Last week, I got a mail from Soumik Datta — a dear friend, gurubhai and a brilliant sarod player. He told me about an ensemble performance put together by his company in London. While going through the list of participating artistes, I paused at Saphwat Simab. I wasn’t familiar with the name. I paused because the list said he would be playing the rabab. The Afghan instrument is the fountainhead of the sarod, the musical instrument closest to my heart. I have been a regular listener of Hindustani music for the last 20 years; yet, I have never heard a live recital on the rabab. I wish I could be at The Royal Court Theatre, in London, to hear Soumik and Saphwat.
Amongst the many instruments that are on the wane, the Afghan rabab (there is also a Kashmiri variant) is an extreme case to ponder: it has not had a prominent exponent in India for more than a century. But instruments that featured in festivals even 20 years ago, such as the bowed instruments esraj and dilruba, the sursringar and the surbahar are rarely heard now. The esraj had two great custodians in Ashesh Bandopadhyay and his disciple Ranadhir Roy; the dilruba had Dakshina Mohan Tagore. After Roy’s death in 1989, there was a hiatus. Now, two young esraj players — Arshad Khan and Shubhayu Sen Majumdar — are reviving the instrument, but they mostly play in soundtracks; one seldom hears a solo classical recital on the esraj. The sursringar, which belongs to the rabab-sarod family of instruments, probably has less than 10 artistes performing on it. The surbahar, of the sitar family, still has competent exponents in Pushparaj Koshti and Irshad Khan, but the instrument has picked up an unfortunate ‘niche’ tag, and surbahar performances are hardly included in major music festivals.
The disappearance of these instruments signifies more than the mere loss of their sounds. Their intrinsic playing styles add variety to the Hindustani repertoire. The esraj, though similar in sound to the sarangi, has a raspier tone, and being a fretted bowed instrument (as opposed to the fretless sarangi), its playing style differs significantly from that of the sarangi. The rabab is ideal for playing fast, double-stroked passages. One can hear these on the sarod, but they are not quite like the higher-pitched, less metallic renditions on the rabab. The surbahar is played primarily in the lower octaves — a distinctive bass sound. Its playing style is characterised by long and resonant
The esraj, the rabab and the surbahar, though first cousins of the sarangi, the sarod and the sitar are not interchangeable with each other. The ubiquity of the latter instruments does not quite make amends for the loss of the former.
One could seek solace in the additions to the family of Indian ‘classical’ instruments in the 20th century. The bansuri (bamboo flute) and the santoor, for instance, were not traditionally classical instruments. They were of folk provenance and were relatively late entrants on the Hindustani music stage. In about seven decades, they have been accepted as mainstream classical instruments. This is perhaps because these instruments had superstar exponents. Pandit Pannalal Ghosh first brought the bansuri into the classical arena. After him, Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia made it more popular. Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma did the same for the santoor. They also taught their craft to several disciples — the best way to ensure posterity of their instruments.
Is it the lack of superstar representatives that cause some instruments to be jostled out of the concert stage? This is true of the rabab and the sursringar. Esraj players Bandopadhyay and Roy were maestros but they were not nearly as glamorous as Chaurasia and Sharma. The surbahar, unlike the sitar did not have figures like Pandit Ravi Shankar or Ustad Vilayat Khan. (Annapurna Devi could have given the instrument a boost, but she gave up performing, and leads a reclusive life.)
All the popular classical instruments — the sarod, the sitar, the sarangi, the violin, the slide guitar — have had larger-than-life maestros who have also taught generously. It is no surprise that the sitar is the most popular Indian instrument in the world: no Indian musician can match Pandit Ravi Shankar’s charisma and few can claim to have honed as many successful disciples as he has. Perhaps instruments orphaned of such a figure eventually end up in museums.
Every time I walk through the Sharan Rani Backliwal Gallery of Musical Instruments at the National Museum, Delhi, I am overcome by gloom. Of the 400-odd instruments on display, I have not heard the sounds of most. I wonder what those now-unheard instruments must have sounded like in concert. Because, really, what good is a musical instrument in a showcase? And I dread that a few decades from now, the esraj, the sursringar and the surbahar will inspire similar thoughts in someone visiting the gallery.
( Arunabha Deb is a Kolkata-based lawyer and music writer; >shubhodeb@hotmail.com )