tayabet The Journey Of A Note: A Poetic Companion To 'Phool Ka Chand'

Photo: Artwork: Vikas Thakur Photo: Artwork: Vikas Thakur

One of the country’s most compelling contemporary auteurs, Amit Dutta, has pushed formal boundaries with films that use extensive research to create sensory narratives. His latest full feature-length hand-drawn animated film “Phool ka Chand” (Rhythm of a Flower) on the life and music of noted classical vocalisttayabet, Kumar Gandharva, claimed the prestigious Golden Gateway Award at MAMI 2024. The animation in the film is by Allen Shaw.

Dutta’s films have always carved a path into the process of the creative act—using time as a parameter to choreograph careful studies of place, presence, and identity. Gandharva was struck by tuberculosis, and Dutta’s film “…takes this single moment of him lying on his sick bed and expands it, where his life of music and contemplation moves like a dream. When he rises after six years in bed, with only one lung spared, he writes, sings, and teaches again, giving voice to the six long years of silence and bridging the old and new with visionary insights.” (From the Director’s Note)

Poet’s Note:

The Journey of a Note has been written as a companion piece to the film, while retaining the identity of an individual poetry cycle featuring the musician Kumar Gandharva. While it is not imagined as a ‘response’ or a ‘review’, the form asks the question: “What does it mean to write into?” There were moments in the film, where I was aware of being part of a conversation. The music and the sound led me, and I started to follow the ‘note’. A taught intuition that is inherent in the slow vistaar of the musical note, as sensation and emotion, arrived unbidden unto my fingers, and I began to write, untethered, the raw feeling that the sensitive listener is enveloped in. This state of witnessing is the reverie of making friends with sound—of riyaaz. I felt as one who is privy to meends and taans that ring with the punctuation of diverse cultures and histories of aesthetics.

Like in Dutta’s “Nainsukh”, I felt the stirrings of a new form of connection. This one was different, because I knew music in a way that I did not know visual art. Some moments took me back to my own taleem. I reflected on my experiences with my gurus—Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar and Ustad Bahauddin Dagar.

I felt that the only way—other than song—that those stories could be told was through poetry.

***

“Aaj main nahi mere tanpure gayenge”

(Kumar Ghandarva, in Phool Ka Chand)

for Amit Dutta

A child tells his music teacher

“Last night, ustad, I heard the tanpura sing”

The unheard note lies beaten

crumpled on the side of the room

It gathers the darkness and becomes a-light

a blinking eye on the prowl

Ustad bends his head close to my ears and says:

“now you don’t need to sing anymore, eh?”

The note becomes a bird whose beating river

of stone has been flung into the sky

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And the note—whose name meant softness

whose place was in a melody that danced

as a deer would—

and the note

that teaches a line to swim

scissors cloudinto a stream

of bronze temple bells

and ideas have children

whose voices curl into shape

and the note becomes a poem

a landscape a dream

the note ceases to be

the absence of sound

but wait the note

whose time has not come yet

where did it go

***

Animation

or the act of verbing the noun

Memory is laughter turned inside out

And from the fragments a light

Fingers that caress dead wood

that tease a rainbow out o’ the strings

Vibrating hairs that know the breadth

of a note are blind to the touch

of the shishya’s hands

We can only know sound

the way ekant knows its quarry

as a shard of dancing dust

we feel sound askance

the ear must strain to listen

to the banter of a night that has forgotten

to close the petals of the evening

it is always the cricket outside the window

laminated to the glass who reminds you

of your place in the world

it is always that shrill percussion

of eros that punctuates the room tone

of a mind at home, a heart alone

a Rimpoche once told me

that enlightenment isn’t turning down

the volume it is switching off

the tape recorder

to understand the birth of a bandish

I listen to the meend that takes a six-year long angdai

I watch a man waking up from sleep

the difference between cinema and dream

is that we cannot see language in a dream

but music shapes this absence

***

A Light

In the silence handcuffed two-to-a-light

the notes claw the earth set the dawn alight

In you everything moves the sun grows old

bamboo cries, grief splinters, the raag, a light

Paisley wind, engine’s reverie, camel’s

lilt, and crow’s screech—All, in your song, alight

The bird’s tail is a dog without a bone

is a child who’s found the sound of a light

The sickle’s blade bites grassThe river snakes

under-breath in the heart’s dark room, a light

It must be soft as waves’ lips on the shore

as a palm that holds the reins of a light

It must be old enough to be a tent

torn, with edges burnt, to let in the light

Ask the city for birdsong tell forest

your name Give song, give voice, give love, her light

***

Ouroboros

“When the tanpura is finely tuned, it feels like the notes are stuck to my fingers”

—Kumar Gandharva

After an hour of lovemaking

he plucks stars from her hair

don’t colour me red don’t

fingers open to reveal a ripening sun

the weariness of sheep

the gramophone’s conch-shelled ear

the hills separate in a whiff of smoke

the song rains on the belly of the earth

it is faagun maas and the air is thick

with pollen and longing

falling flowers and falling leaves

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Fog carries the morning

in her cart—under a shroud

stitched from slumbering city lights

and the vapour of drying pajamas

on parched verandahs

The cart is a taan that doubles in on itself

with laughter and creaking wood

The morning arpeggios

into a sky of kites

***

Postscript

“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies”

—On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer, John Keats

By the riverside

I will wait for you

In your song alone

this body will fly

(Views expressed are personal)

Aranya is a poettayabet, currently based in Delhi, a place to which he doesn’t belong. He is the editor of the newsletter poetly, and is currently pursuing a PHD in Social Anthropology