A tranquil note from the Deccan
Sreevalsan Thiyyadi
Around the time when TS Eliot died, Rajeev Taranath happened to return to Mysuru where he had done his doctoral research on the American poet. That was in 1965, when an educational institution offered him a job. By then, a decade had passed since Rajeev first met Hindustani virtuoso Ali Akbar Khan, whom he made his guru. Lessons from the maestro at Calcutta had made the youngster a promising sarod player. The resonant slides he generated on the fretless instrument gave audiences the impression that Rajeev could visualise the ragas he rendered unhurriedly. This feature appeared like an extension of his PhD thesis on the image in Eliot’s modernism.
True, Rajeev had a love for literature and music right from childhood. Yet, sarod was not on his mind. Its weighty plucks fell hard like staccato notes on the ears of the boy growing up in Bangalore. Already initiated into the tabla under his multifaceted father, Pandit Taranath, he looked set to emerge as a decent singer. Titans Panchakshara Gawai and Venkatarao Ramdurgkar were grooming the teenager in vocals after the boy unexpectedly lost the family’s head. If he stood brave, that was also because of his spunky mother, G Sumati, a Pondicherry woman close to freedom fighter Sarojini Naidu.
Rajeev, nearing 20, sang increasingly well, but was unsure of his preferences — until a titan served him an “epiphany”. In 1952, the youth saw Ali Akbar perform in Bangalore.
The reverberations from the fingers of the Maihar gharana exponent caught his fancy. It grew into an obsession with the passing of weeks. So much so, in a couple of years, Rajeev travelled 2,000 km north-eastward to the Bengal capital. Ali Akbar’s immediate response was guarded, but when Rajeev repeated the act months later by knocking at the door, the sarodiya was warmer and accepting. Eventually, the gharana groomed by Allaudin Khan (1862-1972) in central India (to where he moved from Chittagong region of present-day Bangladesh) got an acolyte from down the peninsula. Rajeev, for all his admiration for Ali Akbar, didn’t lose interest in literature. The passion made him an academic; he became an English professor at the Regional Engineering College in Trichy. Then happened another decisive turn.
Aged 51 and a divorcee, Rajeev was prompted to become a full-fledged musician by another of Baba Allaudin’s disciples. Sitar celebrity Ravi Shankar’s advice led Rajeev to renew regular ties with Ali Akbar, who was by then a resident of the US. That overseas tutelage spanned a quarter century — till Ali Akbar’s death in 2009. Rajeev sustained his learning spirit, waking up in pre-dawn hours for practice even as he gave classes, including online. This went on till last month when a fall fractured his leg. The Padma awardee died in Mysuru on June 11, four months short of completing 92.
The sarod lost a practitioner of both bold and delicate strokes, notes sitarist-percussionist Nayan Ghosh. To him, Rajeev’s glides were sometimes indistinguishable from his guru’s, epitomising the high level of mastery. Musicologist Indudhar Nirody used to laud Rajeev’s tihais, where the three-beat bols would perfectly hit the sam, the first beat of the rhythmic cycle. Yet, as Rajeev’s pupil Sachin Hempe notes, the guru may occasionally miss it, too, during practice sessions. “He’d work till he fixed it.”
To Rajeev, who taught at Aden University in Florida for a decade, music was a pursuit for excellence: “It’s about how well you develop a note to express a lofty idea. Many know more ragas than I do; they play faster too.” At group tuitions, he seldom let the acolytes play together. In effect, they were one-on-one. Minimalism ruled his music; he often quoted a confession of Ali Akbar: “My earnest attempt is to move from a clean ‘ni’ to an equally neat ‘sa’. I’ve managed it four or five times in my entire life.”
Rajeev was into cinema briefly. For two decades till the early 1990s, he directed the music in nine southern films. “Such a challenge requires (AR) Rahman, not Rajeev,” he’d sum up, self-deprecatingly. Even so, “instrumental music is a good bridge between cultures”.
