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'DNA' special: A pujari who now sings a global tune

Avadhoot Gandhi, a priest who often trades his clergyman’s garb for jeans, a shirt and a backpack, could pass off as an employee at one of the mushrooming infotech parks

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Cymbals, mridang and the ektari strike up at the Narsimha Saraswati Swami Mandir in Alandi on the banks of the Indrayani, 25 kilometres off Pune. A voice joins in and the audience soaks in the devotion.

Avadhoot Gandhi, 32, a priest who often trades his clergyman’s garb for jeans, a shirt and a backpack, could pass off as an employee at one of the mushrooming infotech parks.

He ends with the Jai Jai Ramkrishna Hari chant and devotees queue up, seeking his blessings. While that’s de riguer for locals, many in the queue just want to congratulate Gandhi on the eve of the worldwide launch of his album by UnderscoreRecords.com, an online distribution platform for Indian music started by classical vocalist Shubha Mudgal and her husband, tabla maestro Aneesh Pradhan.

“Not many folk artistes like me have the privilege of getting a launch pad like this. I hope that this will help other artistes from different genres of Indian music find a platform,” he says. And yet, Gandhi, who specialises in Bhakti music of the warkari sampradaya, now has an international album to his credit.

So how did this singer-priest who specialises in a niche genre cut an album that is released globally?

“We had featured Gandhi and his companions at ‘Baajaa Gaajaa 2011’, a festival that Aneesh and I curate annually,” Mudgal told DNA. “In a three-day music festival packed with over 50 performances of all varieties and genres, we knew we’d picked a winner when audiences — critics, the cognoscenti, and uninitiated listeners — unanimously responded favourably to him.”

‘Focus is on film and populist music only’
After the festival, when the couple contacted Gandhi to include his recorded tracks in the playlist for a weekly radio show they curate, they found that he had no recordings. “There weren’t even standalone tracks available as demos,” Mudgal rues. “This, unfortunately, is a predicament Gandhi shares with a lot of Indian musicians today — that of being almost totally ostracised or grossly neglected by a mainstream music industry that no longer caters to diverse tastes in music. With the mainstream music industry focussing only on a few genres like film music and a populist brand of devotional music, exponents of other, supposedly niche genres have had to fend for themselves.”

Pradhan adds: “We realised this is where self-publishing and online distribution can play a major role in empowering artistes so that they are not dependent on established record labels as mai-baaps for recording solutions.”

Gandhi says that for him, this was the unthinkable. “I never thought that an artiste like me would ever find space even in the alternative music industry because here too pop and Western forms dominate.”

Mudgal and Pradhan then made an offer to Gandhi: to record him and his musicians as a sort of induction into the processes of self-publishing and online distribution. “Our proposal was to finance and support the recording, and then hand over a professionally-recorded, mixed and mastered album to the singer-pujari. We would also familiarise him with issues related to intellectual property rights, contracts (for example, obtaining release letters and deeds of assignment from members of the group), and licensing, as well as introduce him to the many available channels for online distribution,” says Mudgal.

Recording his own album
Once the offer was accepted, they began the process of working out logistics. “We first thought of recording the artistes in a studio but later decided to record the group in the temple itself since the performance’s emotional charge would have died in the sterile confines of a studio,” she adds.
 
In September last year, a team led by audio engineer Nitin Joshi — armed with microphones and laptops, a network of gears, wires, and two video cameras — spent six hours making preparations and recording 12 tracks. “The musicians helped us before donning white dhotis to perform themselves. Since the idea was to get a natural reverb of the place with ambient sounds, we stuck to that even during the post-production,” says Joshi. “We didn’t keep devotees away, although a team member was assigned to ‘sentry duty’ to keep visitors from entering between takes. While some surprised devotees glanced at the goings on before moving on to pray, others stayed on to listen. The children and the trainee pujaris from the Vedpaathshala added to the experience.”

As the album went through mixing and mastering, Gandhi asked whether he could compile a second volume to the album, as he had forgotten to include a composition in Bhairavi.

“I feel Volume 2 will be a good idea if Avadhoot feels confident about handling the project independently, without any handholding from us,” says Mudgal. “It will be an indication that he has enjoyed the process of recording and documenting his music, and has found both pleasure and benefit in distributing it in CD and digital formats.”

She adds: “It feels great to be part of such an enabling process to keep alive a continuing tradition — which is disciplined but charged, passionate, respectful and performed by young artistes who believe in both spiritual and musical content.”

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