THE GOLDEN DRUMMING OF SWAPAN CHAUDHURI continued
In 1969, when Ali Akbar Khan returned to Calcutta from an extended
stay in America where he had just created the American branch
of the Ali Akbar College of Music, he invited the twenty-four
year old Swapan to his house to play for him. "I played for
maybe half an hour. Khansahib was impressed. He decided that I
should play with him that year in concert at the Tansen Music
Conference. It was a very important concert, the first concert
that Khansahib gave after he returned from America. He took the
risk." Swapanji pauses, reflecting on the memory, repeating,
"He took the risk. For no one knew me at that time. But by
then my love of tabla had begun to develop. It was no longer just
what my father told me to do." The concert, with the already
world-renowned Ali Akbar Khan, was a great success. It was after
that, when musicians began to call the young tabla player asking
him to play with them, that Chaudhuri decided to become a professional
musician. "My practice changed and increased. To become a
concert musician is very difficult. In India, if you're not from
a musician's family, it takes a very long time to establish yourself.
Slowly, over the next few years, I began to be known. I sought
out musicians. But I was often rejected. I remember once sitting
on the stage and a musician refused to play with me." Swapanji
pauses, "But maybe it was good for me, I learned tenacity,
I learned determination, I knew that one day those same musicians
who rejected me would come to ask me to play with them. After
a long time, I began to enjoy some success." During those
years, '69 to '81, Ali Akbar Khan invited him many times to come
to America, but Chaudhuri was determined to prove himself first
in India. "Even in '81 I didn't have the intention to leave
India, but the school needed a teacher and Khansahib asked me
to come. Also, my mother said, 'You should go this time. You should
accept.'" Swapanji hesitates for a long moment, then adds:
"It was her birthday. We were celebrating my mother's birthday.
I had played three concerts the night before, and had to play
one more at one o'clock. Then everybody came to our house, including
Khansahib and his family. My mother cooked for everybody. We had
a nice time and signed the contract. Then at night, just before
12 o'clock, my mother passed away. She had a massive heart attack.
It was her fifty-third birthday, January 26th. There were seven
or eight doctors in the house, but they could do nothing."
At the Ali Akbar College of Music, which by then was permanently
housed in San Rafael, Ali Akbar Khan had a succession of great
tabla masters: Shankar Ghosh, Mahaparush Misra, Jnan Prakash Ghosh,
Zakir Hussain. And, occasionally, Khansahib, himself, or Alla
Rakha, Zakir's legendary father, would teach a tabla class. However,
at the beginning of 1981, the school needed a new tabla master.
"But I could not leave India," Swapanji continues, "I
was too grief stricken. I could not leave my father. I did not
want to go to America. As the eldest son of a religious family,
there were many rituals I had to perform. Khansahib was very kind,
he told me to take my time, to think about it." After several
months, when Swapan's mourning duties were completed, Dr. Chaudhuri
urged his son to join Ali Akbar Khan in California, "It was
your mother's last wish, so you must go."
"I arrived in America on May 5, 1981. I came to the College
and I began to teach. The first concert I played in America was
on May 9th." Swapanji sips from a cup of tea a student has
brought him. "At first, being here was a terrible experience
for me. My grief for my mother, it was a very difficult period
in my life. I had left all my friends, my family, and much of
my professional life in India. Nobody knew me. There were few
Indian musicians here. It was so different, a whole cultural difference...
"Khansahib, of course, treated me as a son, he was so kind
to me, so loving. He still treats me like a son. I am his son.
There's no doubt about it. Even though I'm now fifty half a century,
he still scolds me, he gives me love, it is all combined. He was
giving me so much affection at that time, trying to loosen me
up, like teaching me to cook. I didn't know how to make a cup
of tea. I didn't know how to boil the water. "I was living
alone two doors down," he nods toward the east from the College.
"I was so lonely. I taught five days a week, Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday, Friday," he counts the days on his fingers,
"and watched television on the weekends. Sometimes the students
used to come, they'd bring tea from here. But they were also busy,
they were all working. It's a hard life in America. It's not an
easy life. It took me a long time to get used to it. "I left
in November and came back again in April, '82 for Khansahib's
sixtieth birthday. We had a concert, a great concert. That picture,"
he indicates a picture above the red-carpeted dais where he sits
to teach, "is from that concert. I gave many many concerts.
I threw my whole life, my whole spirit into playing. I played
in such a way as to give the audience all my knowledge, all my
love of tabla." During the '80s, with endless practice time
and drawing on the profound emotions that ensued from his cultural
displacement, Chaudhuri's performances became displays of a dazzling
virtuosity. With an amazing depth of emotion, a crystalline beauty
of tone, a clarity of stroke, incredible speed, awesome variety,
charm, wit, and a charismatic playfulness Chaudhuri simply mesmerized
the audiences of America. He played with the many distinguished
Indian musicians and dancers who came more and more to perform
in the West, as well as with Western musicians trained in Indian
music. Then he began to tour Europe, Asia, and the other continents
and countries of the world. He played not only for sarod and sitar,
but for sarangi, and santoor, for vocalists, for flutists and
for dancers. He played solos, and with symphony orchestras, string
quartets, and with other percussionists. "Each one"
he says, "is different, not only the instrument, but the
person, the situations. Each artist you play with is unique. You
have to listen very carefully for the bols, for the instruments,
the dancers, the different drums, are all different. Each is an
art in itself." And always, he continued to play with father,
mentor, guru, Ali Akbar Khan, adding to their many years of intimate
association. Today, after several decades and fourteen years of
continuous association at the AACM, they have become as finely
attuned to one another in performance as any of the greatest masters
of Indian music. He also began to teach at other universities
in the United States, Canada and at the Ali Akbar College in Basel,
Switzerland; but until Swapan Chaudhuri married Jane Rockwood
his life was not truly anchored in the West. Jane Rockwood Chaudhuri
is also a musician. Her studies of North Indian classical vocal
music began in 1978 with Laxmi G. Tewari at Sonoma State University.
Then, at San Francisco State University with Jnan Prakash Ghosh,
who taught both at SFS and at AACM, she studied tabla. When Ghosh
returned to India, she came to study vocal music with Ali Akbar
Khan at AACM and tabla with Zakir Hussain. When Swapan Chaudhuri
arrived, she began to study with him and, at times, assisted in
teaching. The love of music drew the two together. Married in
1988, Swapanji and Jane now have two young sons, Nilanjan and
Ishan. Recently, when the older child, Nilanjan, turned five,
he came to his father and said, "You started to play when
you were five. You promised me when I was five you would teach
me." "He likes a new composition at each lesson."
Swapanji chuckles. "I encourage him to practice with his
mother. She is very good. They both devote some time each day
to the tabla. When the children are old enough, Jane would like
to study again." "Does she want to play professionally?"
"I don't think so. To be a professional is a whole different
thing. It's a commitment, a life long commitment."
Now at fifty, secure in his accomplishment, Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri
divides his time between performing and teaching in America, his
rigorous world-wide touring schedule, giving concerts and performing
at the great festivals all over India each year during the winter
concert season, and teaching in Calcutta. Having helped propagate
the knowledge of and love for Indian music around the world, he
also devotes an increasing amount of time to an ever deeper exploration
into the sources of his art. He finds great meaning and beauty
in the traditions handed down generation upon generation during
the tabla's four hundred year history. Recently he has presented
many of the old compositions of the Lucknow Gharana. "I always
try to learn more through my music," he declares. "I
analyze my playing. I think the truth is that if you can satisfy
yourself, people who are listening will be satisfied. "As
you grow older, you see things differently. It's not: 'I am controlling
tabla.' It's like when you do the puja, when you go to church,
your whole attitude is very different, you surrender yourself.
I am under tabla's control. I surrender myself because I know
there is nothing I can show to tabla. It becomes more and more
like melody. The joy, the happiness I don't think I used to get
that before." Chaudhuri says that when he plays he often
goes into a trance-like state. He does not know beforehand what
he will play, nor, at times, after a concert, is he conscious
of what he has played. "Sometimes I don't know until I hear
the tapes." In the last few concerts he has introduced traditionally
based compositions that incorporated pakhawaj bols. The pakhawaj,
a two headed drum, is thought by some to have been "cut in
two" to become the ancestor of the tabla. Its deep base tones
are particularly associated with chanting and dhrupad singing.
These passages in the open more resonant, pakhawaj style, played
mainly on the baya, have electrified and bewitched his audiences.
When asked about them, Swapanji shakes his head and smiles: "It
was a surprise, even to me." Then he adds: "The art
is in the bass drum, the left hand. The right is all brilliant
speed and restlessness, like a child running about, but the depth,
the mood, the rasa, the beauty that tabla speaks comes from the
left hand." Though many cannot follow Pandit Chaudhuri's
explorations into melodic and mathematical structures, nonetheless,
all can enjoy the rhythms he discovers. Instinctively, music lovers
respond with delight as Chaudhuri arranges time and sound into
myriad, magnificent, multifaceted patterns. For pattern, rhythmic,
mathematical pattern, as ancient Indian philosophy as well as
the relatively new Theory of Chaos proposes, may be at the very
heart of creation. To hear Swapan Chaudhuri in concert is to share
his love of tabla, his love of drumming, his generosity. At times
he is like a little boy giving you a treat, his eyes laughing
from under long black lashes, at times he is stern, at times majestic,
at times he throws back his head to laugh with delight. At times
the rhythms become so exhilarating, so intense, that suddenly
the heart stills, the breath slows and, like being in the eye
of a hurricane, it is like listening to silence. It might be said
there is here, living among us, one of those legendary figures
you read about in Indian musicology, that Chaudhuri may have,
like Tansen, the great musician of the sixteenth century, "a
power so great that he can, with his music, talk to the birds
and animals of the forest, bring rain, as well as change the hearts
of gods and men." Joyous is the single word that springs
to mind when trying to characterize Chaudhuri's art. He plays
the tabla with a profound elegance and a contagious joy.
The Golden Drumming of Swapan Chaudhuri is based on a series
of interviews and over a year of auditing Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri's
tabla classes. Selections from it appeared in India Currents Magazine.
Jan Haag, a freelance writer, can be contacted via 415-457-5903
or through the Ali Akbar College of Music, 215 West End Avenue,
San Rafael, CA 94901. Copyright © 1995 by Jan Haag