In the Indian North, at a certain stage, music had fallen into such disrepute that until the first few decades of this brought music out in the open and pioneered a movement to give the art respectability and dignity, it could only be taught furtively in the seclusion of shuttered Barsatis and gloomy Tay-Khanas and at dead night.

Even in the Karnatak school where a great deal is made of the saintliness of its composers, music has never been a direct means of formal worship. With the utmost care and circumspection the Karnatak school preempted the use of music as means of formal worship by grammarising it root and branch. So that even during an Arangetram, vis-a-vis with the deity, Karnatak music continues to remain a performance in which technical virtuosity is the chief preoccupation of the qualified student. The sad despairing call of Tyagaraja, asking to be quenched of his thirst for Rama becomes a frond of leaping Solfeges, syncopations and cross rhythms, masses of intricate Gamakas and exploding Arpeggios.

Sikhism is perhaps the only religion in the world that uses music as its chief mode of worship, where music is prayer, is High Mass, is meditation and offering. Firmly it makes the Kirtan and the Seizing into an unmediated and direct pathway to God, the shortest and the quickest means of reaching the true and terminal destination of man’s journey through time, after which there are no more journeys to undertake, no more births to redeem. One reason why this happened only in Sikhism, was because its founder was a musician.

Mirabai, Kabir, Tyagaraja, Dikshitar, Tulsi, Sur, Dhyaneshwar, or Chandi were all great musicians and saints but none of them founded a religion, whereas Guru Nanak did.

In the West, in the Christian religious tradition, music does play a part in even song, in hymnody and psalm, but this is intended to exhilarate and exalt. There is no evidence in the West of singing saints whose music and saintliness were equal and interchangeable. Bernadette, we are told had a contralto, and St. Anselm sang in a powerful countertenor, almost like a choir boy. But that was all desultory, occasional. To some extent, Western music in its technique and conception, preempts such an internal and mystical use of music. Try to visualise Mozart's "Te Derm" or a piece like "Ave Verum Corpus" or the Mass in D producing on a Christian congregation the kind of rapture or spiritual abandon which the Cardens and the Shabads are intended to produce and often do.

Barring Sikhism, the religions of India seemed to have stood in fear of the power of music. By omitting to make a mention of music as a direct mode of attaining the Godhead, it is rarely did not want to use music without first sanitising it, making it all into Raga and Tala Vidya and offering it through the complex drill and format of the performance. So that even where a tradition almost exclusively of singing saints exists as in the Karnatak school where not a whisper of an earthly or a profane concern is allowed to enter music, it becomes difficult to experience the piety and the vision of Tyagaraja without having to fight your way through thickets of Swaraprastharas, through whole gaggles of grace and trills, through too much obscuring skill and craftsmanship. So that you have a situation in which even after the most exalted concert, the listener gets Bhakti only at second hand, slightly shopworn and tried on by too many customers.

In Sikhism this danger is recognised and precautions are taken. It prescribes as one of the conditions of leading a Satsang that the Kirtan should never be made into a performance. The Raga in which the Kirtan is composed is required to be sued cautiously like the fire in a kitchen, properly controlled, properly directed. If the Raga flares into a bonfire, the meaning of the Kirtan would be burned to a crisp. So that Raga and the Tala have to be used as a means whereby the magic spiritual awareness may be experienced. That is all. If the Raga and the Tala should become too assertive, they would manipulate the text and its layered meaning and its measure will succumb to the rigid caprice of the Tala.

If all the separate components of our music are to be muted in Kirtan and if it may not become a performance, wherein will lie a Sikh Kirtan’s rapture? How will it penetrate the filters of the mind and enter the soul? To this question the customary answer is the faith, the holiness and the purity of the singers’s heart. This answer will silence any questioner. To the challenge of faith, holiness and purity there are no takers. But what we often tend to forget is that there is available in our musical tradition a well prescribed technique of working indirectly towards attaining the gift of producing this rapture without getting too deeply involved and sidetracked by Raga and Tala. This technique is Swara Sadhana. A Sikh Kirtan’s power and purpose cannot be served, if the singer has no knowledge or experience of Swara Sadhana. He cannot be mere novice in Swara without sentimentalising the whole thrust and the power of Sikh worship and making it maudlin.

The result of Swara Sadhana is not the same as having a good voice or being perfectly surel. The result of Swara Sadhana lies beyond the stage of being surel and is irrelevant to the knowledge of Raga. Without prior Swara Sadhana which involves devotion, the Sikh hymnody has no more spiritual value as worship than singing a purab-ang Bhajan.

When Prabhu Nanak Guru opened the eyes of Sajjan Thug, it was the power of Nanak Guru’s Swara that cleansed the soul of the bandit. The same power brought rain and fire and stopped marauding elephants mid-step when Tan-Sen sang. The letter used his Swara Sadhana in the service of music and Guru Nanak for the soul. The power that dissolves egos, opens the narrowing arteries of a dying soul, the awakens from their spiritual deaths the walking cadavers of the cities and the towns like Duzdan, is the power of Swara Sadhana, the practice and the attainment of which gives all the qualities of soul and faith that makes a good Sikh Kirtan singer--the Ragi.

But Swara Sadhana is no easy task. One of the reasons why so few if any, make Kirtan, singing into the baptism of understanding and awareness which it is supposed to be. It is solitary, pulverising work on the swaras if the musical scale and it is enters your utterance. This is able to transform the listener by removing the Vibhakti from the heart and letting the Bhakti shine through. Let us not make any mistake about it; the power of the swara is the secret of the Kirtan, its mind-splitting power and the holiness about which we have heard so much and so often.

The swara hides within the musical note. By single minded Sadhana on the notes of the scale, the captured swara engulfs the being of the singer and his utterance thereafter is able to melt, according to Tyagaraja, the hardest substance in creation, which is the human heart. A melted heart is the clue that tells the musical sleuth that a Kirtan singer who is a Sadhak of the swara had passed that way.

Swara sadhana is not esoteric nor hidden. It is only as difficult as the common music-practice that makes a great musician, except that it is not the same kind of work and people do not practise it for the same reason. There are two irreducible minimum requirements for Swara Sadhana. The first condition is the total absence of personal ambition in the Sadhak. The Sadhak of the Swara is not asking to be a musician. It is swara he is after and not music. The second condition is that he should want nothing while he is engaged in working for the swara, beyond the secret of the swara he is seeking. This state of mind frees him from a limiting time-frame. His life then becomes his time. He will never therefore be in a hurry to reach his goal and he will know without having to reason that if he reached a certain level in Sara Sadhana, everything else will come to him naturally, without his wanting or trying for them. He must know this as a truth. Finally his work on the scales must be kept completely free from the slightest trace of Bhava or Rasa. Consequently he cannot acquire the swara through Raga.

There is enough evidence to show that Indian society feared and distrusted the swara’s utterance. The reasons are obvious if we recognise that the purpose of religion is not merely to show man the place of God in his life but also to protect and threat to society. A swara-obsessed singer has always been a threat to social stability, to the common daily concerns of life. For such a man, song will distract the tiller from the fields, the girl from her proper love of the trivial, of gold, baubles and luxuries, her need for a man and a home, will distract the crafty usurer from his money, the children from obedience and respect for the old. Is there any wonder then that music was almost outlawed in the North at a time when perhaps there were too many swara-maddened singers in the country and why Tyagaraja’s compositions bristle with clever Sangathis and brilliant musicals gymnastics. Nothing could be More devastating if swara were pursued by the many rather than by the very few and only at long intervals in man’s history on earth.

This is one reason why music does not play a key role in religious worship of the formal kind. Hidden away in the raga and the tala and served up by merely surel Bhajans and Kirtans, these efforts become safe for daily use. There is no danger of our present-day Bhajans doing to people what was done to Sajjan Thug. The outlaws and highway men of our society will come to no harm. Spirituality thus has become a safe bet.

Dr. Mansukhani’s book is a very important one. For the first time Sikhism’s heart-rending music has been discussed between the covers of a formal book on Indian Classical Music. To the perceptive reader, this directly and lucidly written work should be a clarifying and edifying experience. I would like this book to go forth and perform its very vital task for those who have some experience of worship and some of music, but have not known where they meet.

(PROF.) RAGHAVA R. MENON
India House, Lagos, Nigeria.