Harmony & discord :

in music and in nature

An year long festivities, exhibitions and cultural programmes have been inaugurated in Bengal to mark the 150-th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore. Continueing with my posts of Tagore's Selected Letters, the great polymath who invented Bengal's own music idiom - 'Rabindra-sangeet'- compares the distinctive styles of Indian music and European music. The Letters are written while touring to his family-estates as a manager, living in his house-boat off the Padma river.

Shelidah (Bangladesh)
10 August 1894

Last night the river woke me with a violent bubbling that made the boat billow in the swell - probably the inrush of a freshet: a thing that happens almost daily in this season. As I sat listening I suddenly had the impression that the whole river was alive and highly agitated. Through the planks at my feet I could clearly sense the gamut of ceaseless movement below : tremors, quakes, upheave and downturn, as if I were taking the river's palpitating pulse. The disturbance must have been quite something to set the water racing so wildly.

For a long time I sat on a bench beside the window. Outside was a hazy light that made the excited river look even madder. The sky was spotted with clouds. The reflection of a particularly bright star glimmered on the waters like a gash of agony. Both banks were dim and drowsy with slumber but between them surged an insomniac restlessness.

The day-world calls to mind European music with its various concords and discords, orchestrated into a great, purposeful ensemble. And the night-world is like the sphere of Indian music with its unadulterated melody, sombre and poignant. Both move us, though they are in striking contrast. And why should they disturb us ? Pairs of opposites lie at the very root of creation : king and queen, night and day, unity and disunity, the eternal and the evolving.

We Indians are under the rule of night; we are besotted with the eternal, the One. Our melodies are intended for the solitary individual; European music is for the multitude. Our music removes us from the domain of everyday joys and sorrows to a region devoid of company, as aloof as the universe ; the music of Europe revels in the perpetual oscillations of the human condition.

Sufis of Sindh

Whispers of the desert
poem by Fatima Bhutto
Excerpts:

Karachi air
Breathed in through the lungs
Is sickly sweet
Like honeycomb left out to rot
In the warm, unrepentant heat.
Or else,
It is thick, smoky
Like mesquite
The evening scent of garbarge burning
At the first break of dusk’s early light.
Mynah birds and ravens caw
A jealous chord
Singing to the street.
At midnight
I can hear the poor sweeper man
Sweep sweeping
The moonlit littered roads.
I sleep in bed
Covered in a sheet of sweat.
There is no electricity now
In this deadened August night

I trawl
Middle Eastern airlines, terminals and luggage belts
Stuck alongside students,
Honeymooners in black robes and white thobes
And slave labour, working through the night.
Hiding my name on my boarding passes,
A thumb obscuring the sight of letters, destinations and foreign nights
And inventing new fictions,
Identities
And family trees.
My legs are close to clotting
And my bags unnecessarily heavy.
Qatar, Etihad and Emirates
I count them off as lovers
I use in desperate times of need.,
Flying out every month
Pretending that I’m free,
Subsisting on airline meals.
Parting from Karachi
At departure gates
And onwards worldwide.
I wish it well
My love unkind.

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

MANGO

Monsoon season is the season of mangoes in the tropics. Mangoes of all sizes and shapes flood into the market. The following is description of mango from the pages of history , extracted from two books I have in my library.

The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten : Containing His Description of The East (from old English translation of 1598)

Mangas (mangoes) groweth upon trees like Chakka(Jack-fruit) trees . They are as big as a great Peach, but some what long, and a little crooked, of colour clear green, some what yellowish, and some times reddish : it hath within it a stone bigger than a Peach stone, but it is not good to be eaten. The Mangoes are inwardly yellowish, but in cutting it is waterish, yet some not so much. They have a very pleasant taste , better than a Peach, and like Annanas(Pineapple?) the most best and the most profitable fruit in all India, for it yeildeth a great quantity for food & sustainance (of the countrie people), as Olives do in Spain and Portingale.

They beare fruit upon trees, from April to November, according to the situation of the place. Those which grow in the West(coast) are smaller but of better taste & flavor; within they have a small Nut, or Kernell. Another sort groweth in Balagatte , and those are the greatest, for there are of them that weigh two pound & a quarter, of a verie pleasant taste. So are those grow in the Kingdome of Nisam Sha (Hyderabad) and like unto them are the Mangas of Bengala, Pegu and Malacca. The shel of them being taken off, is eaten in slices with Wine, and also without Wine, as we eate Peaches, they are also preserved; the better to keep them, either in Sugar, Vinegar, Oyle or Salt, like Olives in Spaine, being a little opened with a knife, they are stuffed with greene Ginger, headed Garlik, Mustard or such like, they are sometimes eaten only with Salt, and sometimes sodden with Rice, as we doe Olives, and being thus conserved and sodden, are bought in the market.

From the autobiography of Zahiruddin Babur (1483-1531) - the founder of Mughal[Mongol] Empire.


Anbah (mango) is one of the fruits peculiar to Hindustan. Hindustanis pronounce the b in its name as though no vowel followed it (anb); this being awkward to utter, some people call the fruit naghzak, as Khwaja Khusrau (Amir Khusru[1253-1325]- poet) does :

Naghzak-i ma naghz-kun-i bustan
Naghztarin mewa-i-Hindustan.

[Our fairling (ie.mango), beauty-maker of the garden
Fairest fruit of Hindustan.]

Mangoes when good(ripe) are very good, but many as are eaten, few are first-rate. They are usually plucked unripe and ripened in the house. Unripe, they make excellent condiments, are good also preserved in syrup. Taking it altogether, the mango is the best fruit of Hindustan. Some so praise it as to give it preference over all fruits except the musk-melon, but such praise outmatches it. It resembles the kardi peach. It ripens in the rains. It is eaten in two ways : one is to squeeze it to a pulp, make a hole in it, and suck out the juice - the other, to peel and eat it like kardi peach. Its tree grows very large and has a leaf somewhat resembles the peach-tree's. The trunk is ill-shaped but in Bengal and Gujrat is heard of as growing handsome.