Shankar - Pancha Nadai Pallavi (ECM)

At the heart of Satyajit Ray's majestic film Apur Sansar (The World Of Apu) (1959), there is a brief (perhaps no more than 2 minutes in length), wordless sequence that stirs something so fundamental within me that the only expression I can give to the experience is to say that it haunts me. And that it will continue to haunt me for the rest of my life. Apu Roy has just lost his wife, Aparna; their first child arrived prematurely. Although Apu married this girl in order to rescue her from a decidedly dishonorable form of spinsterhood, we have seen him fall helplessly in love with her, and with the ways in which she is, in fact, so much stronger than he is. Apu is immobilized by grief, and rouses himself only as if to make his body respond in some way to the terrible spiritual force that is his mourning. And a real force it is to, for it resists his will at some level; Apu is unable to commit suicide, even if all the act entails is waiting to be crushed under an oncoming train. Unable to think of his duty to his son, Apu finally turns to wandering. He writes to his friend (and brother-in-law) Pulu. "I am going away. I do not know where, but I know why." Words I myself have said, and written, and acted upon... Apu leaves Calcutta and we see him, far from the crowded thoroughfares of urban India, staring out at the tides. He passes through a bright forest, his eyes turned up toward the light and the mingled song of many unseen birds. After a time (and a quick cut), Apu reaches the summit of a mountain. Before him, the sun is either setting or rising over the landscape that lies on the other side of what he has just traversed. The moon is a small white shadow just at his right elbow. To the melody from the raga "Jog", Apu sits himself so as to face that horizon where the rays of the sun and the rolling of the hills meet. Apu reaches into the bag -- his only company -- he has been carrying all this time and extracts a double-folded sheaf of papers covered in longhand (the characters you can faintly make out are Bengali characters): the novel, based on his own life as an orphan, that he has been exerting himself towards over since his days as a student. The novel is not just his autobiography in some form, which, honestly, is enough in terms of what follows. Yet this novel, the title of which is never given to us, has also been the living receptacle into which Apu has "poured" -- as it is so often and so often glibly said -- himself. The book was, before Aparna, Apu's true love. It contained both his past and his future, both the frustrations of his youth and his adult ambitions. Taking the first page of the manuscript into his left hand, Apu glances down as if he would begin reading. But no, he lets his novel go. The fall from his hands, raised as if in offering, is thus slow, gradual at first, then suddenly utter. From his right hand, one huge section unrolls and plummets, then another, slightly lesser, and it is gone, all of it. We see the translucent pages flutter above the treetops of the forest below Apu, as if in play, twisting around themselves or swooping lazily... easterly, westerly... toward the bottom of the frame. One last page swings upward in a breeze, accompanied by an incredibly expressive flute trill, then floats away. This sequence -- it is really a single shot -- is so sedate a "presentation" or, to use a term from a much older critical discourse, "objective correlative", that it is nearly beyond common "feeling", except there is a hidden wonder and exhilaration in it.

The source of this movement of mind and heart is not really to be found in the poetic visualization of destruction offered by this scene, even if, as it may be for some writers, it is slightly nightmarish. Apu's life, put in a form that resembles scripture, is dispersed and descends as the divine light itself dies. This is only one reading, however. For there is Apu himself, who we see again in close-up once his novel is no longer what it was. Apu is still, his hands upraised, slightly open. He seems not to have moved at all, not to have noticed or responded to what he has allowed to happen. Except that on his face is an expression that is at one and the same time frozen and searing, static and yet in constant upheaval. With one look into a distance that does not include those of us watching him in his suffering, though it could be directed at us (yet why would he beseech the audience at this moment?), Soumitra Chatterjee as Apu gives what would otherwise be an entire performance. Anger, pain, disgust, scorn, exhaustion, and, above all, yearning for surcease are all contained in Apu's gaze.

Of course, I believe that there is some drama in self-abnegation. Self-abnegation in the case of Apur Sansar or devotional music from India -- of which this album by "double violinist" L. Shankar (a founding member of Shakti) is a stunning example -- is not an emptying or, more radically, a voiding. If Ray had wanted to convey that, he would never have shown us the pages of Apu's manuscript in their release. If the practitioners of Indian classical music intended to convey as much, they would not fill their music with virtuoso displays of instrumental command and improvisatory imagination. Self-abnegation here is a nothing that possesses a positive charge. It is a zero that is really an open parenthesis and a closed parenthesis (a plus and a minus) in the state of attraction: the edges of the curves do meet, but only after covering a certain distance filled with many occurrences. Self-abnegation, reducing the self to a zero state, if you will, is really an openness to the nigh-overwhelming complexity of the cosmos. Self-abnegation is a passion for projection, or for one's self -- every vein, every sinew, every neuron, every tendril of desire and memory -- to be expelled out of one's self in order to find its true place in Nature.

If all this sounds somewhat carnal in its intensity, I think it's no mistake or matter of misrepresentation on my part. Devotional songs in India music are, by and large, "love songs" in the sense that those of use well-versed in the American popular songbook would understand that designation. And if you have read the Vedas or the Upanisads or even Tagore's Sadhana, which lays bare the bride that is the human soul in Hindu theology, then you've been exposed to this notion. And if the idea still seems strange and perhaps heathenish to you, take a listen to this ragam-tanam-pallavi (no WorldBeat here…) -- dedicated to late mridangam (drum) master Palghat T. S. Mani Iyer "with love". A ragam-tanam-pallavi is a distinctly Southern Indian (i.e., not Hindustani) performance that moves from pure scalar improvisation in "free time" (ragam or alapana) through further modal ornamentation set now against ebbing and flowing, yet always accelerating pulsed material (tanam) to, finally, improvisation in strict meter based on a formal composition, often a kriti or a strain from a kriti, kritis being explicitly religious in nature (pallavi). Shankar's custom instrument, capable of unleashing both high, keening melodies and deep-pitched, warm, sobbing counterpoint, is as powerfully androgynous in sound as the voice of the great Carnatic / Karnatak vocalists such as Ramnad Krishnan. Shankar also sings as he plays, so that we have a violin mimicking the sounds and cadences of a human voice, that voice itself embodied in vowels and aspirated consonants that are not enunciated as part of any text per se but rather allude to the most ancient and most generative of breaths. More than this cycle of imitations that are never immaculate and repetitions that are never without flaw, there are also sounds for which there are no strictly syllabic and semantic vocal equivalents, not even in the "percussion language" of konnakkol. Shankar's double-stops and bass thrummings, those pluckings and rubbings, those manipulations that belong almost entirely to the hand, that are brisk, that require only a short, taut gap between manual and objective extremities, that are acute... those sounds, make the central section of the ragam portion of this performance ("Ragam: Sankarabharanam") ache with a palpable tension.

Some listeners are quickly irritated by the melismata and the marathons of increasingly frenetic antiphony, often between the principal voice (sitar, e.g.) and tabla drummer, which characterize Indian classical music. Is the restlessness these listeners experience in the music itself, which is undeniably active, or is this impatience one with a disarray that is revealed in and to those listeners by the music itself? Inundated with content, perhaps, they miss the form that is at work, guiding what they "hear". Or, worse yet, they have taken form to be an enemy, a vandal, and they douse every one of form's fires before it can fully ignite -- and illuminate.

Me? I could never be bored by this music. I could never appreciate it as exotica, even with the most well-meaning or humble appreciation, that is, by saying how much I feel reveals to me my shriveled, rootless, neurotic Western self. I don't think this music aims at any sort of reduction. In the same way, I have to accept that Apu's story is, by all rights, as much Ray's, and yours -- and hers and his and yes, theirs -- as much as it is mine. Even when I sit in a room of complete strangers watching Apur Sansar (which I have done recently), I am confident that each person in that room releases something in response to Apu's letting go. The Personal and the Universal... it's a conundrum, sure, and irresistible, but not one that flattens everything in its path. Instead, it is the kind of mystery that dictates that certain vibrations traveling at a certain speed result in identifiable sonorities that have specific properties which, if plied just so and arranged in one of a variety of established patterns, can evoke certain emotions and states of mind. It is also an enigma that, come to think of it, leads me to suggest that the image of those pages in flight from Apur Sansar may even be as profound an image of life itself... of the human lifespan, anyway... as the film's final, redemptive shot of the father, Apu, united with the son, Kajal; of new life, of the boy embraced, held on to, and lifted onto the man's shoulders, the two of them moving together down a road that itself winds beside a winding river.