He could be typecast in any Bombay film as the friendly neighborhood paanwallah. But when he plays, and plays, and plays he creates pure , unadulterated joy. And he knows it.
At 49, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, relatively unknown outside a dedicated circle of flute aficionados even six years ago., has come to straddle the world of Indian classical music like a colossus. Quietly, yet with the fierce determination of a man possessed, he has been bewitching audiences the world over with his six-holed bamboo instrument on which he can produce by sheer breathing skill, a staggering two-and-a-half octaves. His latest L.P., Eternity, sells out faster than it arrives at music stores and is expected to do better than even Call of the Valley which earned the master flutist a platinum disc - his second- from EMI.
At music festivals across the world -pop or jazz- Chaurasia is a continuing sensation. He gives as many as 35 concerts a month charging from nothing to Rs. 50,000 an appearance. His pace is unrelenting, often consisting of half-a-dozen foreign tours a year. Two months ago he performed twice a day, every day for a week to packed houses in cities across Germany. In the US, his flute so charmed the mayor of Baltimore that he conferred on Chaurasia honorary citizenship of that town. And while touring the Soviet Union in the late '70s Chaurasia became the first Indian soloist to perform in the awesome Bolshoi Theater in Moscow. " I felt like a little, helpless bird in that huge theater." he remembers.
Anne Schelcher, a Paris-based concert promoter recently heard him perform for the first time at the jampacked Musee Guimet. The memory still leaves her breathless. { I started getting goosebumps immediately." she recalls. " It was like I was floating in the sky. I felt as if he had taken my soul from me."
At the Theater Odeon in Paris, last year, Chaurasia virtually transformed what was billed as 24-hour festival of Indian classical music into a 28-hour happening as he played, and played, and played and the audience just refused to stop listening. Jean Pierre Rampal, one of the greatest living Western classical flutist, bowled over by the sophisticated patterns of hypnotic beauty that flowed from Chaurasia's near-primitive instrument, now insists in sitting privately with Chaurasia whenever possible and playing along with him in order to be able to imbibe some of his style.
At home, too, he electrifies his audience. He is playing in the early hours of the morning in Nagpur. An elderly woman listens transfixed. She loses consciousness. People pick her up gently and lay her besides Chaurasia on the stage. He continues playing. The woman opens her eyes, looks at him and intermittently lapses back into unconsciousness until the playing is finished. At another small concert in a village near Mathura, women, old and young, ghoongats drawn over their heads, begin to dance to the utter astonishment of their conservative menfolk and brush aside male admonitions with the rejoinder that Lord Krishna, the mischievous flutist, has descended in their midst and such is no time for prudery.
CHAURASIA's physical world is as mundane as are his looks. A modest apartment, three flights of stairs up, in Khar, a suburb of Bombay. A terrace with a small Radha-Krishna mandir shaded with potted palms where he sits with some of his 50-odd full time disciples and practices. A red Maruti in which he zips around Bombay with occasional stops at recording studios where he is required briefly, perhaps, for a flourish of his flute during an orchestra recording for a film song. A stopover for a laugh and some tea with santoor genius Shiv Kumar Sharma with whom he has made several recordings. A brief moment at a paan shop to replenish his stock of chewing tobacco. All else is flute.
Haunting, melodic, playful, flirtatious, mesmeric, emotional, spiritual: all these adjectives describe his playing and yet they come nowhere describing the sound of Chaurasia. His flute hits you in the gut. It jars your inside. It makes you laugh, it makes you weep, it makes you come face to face with deathly visions of old age, it transports you to the innocence and iridescence of childhood when sensations were fresh and there was adventures in every breath. It is a melodic time machine, a sinuous tapestry of madness and clarity. Above all, it is joy.
He is playing rag Malhar. He is playing rag gujrari todi. Sitting cross-legged on his bed, his toes contorting painfully, clenching and unclenching. The flute rests effortlessly in the cleft between his lower lip and chin. It wails. It sings with a trochaic lilt. It cries out in anguish. It whispers softly, reassuringly, soothingly. It explodes into prismatic colors. Sometimes it moves like a waking wind through a bamboo forest. Sometimes like a fierce breeze through a primeval pine grove. Chaurasia, his eyes closed has hypnotized himself. He sways like a mystified eyebrow as if wondering himself where the sounds are coming from. With his flute, he is breathing. When he stops and opens his eyes it is as if the breathing itself has stopped; as if he does not resume playing immediately, he will choke to death : as if the life force has gone out of him.
Before Chaurasia, there was Panna Lal Ghosh., the man who took the flute out of folk music and brought it on to the stage of Shastrya Sangeet. Even in his death there will always be a Panna Lal Ghosh. As much as Chaurasia loved to listen to Ghosh he never tried to fill the niche left by Ghosh. He carved out his own melodic, gayaki style in a determined effort to maintain a classical root for his music, modernize the classical tradition while also venturing into the never-never land of the avant garde with experimental and fusion music.
"People always call my music emotional," he says, " I don't quite know what that means. When I play, I play for my own happiness. I play for myself. But I can play better for myself if I can mesmerize my listeners. With that comes within me this strange sense of shakti, the omniscient and immeasurable power of music, note within note within thousands of notes and their nuances. It is not just a question of pleasing the audience. A monkey trainer can please an audience. So can a magician. But being part of the shakti of music is something entirely different."
The knowledge he has attained - structure and composition - he says is "only the basic vidya. It is only the background. When I concentrate on playing and improvising it is like a adorning a divine statue. You dress it, step aside, and then go back and adorn it differently again, and again, and again. You never weave the same patterns. And while I am doing this I don't even know that I am playing. I sense a power. A great power. I cannot see anything else. I want to touch it. I want to decorate it.
"In the process I am naked. As humans, we all have our protective shields. But in those moments I am letting my guts and soul explode in front of my audience. All the shields are thrown off, I am vulnerable. But then I sense that shakti from above that guides me and guards me. For when I am playing I don's have to the slightest notion of where I am."
Chaurasia expresses the same sense of intense spiritual interaction with his music as do other great masters of Indian classical music but he is not imbued with the sense of religiosity in the way Bismillah Khan is. Chaurasia's feeling of the spirit is more visceral, even folksy. This is perhaps because he, since childhood, was inspired by the tales of Krishna, rather than the philosophical compulsions of the Vedanta.
"Oh, I know the flute has to be God's instrument." he says casually. " Because it is the purest. It has no metal, no plastic, no strings. What is it but a dry piece of bamboo with holes in it? But isn't it strange that we've all heard of Krishna the legendary flutist but no one has heard him play or even knows what his music was like? Perhaps that burden has fallen on me, the burden of letting the world know what Krishna's flute sounded like. Maybe he plays through me. This may sound to you like ego but me it is simply inspiration."
Chaurasia was a successful flutist even in the mid-'60s. But his success turned into artistry less than a decade ago when the entire course of his happy-go-lucky life was transformed into a spiritual journey after a meeting with Annapurna Shankar, the estranged wife of Ravi Shankar, daughter of the legendary Alauddin Khan, and sister of sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan. That was in 1970. Until then music, for Chaurasia, was fun, just another career at which he was gaining considerable success, even a spreading reputation for his versatility.
He had grown up in Allahabad, one of the three sons of a wrestler who was keen that Chaurasia also train in the martial arts and join him in the akhara. Chaurasia would wrestle now and then but his secret love was music-preferably played on Krishna's flute. But in the Chaurasia household, music was banned. It was strictly for other people.
" Once when I told my father that I would like to practice music he almost brought the roof down. He considered it a degrading career, a bandmaster's career. I remember once I was secretly playing the flute locked up in my room. My father barged in and I quickly hid the flute. He asked me what sound was all about. I told him I was whistling. Whistling, to my father's mind, was even a worse insult to him and he responded by giving me a tight slap across the face."
Most of what Chaurasia played or whistled during those days were film tunes. Occasionally he would hear Abdul Karim Khan or Alauddin Khan over the radio and try and play their music on the flute be had by and large taught himself to play. He was barely out of his teens when he abandoned his education and joined All India Radio (AIR) in Cuttack, Orissa, as a staff artiste earning Rs.200 a month. He told his father that he had been hired as a stenographer. But Chaurasia's father was not to live to hear his son's music. He died shortly afterwards.
Chaurasia, within a few years, began getting something of a reputation. People began to notice him. Mostly self-taught, he began to play classical music both in and out of AIR and also came in demand as a music teacher. Fed up with his moonlighting and inability to comply with the respective requirements of a staff job, AIR transferred him to Bombay in 1962 as a punishment.
"And what sweet punishment it was. It was more a challenge than a punishment. I suppose I had some of my father's wrestling instincts in me. You never give up. If I had been punished for my music then I was even more determined to show the world that I would be number one and that I would stay there."
Fame came easily to Chaurasia. Music directors like Madan Mohan Jaidev, Roshan, noticed his playing and gave him film assignments. In fact, classist though he is, Chaurasia has never quite abandoned his filmi duniya- he composed the music for Sisila, and 27 Down and is working on another film. Fame yes, consummate artistry, no. For that he had to seek out Annapurna, his gurumata.
She lived a reclusive existence in Bombay, seeing practically nobody. Her reputation as an artiste of enormous dimensions - she plays the sur bahar - was widespread. She had played occasionally on stage with her brother Ali Akbar Khan. But soon had renounced public life. She had tried to pass on the wizardry of her father to her son, Shubho Shankar, but he left for the US with his father Ravi Shankar. She had also taught Nikhil Bannerjee who continued to express some of the musical radiance he imbibed from her on the sitar until his premature death two years ago. Today, the only living exponent of her tutelage is Chaurasia. But she did not accept him easily. He had heard of her reputation from musical circles across the country and he sought her out in Bombay.
"I kept knocking at her door for two years, " Chaurasia recalls. " and each time she simply told me to get lost. But I was not about to take no for an answer. One day, I don't know what overtook her, she simply said, 'all right, play. I think I played raag yaman. After I had finished, she said: ' You have to start from scratch. You will have to forget everything you have learned.' I even changed from being right handed to left-handed in order to begin afresh. That was to be the beginning of my real tapasya." Annapurna was a tough disciplinarian. Chaurasia would begin his riaz 4 a.m. every morning and play into the late hours of the night. " I began to learn anew the wondrous world of the aalap. She taught me music in different parts, the jod, the jhala, the intricacies of the whole raag, the different feel of different moments."
Annapurna does not play the flute. She taught by singing to him. " She would express in singing what she wanted. But soon I learned to read her expression and produce what she desired. I still produce her through my playing. Within about four years I began to notice a change in myself. There was deep sadness because for the first time I came to face to face with the limitless, infinite universe of classical music and I realized that I would not get to know even a small part of it in one lifetime." But along with the sorrow came strength. "I felt a new power. It was as if there was born in me God's stamina to play and play." While Annapurna was an uncompromising taskmaster who was able to root her disciple into the classicist foundation of shastrya sangeet, she refused to put him into a rigid strait-jacket in which experimentation with form and new sounds was taboo.
"Tradition and what the masters taught us is essential." says Chaurasia, " but man must also create for himself. I love all types of music. Why shouldn't music please, and reach out? Why should it stay stern and uncompromising?" Chaurasia is among a few but growing classicist who made a conscious effort to reach to and expand the audience for classical music. "To me, it was a challenge." he says, " The audience sizes had dipped. I was deeply wounded when I once saw the great Amir Khan singing before a group of just 25 people. It made me weep. Why is this. I said to myself, when the audience for ghazals is expanding?"
In the mid-'70s Chaurasia began making a conscious effort to produce music which while retaining the tradition would bring more " mithas and bhavna into even the most difficult raags. I spent hours every day to research the sound in order for it to become more emotional - how to make a single note touch the heart. I changed my breath control, lip and finger movements t perfect the sound. The idea was not to pander to the audience but to convince it of the beauty of the raags."
Here too, was a page out of Annapurna's compassionate teaching. For she had told him repeatedly: "Be careful of your aalap. Be careful of your audience and elongate and modulate your aalap accordingly. Never, never bore your audience. See and study their faces, and gauge their shakti. When you understand this, then reach out to them. Once you understand their reaction, you will gauge the depth of their understanding. You, your music, your audience must become one. Once this happens you will never want for anything. This is not just a simple mantra, you must strive to attain the siddhi of the mantra."
At a jazz festival in Bombay, 1980, Chaurasia, is poised to test himself before a mass audience with the new sounds he has been perfecting in order to enlarge the pool of classical music listeners. He is accompanied by Zakir Hussein on the tabla. "Zakir was nervous. We thought we'd be hooted out in no time, that the audience would be in no mood to listen to us after the sound of all those acoustical guitars that had preceded us. For two minutes I just let the tanpura sound take over. Then five minutes I played the alaap, Gurumata's alaap. The voices died down. When I stopped the people began to scream, ' We want more!' I realized that my experiment had worked. And I said to myself I must continue to maintain this pace and I prayed to God, please please, let this shakti remain in me forever, for I knew then that only through this music could I help take young people back and live in what is the most glorious about our past."
In his own past there is Krishna. In his dream he dreams of recreating a huge college of flutists, a veritable Vrindaban "in which students will arrive to learn and study with satchels full of flutes, live in mud huts, eat at a common langar. A modern Vrindaban from which a thousands flutes will ring out each day. For what else is there? When my breath is gone and I can't play anymore what do I leave behind? At least I have some dedicated students now. But Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, whom do they have as close disciples to carry on their art? When you leave nothing behind, you cry at the point of death. But I still dream. I dare to dream that through my playing, and through my students my flute will be left behind as the memory of Krishna."