Svaragāna
Debdash Mistry
I might sound queer; but to me, singing or playing or listening to a piece of music is somewhat synonymous with crying– crying for somebody or something not clearly made out– somebody or something our hearts ache for but perception fails to reach. If the gap between the singing souls and the sung [celebrated] collapses, ART disappears and things fall mundane. True, mundanity is never less valuable. Rather, it ignites our thirst for invaluable BEAUTY, and in return, BEAUTY releases our pent-up emotions and gives back to us a serene mundanity.
You have all the right to disagree. Even you can tag me as a mystic, though I hardly know what I am. I must admit that BEAUTY does not feed me, and that I have to earn my bread by the sweat of my brow. Despite all these, there are some occasions when my heart sobs uncontrollably for somebody or something behind some mysterious veil. And whenever I can sob my heart out, I feel relieved. To speak the truth, yours is the purest soul in the world the moment you groan with a pain and cry your eyes out, and svaragānas can help you feel pure at least for a moment. Just forget about all your egoistic identities and get absorbed in the music you are making or hearing– your submission will automatically report to the court of SUNDARA, alias BEAUTY.
To be more specific, let us go a bit deep into gāna and svara. A gāna or a song, as perceived by the musical minds of the Indian subcontinent, is a composite of svara [note or musical tone], tāla [rhythmic beat or time-measure] and pada [lyrics]. Of the three, svara is the most important one, and to my mind, a good arrangement of some harmonious svaras is itself a gāna. So svara needs to be detailed here. For the beginners in music literature, when a human voice or an instrument makes a sound of some pitch, the sound is a svara. Suppose you tune a string to a pitch and strike it, you will hear a series of sounds in the same pitch. The series is a svara, and every bit of sound is a śruti. There are twenty-two śrutis or even more in a saptaka [ octave]; and seven svaras there– Sa, Re, Ga, Ma, Pa , Dha, Ni. Re is three śrutis away from Sa. In non-technical terms, svara is otherwise named sura or tune.
Now it is time for svaragāna. When my heart cries, I sit back with pain melting slowly into a gāna. But sometimes the chaos of tāla [rhythmic beat] breaks my meditation, and the words of pada [lyrics] lead other way the channel to my SUNDARA in the dark. Therefore, I prefer svaragāna– a gāna free of the chains of tāla and pada. Of course, svaragāna can accommodate tāla and pada if the latter are submissive and unvoiced. We can also reconsider the status of tāla when laya or tempo slows down to the limit so that percussionists fail to stay on the beat. Ālāpa can be a perfect example of svaragāna when Rabindra muktaga [dhālāgāna of Tagore] and Bhatiali are accommodating.
With an unhurried gait Bhatialis sometimes tend to be unmetered and unaccompanied like ālāpa. But Bhatialis are more emotive. When a Bhatial, a singing boatman or a Bhatiali singer, stretches the last svara of a phrase, there dawns a serene silence; and all of a sudden when his voice accompanied by giṭkāri reaches a higher svara from a lower one, the silence cracks with a heart-rending cry. For further information, a giṭkāri is a cluster of svaras used in some musical genres like ṭappā. But Bhatiali is unique in the sense that periods between svaras in its gitkāri are a bit lengthier and the svaras here are more stressed, and so its giṭkāri very often sounds like sobbing.
There is still a good example of svaragāna in my locality. Sometimes while rowing boats, ploughing fields or doing household chores, our people sort of sing, or rather hum, Bhatialis, uttering some meaningless sounds. But these sounds go beyond meaning and can speak their mind effectively. In fact, svaragāna is itself a lingua franca without diction– it hardly needs any support from wording. It can be passed to any heart irrespective of language, culture and race. More importantly, our folk do not sing this type of song to entertain a houseful of audience but to privately sob their sore hearts out to their beloved in the dark. Actually, their svaragāna relentlessly searches for somebody they can submit their crucified self to.
Back to SUNDARA, the term is derived from a Sanskrit root √dṛ, which means ‘to caress’ or ‘to love’. So SUNDARA is something or somebody we love to melt into but can never reach. You can argue here that SUNDARA is an immature imagination of an unsatisfied mind. Maybe you are right. But it means little difference to me. I still feel somewhere in my heart a longing for the unknown under debate.