Opera and Indian Music

(With special reference to the art of Dilip Kumar Roy)

The purpose of the present review is to demonstrate the dramatic qualities of music, not of course according to the traditional conception of it. It must be pointed out at the outset that ‘music-drama’ per se is not much in vogue in our country. We propose, however, to familiarise our readers with its importance, not only as a species of music but also as a fascinating type of pure art with unsuspected possibilities.

In order to explain our points in a convincing manner it is necessary to take a concrete instance, and the achievements of Dilip Kumar Roy in this particular direction will stand us in good stead. It will be convenient for us to discuss his songs in the Indian languages and to study the evolution of the Drama as exhibited therein.

One of his Bengali songs, namely, ‘He mohan bajao banshi’ (Oh, enchanter, play on thy flute) appeared to me to be a sort of rhythmic action–a dramatic representation of a series of emotional states, all organically connected and attendant upon the endeavour to attain a definite aim–‘an aspiration enclosed in the circle of a representation’–action, character, local colour, expressed through deathless song.

It had its objective side in rhythmic action, which was suggested and worked out in detail by means of a steadily accelerating movement, expressed mainly by varying the tempo, force and pitch. The lyrical element lay chiefly in its romantic beauties, the sonorous subtleties and delicacies, the dulcet harmonies, the wonderful modulations, the haunting melodies and vocal architectonics, and secondly in its inspirational fervour that animated the soul of the auditor with the vision of ‘veiled immensities’ and the possession of ‘indefinable ecstasies.’

The dramatic representation, by virtue of its rhythmic character, readily suggested a dance-scene whether it be the dance of the waves or of human feet.

As in drama, the song had its clearly perceptible ascent, climax, pause, and denouement, the plays and interplays. Whatever could have been the literary implications of the song, the motif appeared to me to be the singer’s earnest quest for the ideal as suggested, among other things, by the increase in pitch and volume, while the acceleration in rhythm symbolised the intensity of the struggle to attain the ideal.

The feelings which the song roused in me were somewhat akin to those of an imaginary boatman in the following impressionistic sketch:

The pulsation of the song at its commencement was even: like the even heart-throb of a boatman rowing in silent waters, with a dumb, clear sky overhead, and no premonition of the impending storm. Then his joy in his task and mirth in his gay surroundings…..His glad rhythmic expression…..The storm…….The fury of the elements……The Tandava dance……The struggle…….The conquest of Nature…..The exultation……The sublimity of calm repose…….The fatigued and wearisome prolongation of the voyage till a restoration to normal is achieved.¹

The charm dissolved apace, leaving the memory of the palpitating vision of Nataraj and of his wild perennial dance to the elemental tunes of Love, Life and Mystery.

Strange as it may seem to the lay reader in view of the age-old theory of music’s non-imitative and ideal character wherein lies no ‘distracting duty of calling up images of particular and perishable phenomena and whereby expression is given to emotion that may be quite detached from all definite ideas or images,’ although in the wider Aristotelian sense of mimesis music is indirect imitation, I yet had a vision of Uday Shankars’ Tandava or Shiva dance (as suggested by the peculiar nature of Roy’s music) which by the laws of association at once recalled a storm-swept scene with its previous and future histories in contiguity, as a corollary to my feeling of an organic evolution of movement made tangible through music. The pictorial impression was not so distinct as the reality and the strength of the "torrent of varied and entrancing emotion which the song poured along the heart–emotion latent and un- divined", since the pictorial effect is only secondary and derivative. Yet it raised the interesting question of the possibility of music’s ability to conjure up images, assuredly not particular but ideal images. I was aware, not of a spirit only but of motion, and not only of motion but of shapes in motion. Just as the Grecian urn provoked the whole corpus of a dramatic imagery in Keats, so did Roy’s well-appointed music, by stimulating the art-sense of rhythmic forms, produce in me the sensation of a vision of a dance-scene symbolical of the inner struggle in the singer’s mind–sometimes "the soul crying for the over-soul, silent behind the panoramic pageantry," and at other times "aflame with the fire of its own harmony"–‘the cry of the eternal child.’

Until the period of the success of the opera during the last century in Europe, the ‘dramatic’ quality in music had been a moot point. It is a settled fact now. Still to the vast majority of Indians, this ‘dramatic’ power of music has not been clearly brought home by many Indian musicians. We shall try to prove de novo the dramatic quality in music by way of elucidation of Dilip Kumar Roy’s music. In this connection it is well to recall the following remarks of the late Mr. Krishnadhan Banerjee, a nineteenth century authority on music, who surprisingly enough was the first Indian to realise the importance of dramatic music as a desideratum for meeting the growing and complex needs of modernity, to champion its cause and to prophesize for its advent in no distant future. Dilip Kumar Roy, who has heralded this advent and has used it as an artistic instrument of psychoological expression, is its first and chief exponent in India, and is a firm believer in its competence. "Just as the drama is the highest perfection of literary form, the highest perfection of music is dramatic music......The types of music that are in vogue today in our country are not dramatic–they are all ‘Vaithaki’. Dramatic music is very difficult of achievement; it necessitates an appropriate study and adequate knowledge of tunes and character. The business of dramatic music is to express in tunes all the emotions of the human mind and all the tuneful happenings of the external world which bear any relation to human deeds–and thereby cause an illusion in the auditor’s brain." (Extract from ‘Gita-Sutrasara,’ Ch. XI, by the late Krishnadhan Banerjee, quoted in Bengali in ‘Gitashree’ by Dilip Kumar Roy and Nishikanta, and herein translated by the writer). The vocal music that is in vogue in Indian ‘Jatras’ and theatres is more or less a type of songs which serve to explain or emphasize the actor’s or speaker’s actions or deeds in terms of feeling; else, they simply suit the atmosphere of the moment. They seldom, if ever, satisfy the criterion of the power of rousing any dramatic feelings by themselves, divorced from their special context, in that they do not give rise to the sensation and perception of any action–unlike the really dramatic songs of a Wagner or a Dilip Kumar Roy which do possess such power. The -ground music of Indian theatres and talkies is, however, made up of pieces of dramatic music yet in its infancy.

It is this effect probably, "whether coupled or not with a trained intellectual recognition of the highly abstract and elaborate nature of the laws of the relation, succession, and combination of sounds on which the effect depends, that has caused some thinkers, with Schopenhauer at their head, to find in music the nearest approach we have to a voice from behind the veil, a universal voice expressing the central purpose and deepest essence of things." ²

Sound is wave-motion. It vibrates within itself. It is self-revealing, unlike words which are created to express definite ideas. By a special configuration of a set sounds–the musical atoms we my say–with another set, a combination of sound-waves is achieved. Rhythm and tempo give motion to these waves. Our hearts vibrate in unison with this motion or vibration; and as such, the emotion that we experience through musical tones is peculiar to music and is not necessarily related to any definite reality of experience. Motion or energy is the quintessence of creation, and, if aesthetically consitituted as in music or dancing, creates in us an apposite vibrant emotion.

But since we possess this aesthetic faculty of musical creation, it is but natural for us to try to give expression to our real or ideal feelings with their subtle variations through music.

Music and dancing being both space-and-time arts suggest each other. Dancing suggests shapes or forms in motion, which again suggest drama.

Let us now, search for any psychological reason underlying the possibility of music ever giving rise to any pictorial impression in the first place, and the sensation of drama in the second, How was it that from sensation of sound we arrived at a perception of shapes? How was it that Dilip Kumar Roy’s music recalled a ‘Tandava’ scene which, coupled with other effects, gave rise to a sensation and perception of a drama on the sea, by the laws of analogy and association, the images being readily evoked from the depths of the sub-conscious?

"Modern psychology teaches that, odd as it at first appears, our more or less definite images, auditive as well as visual, and whether actually perceived or merely remembered, are in reality the intermittent part of the mind’s contents coming and going and weaving themselves on to a constant woof of our own activities and feelings. It is precisely such activities and feelings which are mainly in question when we use the words, Beautiful and Ugly. Thus everything which has come in connection with occasions for satisfactory shape-contemplation will meet with somewhat of the same reception as that shape-contemplation originally elicited….even the mere nervous intoxication furnished by the musician will all be irradiated by the emotion due to the shapes they have been conveyed in, and will therefore be felt as beautiful." (Vernon Lee: "The Beautiful.")

"Epic and Lyric, or Drama and Lyric," as Croce rightly remarks, "are ‘Scholastic’ divisions of the indivisible, Art is always lyrical–that is, epic and dramatic in feeling." ³ The greatest operatic composer of the nineteenth century, Wagner, expressed psychology in music. "And not only the varying shades of human emotion but also the passion and force of the elements are rendered in his music in a powerful and realistic manner, all the existing rules of musical composition being strained to their utmost to suit Wagner’s purposes." ⁴ The same holds true of Dilip Kumar Roy also who in his music-drama expressed his emotional realism by his arrangements of well-constituted pitch, rhythm, tonality and harmony, by his rich tapestry, inlaid work, and gossamer patterns, and generally by his perfect utilisation of the ‘emotional alphabet’ of Indian music.

In Dilip Kumar Roy’s music-drama (we do not use the term with any Wagnerian association) the emotion was properly worked up, the development being nowhere jerky but progressive. The very quiet beginning of the song reminded one of the sense of calm, haunting the memorable lines of Keats in his Ode to Psyche–.

"Mid hush’d, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,
Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,
They lay calm-breathing on the bedded grass."

Before the song reached its climax, it clearly exhibited the anguish of creation. It was no musical extravaganza. It was a serious production and evinced a sense of an evolutionary process–a sense of organic unity, of cohesion, of unity in diversity. He harped on certain words like ‘udasi’(the indifferent one) and byatha (sorrow) with infinite colour and soulful yearning, squeezing the juice out of them as it were, like ‘linked sweetness long drawn out’–and even now they stand alone in my memory mantled in a halo of unforgettable appeal and haunting melodies.

Let me now enumerate briefly the salient features of the generality of his songs as they appear to me. The first essential characteristic which at once strikes the auditor is the natural spontaneity of his expressions. "He is no conscious artist"–thus says my esteemed friend, Sri Vismadev Chatterjee, the great, if not the greatest, classical singer of Bengal. Dilip Kumar Roy sings indeed "in full-throated ease" of profound things that sway the human mind–ambition, love, faith, mystic communion. His music has an easy movement which is often charged with the indomitable spirit of a mountain-stream or a rushing cataract. The second trait is the life or darad of his song. The songs are intensely alive, charged with the spirit of their creator’s masterful emotional and intellectual organisation. Thirdly, there is a persistent quality of the vast, of a Colossus, both in the conception and in the execution of his songs, which touches the texture of the serious auditor’s -ground of artistic imagination. For instance, in his ‘Eso ma vijaya,’the pictorial impression supplied was a sort of Arati-Nritya or the dance of the devotee in a temple, by the sea-shore, the billowy sea dancing in sympathy with the devotee, supplying a fit -ground.⁵ His famous song in the Malkosh tune punctuated with Akhar (which may be found in his ‘Surjyamukhi’) was a marvellous trilogy of the annihilation, creation and maintenance of the universe. The goddess who was invoked in the song, in her elemental dance-song, symbolised this triple action or world-flux. It was a mighty maelstrom of human emotions, unprecedented in the annals of present day Indian music, in the profundity of pathos and surging intensity and the novelty of technique that silenced all criticism and carried the auditors completely afar with its tempestuous movement. No idea of it can be formed without giving the song a hearing. Fourthly, the songs possess the power of all true belle arti-namely, their capacity to be reproduced in the auditor’s mind according to the mind’s varying susceptibility; and their power to produce often the state of a trance or aesthetic beatitude, seldom achieved by the art-expressions of the majority of musical artists. The melodies that we hear from Dilip Kumar Roy often readily stir up or lead to the ‘unheard melodies’–the music of the Eternal Spirit within and without:

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter, therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

Fifthly, new ideas of thought and vision, symbolism, suggestiveness, and exquisite and appropriate poetry–which sometimes recall the ‘Metaphysical Poets’ of English and Bengali Literature–are drawn with romantic glamour and iridescent grandeur on a vast canvas of epic proportions. "Dilip Kumar Roy has emphasized the word-value of Bengali music in preference to the intricacies of Hindustani melody-moulds, and demonstrated the ample scope of Tan in Bengali music." He has appropriately used consonants and compound letters for Gamak, and vowels for Tan, and with his rich appaisonatas has sought "expression through word-projections and melody-expansions." He has furthermore effected a happy marriage of words with tunes. In the course of a speech introductory to his musical demonstrations he compared this union as being in the nature of a chemical compound and not a mechanical mixture. His songs possess what Prof. Dhurjatiprosad Mukherjee of the Lucknow University calls the balanced beauty of the Ardhanariswara and not the grotesque zoomorphism of the Greek satyr or centaur–in his glorious synthesis of poetry, tune and idea, Sixthly, he has carried on the tradition of his renowned father, Dwijendralal, who according to Prof. Dhurjatiprosad first introduced the western air, specially, we may say, in his famous comic songs. He has hailed it as brimful of the elan, the life-force, with adequate and typical demonstrations in Thumri-Dadra, quasi-Dhrupada, in Teot and Sur-Phanktal, and many other tunes "having distinct echoes of the waltz." Lastly, as great art transcends the limitations of time and space, Dilip Kumar Roy’s music is phosphorescent: it glows in the dark recesses of the auditors’ memory.

Dilip Kumar Roy’s song is a happy nexus of classicism and romanticism–inasmuch as representation and feeling are most artistically blended. Balance or poise has been most markedly achieved in his song. His is a classic spirit breathing through a romantic body. The classic Raga, though not divested of the solemnity of its age, in its spirit is yet rehabilitated in the rich, full and multi-coloured raiments of modernity; is yet made to suffer an orientation in its state of limited freedom and knowledge, and is endowed with a democracy of movement and cultural expansion, as is in consonance with the march of progress, with the pulse of the age, yet revealing the spirit of a growing mind, bearing the hall-mark of individuality and originality.

1 Cf. Chaliapin’s famous "Song of the Volga Boatmen."

2 Dr. Sidney Colvin on "Fine Arts" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Ed.

3 Croce: "Breviaria di estetica."

4 "History of Music" The Britannica Home University Series.

5 Of course, the poetry of the song, read or recited as poetry only, does not warrant any such image, but, when sung, it is a different matter altogether. As has been pointed out previously in this review, music differs from other fine arts in its indefiniteness and plasticity, and it can supply any number of different images. What is meant to be stressed by us is that this ground of the sea, etc., is really full of a suggestion of vastness, which does not fail to impress upon the auditor.