Reported By:
| Edited By: DNA Sunday Team |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 02:02 PM IST
For hardcore Tam-Brams, like yours truly, there are few joys in life as pure as sitting by the window during a downpour, enjoying a freshly-brewed, piping cup of filter kaapi with a book such as this one — Shobha Deepak Singh's Musicscapes – The Multiple Emotions of Indian Music.
With this latest tome, Padmashri awardee Singh completes her Scapes trilogy on Indian fine arts, following Dancescapes and Theatrescapes. While these previous books were collections of photo-freezes by her, honouring our dance forms and navarasas respectively, Musicscapes is a tedious collection of over 200 photos, many of which are candid shots, of the great names from Hindustani classical music.
These have been curated by Alka Pande from lakhs of images captured by Singh's curious lens over nearly five decades. Being in black-and-white, the pictures have a dream-like feel and charm to them, with no descriptions to limit or distract their impact on the imagination. Although Singh includes references at the end of the book mentioning the names of the legends, there are no dates, just as in her other Scapes series.
Musicscapes is full of majestic images of the legends of Hindustani classical music, some gesticulating in trance, while some animated, as if wrestling the high notes to stay in tune with the tanpura.
The imaginative journey with a book such as this one is a personal one. For me, it was like those good old days, when my brother and I excitedly went through All India Radio's annual brochure on Akashwani Sangeet Sammelan – a catalogue with photos of the artistes to be aired on radio for that year. Being exponents of Carnatic music, we were curious to know the Hindustani legends lined up that year as much as the Carnatic ones.
So my imagination stutters for a moment to find that this book has no southern representatives apart from the Ghatam great Vikku Vinayakaram, who is captured in jugalbandi with the mesmerisingly photogenic Zakir Hussain.
I assume it would've been apt to tag the book 'The Multiple Emotions of Hindustani Music' instead, since Shobha Singh serves as the director of Delhi's Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra, which is reputed for its training courses in Hindustani classical art forms, and the Kendra is also where the pictures of the virtuosos were shot.
Going by coffee table book standards, this one is for keeps for the many conversations it'll initiate with unbiased lovers of Indian classical music. In all, the complete Scapes trilogy by Singh, who is as passionate about her intuitive photography as she is about promoting and preserving our fine arts, is a tremendous achievement.
(The author works in an MNC, is a musician and an avid citizen blogger)
