Thank You For the Music

Tuning in to the Christmas program on NPR, I drove around on last minute errands on Christmas Eve as the voice of Mahalia Jackson filled my car with rich golden notes. It was cold, wet and grey here in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Still, despite the horrible traffic (I saw at least one accident on the Post Road), people were up and about and trying to buy last minute stuff. People like yours truly, who in a miscalculated strategic move, had taken upon themselves the task of the annual gift-buying entrerpise.


I doubt people my age listen to Mahalia Jackson regularly anymore, even here in America. But she was such a part of my childhood that it brings tears to my eyes when I catch her voice here and there, bringing back memories of "Little David, Play on your Harp" echoing through our stone walled bungalow in Dehra Dun. How did that happen? How did Mahalia Jackson become such a part of my very Indian upbringing? How did Paul Robeson enter my consciousness? How did I learn to sing along with Yves Montand at a time when I did not even speak French? And how did all of these singers from lands then unknown to me come to occupy a place in my pantheon of musical deities along with D. V. Paluskar, Bismillah Khan, M. S. Subbulaksmi and the diva Kishori Amonkar?


For this, I have to acknowledge the very specific case of my immediate family environment. My parents were a middle-class army couple. But they - and I - occupied an uneasy position between two very different strata in Indian society. On the one hand, there was the uber-westernized elite of immediate postcolonial India, consisting of those who rejected everything Indian even more vehemently than their former bosses the British. This was the world of very smart cocktail parties and very fatuous small talk, with plenty of cigarettes being waved around and enough shallowness to drown a nation. After a hard day of work in a corporate office, one's free time was spent downing gimlet's and whisky-soda's and remembering the good old days when the riff-raff knew their place. This was the world into which my parents had entree due to their educational backgrounds (the good schools of their generation were few and everyone attended pretty much the same places) and family connections and I am still dazzled when my parents break into the foxtrot on the dance floor (in my youth ballroom dancing was no longer a required - or desired - social skill). But this was not a world in which they really belonged, they being entirely too "military" for the upper class pretensions one had to have in order to have any claims to this social segment.


On the other side of our social horizon there was the very traditional, modest Indian middle class whose members lived very humble lives, listened only to Indian music and ate very traditional food. The women wore their saris modestly, the men were gentle and scholarly in their worn bush shirts, the matrons were fat and comfortable, and the food was wonderful and cooked daily by the women of the house with some assistance from part time help. This was the world of my relatives and many family friends where abounded the music of Rabindranath Tagore during impromptu musical evenings and lots of adda during visits to the old hometown of Kolkatta. The worlds of the westernized corporate elite and the ordinary middle classes never crossed. In fact, the denizens of each world would have been surprised by the other's presence and uncomfortable in each other's company. My parents and I moved between both, fitting fully and comfortably only into the alternate universe that was the life of the army. I was required to be proficient in English and Hindi for the outside world, and in Bengali for communication within the family.



What set us as a family apart from all these worlds (including the army) was our taste in music. My parents were not - and are not - trendy. They were quite definitely stodgy, leaning towards the archaic, in their choice of listening material. While my sophisticated friends' parents played Ella Fitzgerald's "Mack the Knife" or Dave Brubeck's "Take Five", my parents dug deeper into western culture and came up with Paul Robeson and Mahalia Jackson. Robeson's and Jackson's talents rose above the limitations of a scratchy, hissy 78 RPM record and introduced me to the music of a country I would only see many years later. On the Indian side, I was never allowed to listen to modern Hindi film music, it being deemed too vulgar and shallow (my rebellion was to embrace Bollywood with a vengeance when I reached teenage). Instead, the radio was put on at 6:00 AM every morning so that we could begin our day with the purifying notes of All India Radio's classical Indian music programming. With my westernized friends, I was unable to enjoy the sweet sounds of Pandit Jasraj singing Raag Basant, the velvet of his voice, the masterful control of his medium. They wouldn't have known who he was, and if they had, would have sneered at his "conservatism". To my traditional Indian relatives and friends I was unable to explain that there was a world outside of Hindustani classical music and Vividh Bharati. While they would have been respectful of Mahalia Jackson and Paul Robeson's music, they would not have known how to fit western music into their lives. I was left humming "Old Man River" and "Bistirno Duparey" by myself.

All of this would have been bewildering mishmash to my children if I had tried to explain it in words. But thanks to Youtube, I can show them and have them hear the sounds of the in-between cultural world that was their mother's childhood. Looking back, it was a cultural education that equipped me to understand the best of both East and West. I hope I can pass on that tradition to my children. So thank you for the music, Youtube, and I hope there are many more years ahead for you.