Its been more than a year that I have started a personal 'research' project - documenting the history of my violin teacher and his guru-shishya-parampara. There is no official purpose or timeline for this. I just want to collect all possible details, data, recordings, anecdotes etc of/about my guruji, or his guru, or his guru's guru, and so on. I don't aim to do it alone (a fellow student is doing his PhD on a subset of this). There have been many unsung geniuses in Indian classical music -- this is the realisation which motivated me to start the task. I don't want the people who spent their lives perfecting a style of music to be forgotten easily (and I don't trust myself on learning enough of the music to be able to showcase anything on my own).
The focus of this blog post is why my progress has been frustratingly slow. The Sangeet Natak Akademi library was my first and is still my only place to hunt for information. However, it is closed on weekends (which means in India research is restricted to those doing it as a full-time job). So I can visit it maybe a day or two in a year when I happen to have a leave from office which does not coincide with a holiday. And when I do land up there, I can only copy out 20 pages from a single book (even if it has been out of print for 40 years).
They also have a nice audio-visual library where the librarian's first response is "we don't have any such thing". I searched through their catalogues and discover something rare -- some vinyl records of my teacher's teacher's teacher (who was one of the pioneers in playing North Indian instrumental classical music on the violin). However there was no player (which I learned after being told to be back in an hour). And neither is bringing an external record player into the library allowed. Hence, such recordings will spend the rest of their lives neatly stocked, and maybe destroyed some day!
One day I and my wife decided to try some other institutions in the capital which had extensive audio-visual archives. The IGNCA library is probably the most unfriendly place I have been to, where the first reactions are "you are not allowed" and "we don't have what you are looking for". Although their website claims they have an extensive collection of 78 rpm recordings donated by V.A.K. Ranga Rao, we could not see any traces of any such thing after going to and from between two huge buildings in a sprawling campus.
We also tried the Akashvani Bhavan where people were very helpful. However they don't allow anyone to look at their archives so that ended there.
Failing to access libraries, I decided to buy the books I wanted to leaf through and turned to the internet. This also proved to be frustrating. Most online shopping sites focus on fiction and books for examinations and jobs. Flipkart is slightly better since it has a huge inventory. However the lack of categories from humanities is disappointing. After all, isn't online shopping meant to increase our choices beyond the books available in shopping malls?
After searching a lot I did find some publishers in Hindi who had sites and/or online catalogues. I couldn't find much from Bengal (I had called a publisher in Kolkata for their catalogue and the person requested me to come down and see what I wanted to buy).
The Digital Library of India is an ambitious project which is digitising books from libraries all over the country. I was impressed at their collection. I was equally frustrated at the horrible website they had put up, where you can see a book by downloading one scanned image at a time. There are some pdf books as well but they are not searchable! I expected better in something where the IISc is involved.
The best online effort from India in this subject is http://musicresearch.in/. But we are so much far behind European and US universities who have meticulously collected books and resources from India and archived them for easy access. Just a few days ago, a friend in MIT was also lamenting the lack of collaborative projects between library sciences and IT in India. I wholeheartedly agree, specially when we have tons of cultural treasures which are not being cultured or preserved.
The focus of this blog post is why my progress has been frustratingly slow. The Sangeet Natak Akademi library was my first and is still my only place to hunt for information. However, it is closed on weekends (which means in India research is restricted to those doing it as a full-time job). So I can visit it maybe a day or two in a year when I happen to have a leave from office which does not coincide with a holiday. And when I do land up there, I can only copy out 20 pages from a single book (even if it has been out of print for 40 years).
They also have a nice audio-visual library where the librarian's first response is "we don't have any such thing". I searched through their catalogues and discover something rare -- some vinyl records of my teacher's teacher's teacher (who was one of the pioneers in playing North Indian instrumental classical music on the violin). However there was no player (which I learned after being told to be back in an hour). And neither is bringing an external record player into the library allowed. Hence, such recordings will spend the rest of their lives neatly stocked, and maybe destroyed some day!
One day I and my wife decided to try some other institutions in the capital which had extensive audio-visual archives. The IGNCA library is probably the most unfriendly place I have been to, where the first reactions are "you are not allowed" and "we don't have what you are looking for". Although their website claims they have an extensive collection of 78 rpm recordings donated by V.A.K. Ranga Rao, we could not see any traces of any such thing after going to and from between two huge buildings in a sprawling campus.
We also tried the Akashvani Bhavan where people were very helpful. However they don't allow anyone to look at their archives so that ended there.
Failing to access libraries, I decided to buy the books I wanted to leaf through and turned to the internet. This also proved to be frustrating. Most online shopping sites focus on fiction and books for examinations and jobs. Flipkart is slightly better since it has a huge inventory. However the lack of categories from humanities is disappointing. After all, isn't online shopping meant to increase our choices beyond the books available in shopping malls?
After searching a lot I did find some publishers in Hindi who had sites and/or online catalogues. I couldn't find much from Bengal (I had called a publisher in Kolkata for their catalogue and the person requested me to come down and see what I wanted to buy).
The Digital Library of India is an ambitious project which is digitising books from libraries all over the country. I was impressed at their collection. I was equally frustrated at the horrible website they had put up, where you can see a book by downloading one scanned image at a time. There are some pdf books as well but they are not searchable! I expected better in something where the IISc is involved.
The best online effort from India in this subject is http://musicresearch.in/. But we are so much far behind European and US universities who have meticulously collected books and resources from India and archived them for easy access. Just a few days ago, a friend in MIT was also lamenting the lack of collaborative projects between library sciences and IT in India. I wholeheartedly agree, specially when we have tons of cultural treasures which are not being cultured or preserved.
you can try contacting vikram sampath (who heads the ignca in bangalore) and is also a music historian (has written a biography of gauhar jaan). he might be able to help you.
ReplyDeleteLets meet up! I will try to get you access..hopefully my contractual staff status can be of some use. -Asubramanian
ReplyDeleteArijitda, I did write to Vikram some time back but he was probably too busy to reply. If you know him personally it would be nice to get introduced to him.
ReplyDeleteI am intrigued by your interest in Gagan Chandra Chatterjee, my grandfather's younger brother. That anyone as young as you has heard his recordings is amazing.
ReplyDeleteMy youngest uncle (kaka) the only violinist in our family would have more information about Gagan Chandra Chatterjee.
Regards, Amaresh Chatterjee (achatterjeejpr@gmail.com)
Thanks a lot for your comment. My interest in Gagan Chandra Chatterjee stems from the fact that my violin teacher Sharat Chandra Srivastava's teacher was Pt Joi Srivastava who was Gagan Babu's student. I am touch with Jawahar uncle, if you are referring to him.
ReplyDeletePlease do listen to Gagan Babu's recordings as well as those of Sharat Chandra Srivastava and Joi Srivastava from youtube - you'll see the common patterns and discover how this music evolved over decades.