Not long ago I reviewed Sheela Banerjee’s What’s In A Name for the Irish Times and was struck, among many other things in that fascinating book, by her comment in passing that “Tagore’s songs, known as ‘Rabindrasangeet’, are sung at countless gatherings, as people are doing their housework, on the radio covered endlessly by famous singers.”
It reminded me of my own childhood experience of these arts – I had recently written these sentences for the introduction to my next book: “Ireland’s poetry, as I first heard it from my mother, oscillated between the poles of language and music; along with many songs (a number written by poets including Padraic Colum), she knew an enormous amount of poetry by heart – which is how they taught the subject in the Irish schools of her youth. All I owe her includes those hours listening to magical words sung and spoken while she conjured up huge meals for our huge family, at least by English middle-class standards.”
Poetry and music interpenetrating during my youth was therefore something I had in common with the performers of the Indian poetry and music festival Saudha, a caravanserai of singers, musicians, dancers and writers, which had been touring nationally in the UK before arriving at Roundhay Park where I would join them for a site-specific turn of my own on a sunny July evening at Barran’s Fountain, a piece of Victorian architecture that wouldn’t have looked out of place in imperial India.
Previously, when I read at the RadhaRaman Folk Festival, I noted the variety of traditions represented there, meaning the audience sometimes displayed mixed applause to performances, enthusiastic in some parts, polite for those with which it was less familiar. One song, though, was unanimously and rapturously received; when I asked my neighbour what it was about, he replied, “Basically, all our communities need to come together and drive the Brits out of our country”.
Later, when I asked festival director Ahmed Kaysher for details of this song, describing its contents, he wanted to know the name, which unfortunately I couldn’t supply. “You need to be specific,” he said: “there are loads of songs like that!” Eventually, we shared the bill at another event at Leeds Industrial Museum where he presented a programme of anti-imperialist songs that nevertheless proved popular with our mainly-English audience. It was occasions like this that made me interested in working with Saudha.
Ahmed Kaysher is also the driving force and curator of Saudha, the Society of Poetry and Indian Music, which has mounted a roster of highly original and imaginative productions: Frida Kahlo Through Indian Classical Music was performed at the Royal Albert Hall and Saudha took Lyrics of Love from the South Bank Centre to Edinburgh Fringe. Chayanaut through Sebastian Bach at the House of Commons, Taste of Twilight at ICCR, Kolkata and the Welsh Parliament were all well-received in the media while Rupban – A Ballad of a Bengali Oedipus received a standing ovation at Leeds Clothworkers Hall at its centenary celebrations. One of the many things that impresses me about Saudha is how it engages with world cultures through an undiluted Indian heritage. In conversation, Ahmed casually referenced Paul Célan to illustrate a point, not a writer even poets in these islands can always be relied on to know.
Ahmed was supportive of my ideas for a site-specific talk and readings about connections between Irish and Indian music, reflecting their relationship to supernatural dimensions including religion, jinns, duende and fairies – topographically relevant to the event as we’ll see later. A Tagore aficionado, needless to say, he told me about the poet’s ‘mystic modernism’ – this may seem a contradiction now, but Alfred Orage’s Leeds Arts Club displayed a similar mixture of enthusiasms for avant-garde art and theosophy (Orage himself was later befriended by Aleister Crowley).
Ahmed likes his projects to be a feast for the senses and a barbecue was laid on for the Saudha evening, as there had been grand spreads at the RadhaRaman festivals. This also recalled memories of my mother at family occasions, so I’m going to use it as a pretext to reproduce a group poem from a workshop I led with the Touchstone Sikh Elders, an occasion where every verse-end was deemed an excuse to conjure up food – so I made that the theme of our session.
The Meaning of Food
The meaning of food is the sharing of it like poetry:
your favourite meal cooked for decades by somebody
who loves you but will never taste it because of its meat.
The meaning of food is in that it clarifies like poetry
and butter in a pan so you can see better the little things
that make all the difference on the plate, the page, the world.
The meaning of food is in the kindness of the woman
who can tell shop-bought garam masala in a hostess’ cooking
but remains silent as the white space around the words of a poem.
The meaning of food is also the bounty of God and nature:
a world with twenty thousand edible plants, galaxies of spices,
seas of oils, enough beans for different dhals every day of the week.
The meaning of food is its beauty: the cream bouquet
of a cauliflower, the aubergine purple as a Roman emperor,
rainbows of chilies, moons of onion rings, suns of sliced potatoes.
The meaning of food is what it means to know goodness:
garlic for your heart, hing for wind and ginger for everything,
then the blessings food receives and gives to you in the gurdwara.
The meaning of food includes that it can be so simple,
or so rich that your doctor asks if you still cook the old way,
as your blood pressure tablets don’t seem to be working any more . . .
The meaning of food can be licked from your fingertips,
though your children now demand knives and forks complaining
that to eat with hands might ruin the mobile phones always with them
The meaning of food defies time: childhood is never lost
but always just a half-forgotten taste away, a smell in the street
or escaping a kitchen like a snatch of an old song or a new poem.
By Hardeep Kaur Khalsi, Sewa Singh Khalsi, Satwant Virdi, Darshan Virdi, Mr. Sohanpal, Surinder Riat, Mrs Suryavansi, Pakash Hare, Surjit Dhanjal, Surinder Jit Kaur, Mrs S. Nath, Mrs A. Kalsy, Mrs R. Matharu, Zubaida Khan with Ian Duhig
The pleasure taken in life and art by Ahmed and among these relocated cultures of large, food-loving families like my own, based as they are outside universities so not driven by a pursuit of qualifications, is one of the reasons I enjoyed my involvement with them so much.
“Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine – good God, how fine” Keats wrote to his friend Charles Wentworth Dilke; the day before Roundhay, Saudha had performed at Keats House and I certainly wanted to explore the more sinister aspects of the fairy figure, as he did in his poetry. Reviewing Francis Young’s new book Twilight of the Godlings for the TLS, George Morris writes “the author identifies a consistent role for these small gods, inhabiting the same cultural niches and bearing significant similarities, such as an association with sources of water . . . worked out through scriptural references to giants, fallen angels and monstrous beings”. I would return to an Irish account of fairies in relation to fallen angels in my poem written for this occasion, Turns.
I was scheduled to read after Shree Ganguly, whose dramatic short story The Snake features those and jinns, the latter believed sometimes to inhabit the former. I’d heard it when we read together before and incorporated those elements into Turns. I would be followed by singers Sumana Mallik Basu and Srimati Koyel Battacharya, who it was hoped might sing Rāg Malkauns, “the Rāg of Jinns” but we overran. After Koyel, Jon Erik Schelander spoke to and performed songs of the troubadours, on whose music an Arabic influence has been the subject of scholarly speculation as far back as 16th-century Italian historian, Giammaria Barbieri. The more recent Arabic Andalusian influence on Lorca is well-known as is also that of the Roma on his concept of deuce, which we will return to in an Irish context.
A short distance from Barran’s Fountain, there is a waterfall mentioned in an old song set in Roundhay Park with very Yeatsian words by JH Eccles: “Come to the fairy glen, / Come to the waterfall . . .” (note the watery location in relation to Young’s comments). As the company and I set up, Somali children dressed as fairies from a nearby party danced about us and the fountain until shooed away by the musicians. They were the first sprinkle of magic over our event that evening. Mage and fairy-enthusiast Yeats was very interested in Indian culture, including the work of Tagore, I read Tagore’s poem Waiting after my talk alongside Heaney’s The Given Note, inspired by Seán Ó Riada’s account of Pórt Na bPúcaí (or The Fairy Lament) and its magical arrival into the Blasket repertoire.
One advantage for any artist living in Leeds is the opportunities for cross-cultural collaborations and mine included working with Satnam Galsian on our Ilkley Festival Commission, Rosa Alba, Rosa Mundi. Satnam is a classically trained singer of north Indian heritage who has been fruitfully exploring its similarities with Irish styles: her rendition of She Moved Through The Fair in that mixolydian pentatonic scale shared by Indian music, is a moving and beautiful experience.
However, Daniel M Neuman writes in his The Life of Music in North India, “When rāg Malkauns ceases to be the rāg of jinns and becomes a pentatonic scale, the music becomes something different because it means something different”. As soon as I start talking about Satnam’s performance using words like mixolydian and pentatonic, I feel the magic of the experience retreat from me, rather as in the famous story about the great 16th-century CE Hindustani musician, Tansen and Akbar we will come to later.
That’s the point of Neuman’s quote, I think, and why in my short talk I invoked paradox, magic and theology as analogies for what happens in art when it moves into the realms of the indescribable, as well as Lorca’s accounts of duende, the word itself originally meaning a supernatural being something like one of Young’s godlings or an Irish fairy.
When I was discussing my ideas with Ahmed Kaysher, he said rāg Malkauns always sounded Irish to him and sang a melodic line that really seemed to illustrate both what he was saying and my theme. Seán Ó Riada lectured and broadcast on the relationship between Irish and Indian traditional musics, especially as manifested in sean-nós styles, although this idea goes back at least to George Petrie’s comments in his 1855 Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland.
How this connection might be established to scholarly satisfaction is a butterfly that has never been pinned down – did it travel from India with who we now know as the Roma, as has been suggested in relation to flamenco and canto jondo (“deep song”)? I seem to recall Taruskin writing that unaccompanied singing wherever it is from develops certain features in common such as rubato and a highly-ornamented line. So maybe it was just a coincidence – or maybe the music was carried on the air like the tune of The Fairy Lament.
When I talk about performances of music and poetry seeming to have supernatural dimensions, I am aware the suggestion moves them closer to the territory associated with religious practices. Some of the Saudha artists had been involved in a version of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land where his use of the sanskrit word for peace, Shantih, prayed at the end of an Upanishad, attracted the company and they employed music and dance in their spectacular realisation of what is usually considered a bleak poem. Its use was defended by Eliot to Eurocentric audiences as clearly suggesting a ritual closure, whether or not they knew its actual translation is known. Grail imagery from The Waste Land fed into my Roundhay poem, Turns because of Saudha’s use of it in their project.
Poetry, where the condensation of language and manipulation of syntax are used to imply much larger and more complex ideas, can overlap in technique, if not ambition, with religious expression (“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer” as Derek Walcott said in The Paris Review interview with Edward Hirsch). Perhaps partially because of this, poets often become suspicious to adherents of religions: I was acutely aware that there would be Muslims in our Roundhay audience and recalled words from the untranslatable Qur’an in my version by MAS Abdel Haleem: “Only those who are lost in error follow the poets” and Geertz’s Local Knowledge: “The man who takes up the poet’s role in Islam traffics, and not wholly legitimately, in the moral substance of his culture . . . Poetry is morally ambiguous because it is not sacred enough to justify the power it actually has and not secular enough for that power to be equated to ordinary eloquence.” Eloquence is suspect in Christianity as well, of course, the distinguishing talent of the Antichrist in the Bible.
Indian musicians have long been aware of this and Neuman relates the story I mentioned earlier of Akbar asking Tansen to take him to hear Tansen’s guru sing. He does so and Akbar is enthralled by the guru’s beautiful, transcendent performance. Back at court, Akbar asks Tansen to sing the same bhajan, which Tansen does, perfectly. Yet Akbar says somehow it’s not the same, something is lacking. Tansen explains his guru sang for God: he’s only singing for a king.
Maybe as poets and musicians, this is how we cover our backs against the suspicion that if we make or play something wonderful, we were given the power to do so when we met the Devil at the crossroads or somesuch, so we give credit to higher powers. Sometimes religious and supernatural abilities overlap, as for example in what my family knew as “priestly powers”. As recently as 1982 on RTÉ, a programme presented by Donncha Ó Dúlaing explored with folklorist Pádraig Ó Héalaí the use of the priest’s power in folklore. My uncle Tommy had a story where a local woman abusing the parish priest was threatened by him with being turned into a rat. That night, kneeling beside the bed with her husband, after they had finished their prayers, he turned to her and said “Be sure you put the cat out . . .”
This brings me to my poem Turns, written in the spirit of Indian music’s structured improvisations and linking Irish and Indian motifs, including the significance of the number three. As site-specific, like the joke, you really had to be there, but like its serpents, I hope it helps to wind this up in an interesting way. I should mention that a ‘hay is a lively old dance, hence “antic hay” in Marlowe’s Edward II.
Turns
By Saudha’s Poetry and Music Festival stage in Roundhay,
the park with a circle-dance, serpent-dance name, I wait
my turn, my mind turning over the organiser’s words:
“Rāg Malkauns always seems to me like an Irish tune.”
I wait to read with its magic music going round my head,
for its Schom, the last beat also a first as if in a triskelion reel.
My mind unreels a line of an old song set in Roundhay Park:
“Come to the fairy glen” winding unto The Fairy Lament
from Ireland where I heard that fairies were once angels
exiled for neutrality in Heaven’s Civil War. Fairies, jinns
or poets are many-sided, good to bad, shaded black to white.
In one story, it is those neutral angels that guard the Holy Grail.
To find the Grail, Parzifal needed good turns from his handsome,
half-Moorish half-brother Feirefiz with skin likened to writing
on vellum. I write on milk of the ocean churned by Vasuki,
serpent aide to Shiva of the triple godhead in that old story
once linked to the Holy Grail. But what if Vasuki turns to bite
his tail like the Celtic serpent? Suddenly, I hear a ringing Schom!
Now at the Saudha Poetry and Music Festival in Roundhay Park
with its circle-dance, serpent-dance name, I’ll read this poem
for the very first time. I have read this poem here forever.
For all my talk about fairies, jinns, duende and magic, I finished my talk in Roundhay as I finish this now with an acknowledgement that the great Irish and Indian musicians I know about shared one feature of genius as identified by Carlyle, the infinite capacity for taking pains, one feature of magic Irish poet Michael Longley described as the alchemy of hard work.
The alchemy of Saudha’s events are achieved by Ahmed’s hard work and that of all the performers. People greet me with “How’s the poetry going?”, (Gerry Dawe even used that phrase as a title for one of his books). Neuman reports that among Indian musicians the question would be “How’s the riaz (practise) going?” something Irish musicians would understand. A sitar student himself, Neuman had to learn “the beauty of mutilated cuticles” and considered filing grooves into his fingernails to look a truly serious musician among his fellows. You can know a great poet by what they cut from their writing: perhaps the capacity for dissatisfaction with their own productions is an artist’s secret magic power.
I ended my talk with another fairy story I heard in Ireland. It concerned a man out for a walk in the country one night who encounters a fairy in some predicament and frees it. The grateful fairy offers the man a wish as a reward and the man replies that he is a piper, but would like to be a great one. The fairy is pleased not to be asked for gold but inquires if the man wants to be thought a great piper by himself or other people. “By myself, of course!” he says, a little puzzled by the fairy’s question.
A few weeks pass and the piper is out for a late stroll in the same area when he meets the same fairy who asks him how his wish is going. Not too well, the man confesses: I think I play wonderfully but everyone else just tells me to stop that awful racket. Unusually, the fairy gives him a second bite at the cherry. The man becomes the most celebrated piper of his age but all he can hear is the errors he makes, the ornamentation he botches and thinks how much more practice he’ll need to eliminate these mistakes, wonders if he’ll ever eliminate them all, knows that would be impossible. That is the point: as Valéry is reported to have put it: “A difficulty is a light; an insurmountable difficulty is a sun.”
