Matthew Rahaim (Minneapolis, MN) is associate professor of musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Minnesota, author of Musicking Bodies, and a practicing Hindustani vocalist in the Gwalior tradition.

Musicking Bodies

Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music

By Matthew Rahaim

Wesleyan University Press

Copyright © 2012 Matthew Rahaim
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8195-7325-4

Contents

List of Illustrations,
Acknowledgments,
A Note on Transcription,
A Note on Languages and Terminology,
Introduction,
1. A History of Moving and Singing in India,
2. Gesture and Melodic Motion,
3. Ragas as Spaces for Melodic Motion,
4. Melodic Motion in Time,
5. The Musicking Body,
6. The Paramparic Body,
Appendix A: Planes of the Body,
Appendix B: Teaching Lineages of Jitendra Abhisheki,
and Gajanan Rao Joshi,
Appendix C: A Note on Methods,
Notes,
Guide to Transliteration,,
Glossary of Terms, and List of Names,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

A History of Moving and Singing in India

* * *

A murmur of conversation rises from the audience between performances at Shantiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore’s university in West Bengal. A music teacher and I are excitedly discussing the different styles of two classical singers that we admire. We compare their styles of voice production, their divergent approaches to raga development, their preferences for different tempi and metrical cycles. Then I mention their differences in gestural dispositions. The flow of our conversation is interrupted. She sits upright, furrows her brow, and says, “But gesture is a dosha [fault], not a guna [virtue], isn’t it?” As she drops technical terms from authoritative Sanskrit music treatises into her vernacular mix of Hindi and English, the tone of the conversation shifts abruptly. We interrupt our discussion of singers, performances, and musical training in favor of a discussion about authoritative texts, terms, and categories. It is only when the singer interrupts our conversation with a compelling phrase in Rag Jhinjhoti that we turn our attention back to the body on stage.

Somehow, it is in discussions of gesture — where the body and the voice work together in the most obvious way — that music scholars insist most emphatically that the body and the voice are, in fact, separate. The body serves as a discursive pivot that modulates from matters of aesthetics (beauty vs. ugliness, grace vs. awkwardness, elegance vs. excess) to matters of ethics (chastity vs. promiscuity, sincerity vs. ostentation, spirituality vs. sensuality). This can be explained in part by the moral burden borne by singers. This burden, a residue of centuries of discourse in Sanskrit and Persian, Hindi and English, continues to shape thought about the role of the body in music. As we will see, music scholars of all kinds, writing in Persian, Sanskrit, Tamil, and English, writing for courtly feudal and urban bourgeois audiences, drawing on the jargon of yoga, sufism, theosophy, and secular romanticism, have found remarkable agreement when it comes to the gestures of vocalists. The consensus is that gesture is bad: uncouth, antispiritual, or at best incidental to real music. The goal here is not to summarily debunk these claims as fanciful “projections onto an empty screen” (Latour 2004: 242) — indeed, the coming chapters will make the case that the movement of singers, in the moment of performance, is anything but empty. I am not urging music connoisseurs to take pleasure in gesture; nor am I urging singers to reject received wisdom and gesture more. Nothing here is evidence that gesture in itself is a sign of good manners, that movement is necessarily and inherently spiritual, or that the hand is more important than the voice. But for those who are interested in the role of the body in music, the processes of melodic improvisation, and the transmission of musical practices, there is much to learn from gesture, posture, and the physicality of vocal production that cannot be learned from sound alone.

Readers who are eager to get on with the analysis of gestural performance may wish to skip this chapter for now and move on to chapter 2, which addresses the relationship between vocalization and gesture. First, though, in order to understand why the melodic knowledge embodied in gesture has been largely ignored by music theorists and, eventually, to understand the ethical import of gestural inheritance in teaching lineages, it is helpful to look carefully at these streams of discourse — even where we cannot draw conclusions about the details of gestural practice.

Gesture in Ancient and Medieval Indian Music Literature

The earliest lengthy discussion of performance conventions in the extant Sanskrit literature is found in the dramaturgical manual Natyasastra (ca. 200 ce). Here movement is mostly treated in connection to drama and dance. In its discussion of drama, for example, the Natyasastra suggests three ways in which gestural dispositions can indicate a character’s social standing. First, gestures made higher on the body indicate high rank; second, frequent gestures indicate low rank; third, while characters of high social rank move according to canonical rules, actors playing characters of low social rank merely emulate the spontaneous gestures of daily life (Bharatamuni 1998: 9:61–66, 191). Thus begins a long tradition of placing spontaneous gesture in opposition to prestige and nobility. The notion that gesturing according to prescribed rules is suitable for high-status performance helps to explain why conventional, systematized systems of gesture — such as the conventional patterns of claps and waves that mark metrical cycles, the intricately prescribed motions of classical dance, and the handshapes (mudras) that correspond to melodic formulas in Sama Veda recitation — have traditionally been considered morally neutral. These systems, unlike the spontaneous melodic motion of singers’ gesture, prescribe fixed, prefigured hand movements. Indeed, it seems to be precisely this explicit systematicity that exempts these gestural systems from moral condemnation. Among the very few descriptions of bodily motion in connection to melodic action is the prescription that a good female singer should be capable of “maintaining disposition”; among the bad qualities of a singer are sandasta, or singing with teeth clenched (Bharatamuni 1998: 32: 450–454, 467).

The Sangitaratnakara (thirteenth c. ce), perhaps the most influential Indian music-theoretic treatise of all time, deals extensively with the bodily processes of singing. The author, Sarangadev, served as an ayurvedic physician at the Seuna court in Devgiri. Accordingly, the first substantive section of the book is a detailed description of human anatomy, from bones to chakras, running to 163 verses. This virtuosic survey of the body is capped by the following summary statement: “Such is the body, a heap of filth surrounded by all sorts of impurities of all sorts; and yet intelligent people utilize it as a means for worldly enjoyment and for salvation [mukti]” (Sarangadev 1991 [13th c.]: I.2.163c–164b). This by itself is a fairly conventional statement of a tantric view of the body (i.e., it is both inherently filthy and a potential vehicle for liberation) that would have been well known in Sarangadev’s Kashmiri scholarly lineage. More surprising, however, is the following verse, in which he asserts that practicing and contemplating music is one way his readers might use the body to save themselves from the horrors of incarnation. After considering various means of salvation in turn, Sarangadev concludes that music is the best method for most people, as it is more immediately appealing than austere, purely contemplative practices (I.2.167–168b). Thus Sarangadev justifies the extensive discussion of music that follows on the grounds that it offers an easily accessible means of liberation from the flesh. In his decidedly unfleshy account of voice production, for example, the voice finds its origin in the atman, or individuated soul:

Desirous of speech, the atman impels the mind, and the mind activates the vahni [vital fire] stationed in the body, which in turn stimulates the prana [vital breath]. The vital force stationed around the root of the navel, rising upward gradually manifests naad [vibration] in the navel, the heart, the throat, the cerebrum, and the cavity of the mouth as it passes through them. (I.3.3–4)

Unlike the Natyasastra, the Sangitaratnakara specifically mentions hand movements produced while singing. As the music described in the Natyasastra was largely through-composed, it is possible that the singing practices described therein featured little spontaneous gesture. By the time of the Sangitaratnakara, the prevailing melodic system seems to have featured melodic improvisation within ragas, and it seems that, as in modern practice, improvisatory singing was accompanied by improvisatory gesture. In any case, we can be reasonably certain that singers were moving while singing because Sarangadev criticizes them for doing so. Such movements appear in lists of doshas (faults): “involuntary shaking of the limbs” and “stretching the limbs.” Other physical faults, such as displaying the bulging veins of the neck or face (III.3.25–38), are listed as well. Significantly, there are no corresponding descriptions of approved bodily movement on the list of musical virtues.

Subsequent Persian and Sanskrit music treatises used the Sangitaratnakara as a model. As in the Sangitaratnakara, the visible motion of the musicking body typically appears in later music treatises only in formulaic lists of bad qualities, alongside bad posture and harsh vocal timbre. For example, the list in Faqirullah’s 1666 treatise Rag Darpana (Faqirullah 1996 [1666]: 157) includes “throwing right and left of the limbs and causing jerks to the voice when singing,” stretching the neck “as a camel does,” singing in such a way that veins protrude, and showing the teeth. Indeed, showing the teeth while singing seems to have been a feature that distinguished high-status musicians from low-status ones in North Indian courts. This was stated explicitly in Mirza Khan’s encyclopedic 1675 Tohfat al-Hind, which specifically mentions that a well-mannered singer should not show the teeth while singing. Indeed, in court paintings of this period, dhadhis (low-status musicians) are often depicted with visible, misshapen teeth; the teeth of kalavants (high-status musicians), are typically concealed inside their mouth (Brown 2003: 160 n. 68). Mughal court paintings of singers often depict singers with a distinctive upturned hand, though no details of gestural patterns can be gleaned from these (Wade 1998: 195). In lists of singers’ good qualities, gesture is typically not mentioned, except when prescribing its avoidance, as when the Tohfat al-Hind recommends that a singer should maintain a “calm demeanour when performing, and an open and cheerful countenance” (Brown 2003: 138). The preference for a “calm demeanour,” as we shall see, is in tune with the bulk of discourse about gesture that prefers stillness to motion.

One later treatise, the Ma’dan al-Musiqi (1856) of Hakim Mohammad Karam Imam, goes into some detail in its description of gestural practice at the Awadh court of Wajid Ali Shah. Imam not only rehearses the standard lists of bad gestural habits (including using the hands to indicate melodies that the voice cannot reach), but also names specific contemporary singerswho display these bad habits. He also breaks from tradition to mention some singers who move subtly and beautifully while they sing, such as “Babu Ram Sahai, whose eyes, eyebrows, and hands just quivered to highlight the nuances of his song.” He includes a rare nondenigrative description of singers gesturing, asserting that

it is very difficult to keep one’s body straight and still when one sings. There should be slight movements of hands, eyes, and eyebrows to highlight the beauty of the song. Because such well-measured actions of the body, according to the bhava [affective] nuances bring added charm to the music. (Imam 1959 [1856]: 9–10)

Although Imam, like his predecessors, disapproves of spontaneous gesture, he also describes the potentially “charming” effect of “well-measured actions.” The Ma’dan al-Musiqi, containing both formulaic restatements of tradition and a humanistic concern for the particularities of performers and performances, anticipates the rich archive of gesture discourse provided by the literature of music reform in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is likely a good deal more to learn about the history of musical gesture in the vast body of yet unedited early modern Sanskrit and Persian music literature (Pollock 2011). For now, all that is certain from the era between the Sangitaratnakara and the first films of singers is (1)that it was perfectly ordinary for singers to have moved their hands while singing and (2)that this motion was understood as faulty in the prevailing courtly and spiritual discourses.

Gesture, Gender, and Music Reform in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Many recent histories of Indian music have focused on the institutional, music-theoretic, and educational consequences of Indian music reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Dan Neuman 1990; Bakhle 2005; Subramanian 2006, etc.). Recently some scholars of dance and music have extended this history to include changes in the presentation and reception of bodies on stage (Dard Neuman 2004; Weidman 2006; Krishnan 2008; Soneji 2012). Janaki Bakhle (2005), for example, reports two fascinating cases in which reformers seem to have insisted on reforming the conventional postures of singers — but in opposite ways. In Bengal in the 1850s, “popular singers were condemned for singing while standing” (273, n. 71); half a century later, Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III of Baroda asked that his court musicians “break their habit of singing while seated.” In this latter case, the musicians were specifically asked to “emulate the tradition of vocal performance in Western high art music” (33). Despite evident regional variation, the music reform movement transformed the conventions of bodily comportment on stage.

Although there are few documentary films of vocal performances from this period, some picture of the ethical power of these corporeal reforms can be gleaned from depictions of singers in fictional films. In Tansen (1943), Baiju Bawra (1952), Basant Bahar (1956), and many other early Indian films that feature classical music, singing gesture is depicted in film as a token of clownish, showy virtuosity in contrast to devotional (and usually Hindu) piety (Booth 2005).

Sant Tukaram (1936), among the best-known and most influential of Indian films, develops the gesture-denigrative discourses found in medieval music treatises into embodied norms for modern politics, gender, and devotion. When Sant Tukaram was released in 1936, it ran for fifty-two straight weeks. Today it is shown again and again on Marathi TV and plays to full houses in movie theaters, even outside Maharashtra. It was also the first Indian film to win international acclaim, winning third place in the Venice International Film exhibition. Though the film is filled with Marathi devotional songs known throughout Maharashtra, its power and popularity far exceed its linguistic reach and literary content. Indeed, the near-unanimous critical praise of this film focuses almost exclusively on its powerful musical performances and visual language. The power of this musical and visual language derives from a play of various modes of embodiment — gestural and vocal dispositions that carry profound moral and political weight.

In the opening sequences of the film, gesture operates alongside elocution, dress, song style, and posture as a sign of the main opposition represented in the film: between the hierarchical, elite Brahminical religion and the populist, devotional spirituality of the Marathi singer-saint Tukaram. These extremes are enacted in the performance styles of Tukaram and the vain, hypocritical priest Salomalo (figure 1.1). Tukaram sits on the ground and hardly moves at all as he sings his simple, unadorned songs — transported, as it were, beyond his body. Salomalo, on the other hand, marches about and gestures wildly as he peppers his devotional songs with florid, distracting melodic runs. At one point he nearly smacks an audience member in the face with his flailing arms.

Later in the film, a courtesan in the service of Salomalo is converted to Tukaram’s devotional path, and her piety is depicted dramatically through a transformation in her gestural disposition (figure 1.2). Salomalo sends Sundara, the courtesan, to tempt Tuka into abandoning his devotional life. She approaches Tukaram’s house dressed in glittering ornaments, singing an erotic song about Radha’s yearning for Krishna. Tukaram emerges, playing his kartal (wooden clappers) along with her, in a rhythm typical of the devotional genre kirtan. Oblivious to her flirtatious glances, he praises her voice for “carrying to the heavens.” In contrast to Salomalo, who earlier in the film had listened to Sundara while chewing paan, praising her performance in conventional courtly verbal formulas, Tuka participates by musicking along with Sundara, as though they were performing kirtan together. Thus Tuka converts a courtly, worldly performance into a devotional occasion. But, crucially, Tukaram also converts Sundara. Although Tukaram’s words serve as an important instrument of conversion (he advises her not to waste her beauty on temporary pleasure), the results are most immediately visible in her gestural disposition. She renounces her former ways and becomes Tukaram’s disciple. She throws herself at his feet and immediately adopts a new manner of singing. After the conversion, she sits down on the ground and accompanies herself on kartal with her hands folded palm to palm, singing a devotional song, with her eyes closed,and quite still. In short, she inhabits a new musicking body.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Musicking Bodies by Matthew Rahaim. Copyright © 2012 Matthew Rahaim. Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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