Indian Classical Guitar

Hindustani Slide
Indian Classical Guitar
Debashish
Bhattacharya
Hindustani Slide
Getting There: One American’s Journey
by Mark Humphrey
Photo by Mark Wooley
On a bone-jarring bus ride through Howrah, one of the planet’s poorest and most densely populated
communities, Debashish Bhattacharya turned to me and asked, “Will most Americans be watching this
video during the morning or evening?” From our teetering, standing-room-only bus, Debashish’s attention shifted to the arcane psychology of Hindustani music with its notion that specific sound formations
are appropriate to particular times of day. To a 6' 2" American buckling his knees to avoid concussion
(Debashish commended my ‘good hydraulics’) and white-knuckling the overhead rails to avoid being
pitched at the next pothole into the passing slums, this seemed a curious inquiry. “Evening,” I replied.
Debashish said “Acha” (‘uh-huh’), nodded assent (the Indian way, side to side) and was satisfied. He
could now prepare his program.
How, I surely must have asked myself, had an Oklahoma-born Californian come to be on a bus
lurching into Calcutta with an Indian classical musician seeking counsel on American video-viewing habits? The blame, I concluded, must be shared equally by Bukka White and Ravi Shankar. Like many
Westerners, I had become vaguely aware of Indian music via the use of sitar by the Beatles (Norwegian
Wood), Rolling Stones (Paint It Black), and others in the halcyon days of psychedelia. I was perhaps 14
when I bought a Ravi Shankar album (The Sounds of India, Columbia CL 2496); a few years later I saw
him in concert with the dynamic tabla master, Alla Rakha, father of today’s leading tabla virtuoso, Zakir
Hussain. The fancy for Indian ragas as soundtrack to psychedelic epiphanies, much satirized on Laugh-In
(and, in a different way, Dragnet), soon faded, as did my own fleeting interest in this ‘exotic’ sound.
American blues emblemized epiphanies of an earthier order, and in my late teens this music became my
passion.
I may have been 17 when the Columbia Lp reissue of Bukka White’s 1940 session (Parchman
Farm, Columbia C 30036) entered my life, and with it an awareness of bottleneck slide guitar. How did he
get that sound? I wanted to find out, and began tentative experiments with pocket knives, rain gauge
tubes, and (more successfully) finger-long pieces of steel tubing. Bukka, I would later learn, was a ‘gateway’ for many of us who came to this music about the same time, circa late 1960s-early 1970s. Leo
Kottke recalls the first slide piece he learned (via John Fahey) was Bukka’s version of Po’ Boy. From
Bukka I discovered a rich African-American tradition of slide guitar, much of which was just then becoming accessible via reissues on the Yazoo label. Here was an exciting ‘new-old’ guitar sound, one that had
yet to become an overdriven rock cliche. Exploring its sources on record and attempting to play with
some semblance of these artists’s grit and passion was an exciting challenge.
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Sumit Banerjee plays a 'Givson' electric steel made in Calcutta. Photo by Mark Humphrey
After a couple of years’ experimentation (a wine bottleneck, I found, worked best for me), I had
acquired enough technique to venture to play more than mere imitations of blues pioneers. I found lowrent versions of country steel guitar standards and made a few stabs at lazy luau Hawaiiana. One of my
better goofs was Zorba the Greek bottleneck style. Sometimes I’d hit a lick and think, ‘That almost sounds
like a sitar.’ Slow slides as well as certain brisk leaps around a note recalled what I’d heard Shankar play
a few years earlier. “Interesting,” I thought, and moved on.
My bus ride through Howrah was still far
away, but creeping closer. Some 15 years after my
slide Zorba days, I found myself working as Music
Director at a public radio station with a varied (if
short-lived) American roots music format. Weekday mornings I DJed, and Western Swing was a
popular part of the programing on this station in
the San Fernando Valley, where California Okies had
made Bob Wills and Spade Cooley pop heroes in
the 1940s. I heard recordings with steel guitars daily,
so I was startled to walk into an Indian food stall in
Santa Monica and hear a tape of an Indian pop
singer with a steel burbling behind her. Intrigued, I
asked the guy at the counter the names of artists
with such accompaniment, which he kindly wrote
down and I promptly lost. But I soon discovered an
Indian market in Culver City with hundreds of cassettes selling for $1.50: I bought a couple ( Hit
Ghazals, Divine Melodies) by steel guitarist Gautam
Dasgupta. He used an electric steel (very trebly with
a good dose of reverb) to play vocal lines - single
notes, no harmony - with kitschy synth orchestration. The steel became a surrogate female voice,
alternately weepy or flirtatious. This was ‘mood
music’ of the old (pre-New Age) order, “Subcontinental Mantovani” with some dazzling bar technique.
Just as Ravi and Bukka gave me my first kick towards the Howrah bus ride, so the soundtrack to
tandoori chicken at the Bengal Tiger confirmed my
hunch that there was an affinity between the Indian
twang and American slide guitar.
Discoveries of further pieces of an evermore intriguing puzzle then accelerated. Gautam Dasgupta’s
syrupy pop was followed by an apparently far stranger find: an album of Indian classical music played
slide style on an archtop jazz guitar! The cover showed a mystically sincere looking fellow in formal white
kurta and dhoti sitting cross-legged with an archtop guitar in his lap. Mind you, I’d seen great vintage
photos of hillbillies and Hawaiians playing lap style, but this was something else again. The album was
Two Raga Moods On Guitar (World Pacific WPS-21452) by Brij Bhushan Kabra. I paid $1.89 for it.
About a year later, I was sent review copies of a couple of recordings by Vishwa Mohan Bhatt
(Easter Sunday Recital, Raga 105 and Bihag—Desh, Raga 208). This was some three years prior to his A
Meeting by the River ‘ World Music’ Grammy. Here was more Indian classical music played slide style on
an archtop guitar, this time one with sitar-like sympathetic strings added. A testimonial from Ravi Shankar
said: “Although guitar is a foreign instrument, he has a tremendous command over it... He has given a
new dimension to it by merging the sound and style of guitar, sitar, and sarod.” Now I had recordings
made at least 20 years apart by two guys playing Indian classical music on guitar. What, I wondered,
gives?
A tangential piece of the puzzle fell into place on yet another used vinyl forage. I happened on a
mildewed album of Dr. Lalmani Misra (Nectar of the Moon, Nonesuch H-72086) playing something called
the vichitra vina. The cover was a gorgeous color drawing of a man siting over an instrument comprised
of two large gourds joined by a neck fretted with a glass egg! The instrument looked like some bizarre
medieval cousin of the modern steel guitar, though it sounded very much like a sitar. I was stumbling, bit
by bit, into fragmented artifacts of a rich musical tradition: I first heard the sticky sweet steel in Indian
pop, then classical music ‘slid’ on archtop guitars, and finally an apparently traditional Indian instrument
played slide style. I wondered further - What gives? I had to see and meet some player of this music for
answers.
Vichitra vina
Southern California has a large Indian community which frequently sponsors concerts. The discovery of Indian slide guitar had rekindled my long-latent interest in Indian music, so in September 1993
I found myself at a concert by sarod master Ali Akbar Khan. A lady was distributing flyers outside the hall
for ‘Ustad Zakir Hussain’s Festival of Music.’ There were names and dark blurry photos of performers
associated with Calcutta’s Sangeet Research Academy. One was captioned: ‘Debashish Bhattacharya:
Guitar.’ “What kind of guitar?” I asked. “Like Vishwa Mohan Bhatt” was the reply. Finally, a piece of the
puzzle I could watch play; possibly one I could talk to. I would not miss his concert.
But I did. There were many performers, two nights of concerts and no indication on the flyer that
everyone wasn’t playing on both nights. They weren’t though, so I missed the guy I’d driven 50 miles in
sweltering September heat to see/hear/interrogate. I was not keen on this turn of events - if I couldn’t see
a guitarist who played in this style, then at least I would talk to one. I had bought Debashish’s sole CD
(Debashish Bhattacharya—Guitar, India Archive Music, IAM CD 1007) and read in the liner notes that he
was a disciple of Brij Bhushan Kabra. Henry Kaiser had done a first-rate interview with Kabra which ran in
the December 1985 Guitar Player. I xeroxed it to break the ice with Debashish in case he hadn’t seen it.
As the concert was ending, I recognized him (despite the bad photo) walking from backstage to take a
seat for the remainder of the concert. When it ended, I made my way up to him just before he exited,
introduced myself, and gave him the xerox on Kabra. “He is my guru,” he said, pleased. Evidently I’d
done the right thing. “What can I do for you?” I explained that I wanted an interview and some instruction.
“This I can do,” he said.
The next evening I went to the home where Debashish was staying. I expected to do a formal
interview, but first Debashish asked me, “Do you play guitar?” I allowed that I did, and added that I had
one stashed in the trunk in case he felt inclined towards a lesson. “Please bring it in,” said Debashish, who
then requested I play. For a gathering of touring Indian classical musicians I played Steel Guitar Rag; they
clapped along! The ice was broken; I played Wabash Cannonball, and then Debashish was eager to have
a go at my old steel-bodied National. He surprised me by playing a version of Spanish Fandango, a sweet
19th century parlor guitar tune. He was entranced by the sound of my Duolian; he had read about resonator guitars and was fascinated by how they worked. I turned on my tape recorder and asked many questions; Debashish patiently and thoroughly answered. Then he said he would like to visit some music
stores the next day. I offered to chauffeur him and his friend, musician/composer Sanjoy Chakraborty.
Aside from some Hollywood hustlers who cheerfully tried to swindle the out-of-towners (a 1970s Dobro
was presented as a 1920s National at one store), the highlight of our music store tour was a visit to Pacific
Piano, where the string wizards from Calcutta (Sanjoy plays sitar) stockpiled spools of Austrian Zither
wire. They were giddy with delight: “You cannot get this in India,” they enthused. Effusive with thanks,
they said, “You must come to Calcutta.” A year later, I did.
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In hindsight, it was a journey for which I had been preparing for more than a quarter of a century.
Perhaps if I hadn’t xeroxed that article on Brij Bhushan Kabra, it wouldn’t have happened and this video
wouldn’t exist. But probably things would have gone right anyway, for Debashish Bhattacharya is a master musician who is also an extremely open, accessible person. I was lucky - my curiosity led me to the
right guy. The night this video was taped, he told me: “Baba Allauddin Khan said, ‘To be a good musician
first you must be a good man.’ Most Indians keep the Bhagavad Gita in their place of puja [worship]. I
keep the life of Allauddin Khan.”
Why this discursive preamble? Because most Americans, I suspect, come to this music as I did by
some circuitous route. We share a curiosity about the seeming anomaly of Indian music played slide-style
on guitar. It looks, on first glance, like a complete oddity. But what on first glance appears anomalous
becomes, on closer examination, sublimely inevitable.
Getting There II: Hittites & Hawaiians
Photo by Mark Humphrey
The evening Debashish surprised me with Spanish Fandango (and sounds more Indian besides),
he said, “It is important to Indianize the guitar.” In the immediate context of his career, he was emphasizing (A) the struggle of Hindustani slide guitarists to be accepted as the equals of sitarists and sarodists on
the Indian ‘art music’ playing field, and (B) their stylization of the instrument (the addition of sympathetic
strings being the most obvious example) to suit the contours of Indian classical music. In a broader sense,
he was also pointing to a long-standing process: the guitar is merely the latest in a long line of ‘Indianized’
foreign instruments. The sitar may have evolved from the diminutive three-stringed setar of Persia, the
sarod descended from the Afghani Rebab; tablas came from the Middle East, the violin and harmonium
from England. The musical gifts of India’s many invaders were readily assimilated and reinvented; American ‘ways and means’ have recently met the same treatment afforded those of Moguls and Britons - they
have been Indianized. In South India, Karnatak classical music is now performed on saxophone and
electric mandolin as well as the traditional vina. As for the guitar, there are those who believe it was first
Indianized not on the Subcontinent but in Hawaii.
Two different accounts from the 1930s describe the 1880s performances of Gabriel Davion, said
to have been a kidnapped Indian brought to Honolulu by a sea-captain. Remembering a boyhood encounter from 1884, Hawaiian composer Charles E. King recalled: “This Davion attracted a great deal of attention because he had a new way of playing the guitar... All the playing was done on one string, and the
strings were not elevated by a bar.” Davion is said in another account to have accompanied hula dancers
with Hawaiian-style guitar at King Kalakaua’s Jubilee in 1886. If true, an Indian exile may have been the
first Hawaiian guitarist, though it was surely Joseph Kekuku who both popularized and claimed to have
invented the style. “The fact that Davion came from India is significant,” writes David D. Kilolani Mitchell
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Goddess Sarasvati and her Vina
Gottuvadyam. Photo by Mark Humphrey
in Hawaiian Music and Musicians (George S. Kanahele, ed., University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, 1979),
“for he might have learned the sliding technique using a rod or hard substance from Indian players of the
gottuvadyam. It would have been a relatively simple matter of using it with a guitar.”
The gottuvadyam (‘block instrument’) is the sister instrument of South India’s vina, sometimes
called a Sarasvati vina for the goddess of music and learning often depicted playing it. It is, in musicologist’s
parlance, a fretless long-necked lute; a hard wooden block is used as slider to change its pitch. Much of
the playing is done on the highest-pitched string, actually a course of two or three strings tuned to an
octave. To speculate that Davion played gottuvadyam assumes that he came from South India, which we
don’t really know. But the gottuvadyam wasn’t the sole Indian instrument played in this fashion. The
aforementioned vichitra vina is a North Indian relation, though it may have developed after Davion’s time.
There were, however, folk instruments: H.A. Popley used ‘Tambur’ as a generic term for Indian longnecked lutes in his The Music of India (first published in 1921), and wrote: “Sometimes players use the
tambur in quite peculiar ways. I once heard a musician play on it by stopping the strings with a small
bamboo and using it more like a vina. The full resonance of the tambur and the buzzing sound gave the
melody a very pleasing effect. I also heard a player play an instrument like the tambur by stopping it with
a cocoanut.”
This means of fretting a stringed instrument was nothing new
in India. The Ajanta cave paintings of the 5th century A.D. offer
the earliest glimpses of an instrument which became important in
medieval India, the ekatantri (‘one string’). It was essentially a hollow wooden or bamboo tube along which a single gut string was
stretched. At the upper end was a gourd, the instrument’s sole resonating chamber, which the player rested on the left shoulder. At the
lower end, the string passed over a wide convex bridge; the buzz
associated with India’s plucked stringed instruments emanates from
such bridges. The ekatantri is also believed to have been the earliest instrument to utilize a jiva of bamboo fiber placed under the
string at the bridge to accentuate this buzz in the manner threads
are today used on the tambura. Most significant in our context, the
instrument was often fretted with a kamrika, a short length of bamboo. The 12th century scholar Haripala gave detailed descriptions
of techniques for playing the ekatantri, including one called
Sphurita: “The string is made to produce tremulous note due to
shaking effected by bamboo...” Ekatantri became a significant instrument of the 7th through the 13th centuries A.D. Writing in the
11th centur y, the scholar Nanyadeva proclaimed, “Goddess
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The first LP of Indian classical guitar to be released in the U.S., 1968.
Sarasvati Herself dwells in the ekatantri,” for it could deliver all srutis (notes and microtones) and gamakas
(ornamentations). The 13th century scholar Sharangadeva called the ekatantri “the mother of all vinas,”
and the vina, as evidenced by its mythic association with Lord Shiva, credited with creating it, and Sarasvati,
resides at the pinnacle of the Indian instrumental hierarchy. (In a sense, all the plucked ‘long-necked
lutes’ of India, including sitar and currently guitar, may be regarded as varieties of vina.)
So there was nothing ‘foreign’ to India about a plucked stringed instrument on which a slider
changes the string’s pitch. By the 20th century, however, it was no longer a technique in extensive use,
though the gottuvadyam and vichitra vina revived it somewhat. (Writing in String Instruments - Plucked
Variety - of North India, Vol. II in 1988, Sharmistha Sen states: “The vichitra vina is a recent innovation
and took its shape hardly 60 years ago.” The gottuvadyam’s chief exponent, Ravi Kiran, touts his instrument as “the earliest form of vina,” but believes it emerged as a concert instrument only a century ago.)
The Hawaiian guitar’s arrival in India isn’t something we can precisely date, even though we hear it
prominently in movie songs (filmi music) shortly after Independence. There were hints in even these filmi
performances of the slide guitar’s adaptability to Indian classical tradition: the song “Baat Chalat” from
the 1953 film, Ladki, opens with a brief meditative guitar line suggesting the slow alap or introductory
phase of a raga before becoming accompaniment to the plaintive pop vocals of Geeta Roy.
We might well wonder what took the guitar so long to get to India. Hadn’t an occasional colonial
Briton passed through strumming it in Spanish (fretted) style? Hadn’t there also been opportunity, among
waves of sundry invaders, for something guitar-like to take root in India? The earliest recorded ‘guitar’ is
etched in stone on the Sphinx Gate at Alaca Hoyuk, Turkey. It’s a small-waisted fretted instrument resembling today’s Persian tar. A Hittite juggler plays this primordial guitar in the bas relief, circa 1400 B.C.
Surely Asia Minor was a nearer port of export for the guitar (or some kindred chordophone) into India
than Hawaii. But the guitar bided its time, traveling instead to Europe and only coming to India after its
Hawaiian transformation (which an Indian may have prompted).
The Hawaiian guitar insinuated itself into 20th century Indian music by two routes: recordings and
direct contact with Hawaiian musicians. Hawaiian music was an international craze in the early 20th
century, and recordings of Hawaiian guitarists were reportedly popular in India. The Hilo Hawaiians’ recording of Aloma inspired the formation of Calcutta’s Aloha Boys in 1938, a group which recorded for
HMV (Victor) and broadcast on All-India Radio. According to Hawaiian Music and Muscians, Jimmie
Rodgers’ naughty 1929 recording, Everybody Does It in Hawaii (with Joe Kaipo on acoustic steel guitar),
“was a great hit in India.” Recordings inspired home-grown imitators, and there were visits by touring
Hawaiian troupes too: the Tau Moe family spent the years 1940-1947 performing and recording in India.
(Bob Brozman’s account of them appeared in the January/February 1991 Acoustic Guitar.) By Independence, Indians had heard enough Hawaiian guitar to begin integrating it into their own music. The chordal
vamps and dreamy harmonies of Hawaii were discarded; in their place emerged single-string glides and
subtle ornamentation of notes.
I had the opportunity to ask Debashish’s father, Sunil Bbattacharya, if he heard the guitar when he
was a young man. “At that time there was guitar in our country,” he said, “but they played [Rabindaneth]
Tagore songs and light music (‘light music’ tends to denote something between classical and popular
genres). They were also very popular in orchestras playing Western music in the 1930s and 1940s.”
Vishwa Mohan Bhatt told me: “Before, guitar was considered an instrument only for light music, for film
songs... They were having a very wrong impression about it.” In other words, it was deemed inappropriate
for Indian classical music.
The man who changed that was Brij Bhushan Kabra. “He is a
total musician,” Debashish says of his guru, “a god-like man. Vishwa
Mohan and I are performers. Brij Bhushanji is a musician.” Born into
a prominent family in Jodhpur in 1937, Kabra shocked his father, a
patron of the classical arts who had studied sitar with the legendary
Inayat Khan (father of sitarist Vilayat Khan), by embracing a Western instrument, an archtop Hofner guitar acquired for 250 rupees in
1958. Kabra’s elder brother, Damodar Lal, had studied sarod with
Ali Akbar Khan, and so shouldn’t he follow suit? Surprisingly, Ali
Akbar Khan encouraged Kabra’s enthusiasm for guitar: “Don’t leave
this,” he told Kabra after coaching him in the rudiments of Hindustani
classical tradition. “I believe you are going to do something on it.
There is something special about this instrument...” The father who
initially objected to Kabra’s interest in guitar then challenged his
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son by offering to present him in concert a year after he took up the instrument. “I started playing like a
mad person,” Kabra told Henry Kaiser (Gultar Player, December l985), because “up until that time, there
had been no precedent for the guitar in Indian classical music.” Kabra’s solitary crusade to prove the
guitar could hold its own in this tradition was a success: his 1959 concert debut was followed by further
experiments with guitar (he would be the first to add the chikari, or rhythmic drone string) and, beginning
in 1964, a recording career. “I had no fixed ideas about music or the instrument,” Kabra told Kaiser. “I
developed my technique according to the music I wanted to play, by trial and error, and it kept getting
better and better... As I went on, I found there was unlimited potential in it; the only question was how far
I could draw on my own reserves, how much more I could learn to really bring it out of the instrument. But
the instrument never said no. It has fantastic range, as far as the holding (sustaining) power of the note is
concerned. No other instrument has that. For the most important part of Indian music, the alap, it is one
of the most ideally suited instruments... the most important aspect of the alap - the modulations that the
human voice can do, the grace notes it can produce - that can be achieved very well on the guitar.”
“The guitar’s entry into the Indian classical arena,” wrote Mohan Nadkarni in the notes to Kabra’s
1968 World Pacific album, Two Raga Moods on Guitar, “is looked upon as a welcome, if bold venture.”
This sense of a new voice within Hindustani tradition doubtless drew young musicians to follow Kabra’s
lead. “The guitar has now become quite a popular instrument in India,” he said a decade ago. “The real
thing will start rolling when a lot of other young people come up.” And things have indeed rolled at a brisk
clip as younger players have garnered international acclaim for the sound of Hindustani slide guitar.
Being There: Debashish Bhattacharya
Photo by Mark Humphrey
Debashish Bhattacharya plays a 1930s National Duolian.
The guitar had been nudging its way into Indian classical tradition for scarcely a decade when
Debashish Bhattacharya began playing it on All India Radio. He was a seven-year-old prodigy then:
“Many of the upper musicians of our country told us, ‘If you keep him learning, definitely he is assured of
success,”’ his father recalls. Born in West Bengal in 1963, Debashish is the eldest son of Sunil and
Manjushree Bhattacharya. They are singers who forsook the often-penurious musicians’ life for clerical
jobs in Calcutta to better provide for their three children. “My mom and father have sacrificed their whole
life,” says Debashish. “My father used to sing a very good thumri (light classical vocal) style. He had all
the qualities to be a good musician, but if he had done concerts and went to his gurus and stayed with
them, we could not be nourished in the proper way. You will find a rare father in him.”
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Photo by Mark Humphrey
If you visit the Bhattacharya household in Calcutta,
you may find Debashish holding court for a group of aspiring guitarists, or his sister, Sutapa, playing harmonium
and teaching Indian Solfeggio (Sa=Do) to an enthusiastic
gaggle of young girls. You may encounter Debashish’s
brother, Subhashish, teaching the mysteries of tala
(rhythm) on tablas or pakhawaj or one of the other drums
he plays expertly. If no students are present, you’ll likely
still hear music from one or more of the younger
Bhattacharyas, whose parents sometimes drift into their
music room to listen and offer encouragement. It was
probably always like this, and naturally these musical
parents were eager to see if their first born had talent.
“We had the opportunity to test him at age three or four,”
recalls Sunil Bhattacharya. “He had the power to grasp
music by listening: the music he has taken from his ear,
he can sing and express it. When we came to the conclusion that he has got musical sense, I decided he must be
encouraged along this line, to be trained by some renowned musicians.”
The guitar came to this musical family as a surrogate voice for Manjushree Bhattacharya. “His mother was
a singer,” says Sunil, “a proper singer. But when she gave
birth to my first son, Debashish, she became very ill. Then
I told her to play some light music, to take up an instrument. I toId her, ‘You can play a guitar; it has got some
scope in making light music.’ Then I purchased a second-hand guitar. When he was about five, I told his mother
to give him a chance to adapt this instrument to his musical sense, to his musicality that was in him from birth. He became successful at the age of five and six
months. Within three months he has gone through the whole six strings of the instrument.”
“The guitar was bigger than me,” Debashish recalls. “My Mom taught me, ‘This is Sa (Do), this is
Re (Re), this is Ga (Mi),’ and so on.” After Debashish mastered the scale positions with his bar, Manjushree
sang Solfeggio lines and asked her son to play what she had sung. Gradually she added the ornamentations (gamakas) and challenged her son to play those as well. “This is the system,” says Debashish,
“learning from singing. I never felt any limitations on guitar because I learned from a limitless type of
music, vocal music. Vocal cords have no limitations; they can articulate in any design.” Indian instrumental practice is closely patterned after the contours of a highly - developed and venerable vocal music
tradition.
Even so, Sunil sought out a guitar tutor for his promising son. “I was 61/2 years old,” Debashish
remembers, “when my father took me to Sri Rajat Nandi from Calcutta. He is a Western music performer.
He plays Spanish and Hawaiian type guitar.” From him Debashish learned tunings, Western notation, and
such universal guitar hits as the theme from Bonanza and Wipe Out. “I took two years’ lessons from him,”
Debashish says of Nandi, “and then left because I didn’t find much in it. I started to play some Indian
music and also old compositions which my mom has taught me.” His training would continue along more
orthodox lines.
Debashish studied sitar with three prominent sitarists of Calcutta, Haradhan Roy Chowdhury, Pandit
Gokul Nag and his son, Pandit Manilal Nag. From them he learned much about ragas and traditional
compositions. Sri Maharaj Banerjee gave him instruction in harmonium, the missionaries’ gift to Indian
music. All the while Debashish continued playing guitar. In 1984, he became the first guitarist to receive
the President’s Award of India. At the time he was playing an ordinary six-string Hawaiian guitar.
In 1986, Debashish embarked on five years of intensive study with Brij Bhushan Kabra. He had
already proven himself as a performer, yet he felt a need to deepen his command of the guitar as instrument of India’s classical tradition and thus became Kabra’s disciple. In the past, the intense guru/disciple
relationship was the primary means by which India’s classical music was transmitted. If a guru agrees to
take on a disciple, he assumes responsibility for the disciple’s food, shelter, and clothing. The disciple
becomes a member of the guru’s household and often helps with cooking, cleaning, and routine chores.
But the majority of the disciple’s time is devoted to musical study and practice. “The traditional manner of
transmitting knowledge through the ages in India has been the guru sisya parampara (‘preceptor disciple
tradition’),” writes Stephen Slawek (Sitar Technique in Nibaddh Firms, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 1987).
“The initiation ceremony symbolizes the binding for life of the sisya to the guru. The ceremony takes its
name from the most important part of the affair - ganda bandha (‘thread tying’) - in which the guru and
sisya tie red sacred threads around each other’s right wrist...” During the intense period of training, the
guru offers not only instruction but an ever-present role model for the musician’s life. “The guru is my
god,” says Debashish. “Guru is my father, guru is my mother first, then my family who gave birth.”
A disciple absorbs specific techniques and ways of thinking about and playing ragas. A musical
patrimony is handed on, and so the disciple becomes a member of a gharana, a musical lineage (literally
‘family’). Because of his important connection with Ali Akbar Khan, Kabra is a member of the Senia Maihar
gharana, a lineage he passes to his disciples. Linked in legend to the 16th century Mogul court singer
Tansen, this is one of the most esteemed and influential gharanas. In the 20th century it blossomed under
the care of the legendary Ustad Allauddin Khan, whose famous disciples include his son, Ali Akbar Khan,
and Ravi Shankar. Membership in a respected gharana confers legitimacy on a musician, and this is doubly
important for those whose means of expression is a maverick instrument, the guitar.
“Before my guruji,” says Debashish, “guitar was supposed to be a light music instrument. My
guruji’s effort has brought us to where we are today.” Many disciples tell tales of gurus who are relentless
martinets, but Debashish describes a convivial relationship with Kabra. “You will not get many gurus like
him,” he says. “Generally gurus prefer that, ‘What I am playing, you play.’ But my guruji always encouraged me to do new things. He always appreciates new kicks in my head. He always loves to see his son
do better and better. Everytime something has clicked in my head, I made a telephone call to guruji. He
told my brother Subhashish, ‘While Debashish is performing, if he just tries to remember what I have
taught him, he will never be an artist. The artist is born, not taught. So what actually he has in his crooked
brain, he must produce it on the stage. Otherwise he is not an artist.”’
Debashish Bhattacharya is an artist. On November 21, 1994, he performed before several hundred thousand at the 23rd National Festival of Music in Bangalore, becoming the first guitarist to be
invited to this prestigious event. Along with extensive concertizing, Debashish devotes much of his time
to teaching. “I have my mission,” he says, “not only to play guitar but to do something with my students
also. If it is good for Indian classical music, I wish to encourage the students of guitar not to only play filmi
music but to play our own country’s wealth. That is classical music, always the treasure of any nation.”
As of November 1994, Debashish had 30 students ranging in age from children to adults. “Some of them
are really fantastic,” he said. “Young prodigies. They can play what I sing just by listening. God blessed
them.” One of his students, a 14-year-old young lady named Mitu, has taken first prize in the All India
Telecommunications Cultural Competition for the past four years. With a new generation in training, the
guitar is poised to play a more prominent role in Indian classical music in the 21st century.
The Instrument
When this video’s director, Abhijit Dasgupta, saw Debashish’s instrument for the first time, he
looked it over and said: “I see. It’s one-third sitar, one-third sarod, and one-third guitar.” “Yes,” said
Debashish, “and another ten percent besides.” Given the varied sounds he evokes from his instrument,
Debashish’s ten percent is modest. He keeps nails on his left hand and occasionally plucks the sympathetic strings in the manner of the Arabic zither, the kanun. (In Indian classical music, this technique has
been used by the santoor master, Shivkumar Sharma.) He may play echoic lines which recall the venu, or
bamboo flute. And, of course, there is the all-important role model, the voice. Debashish continues to
study it with the internationally renowned singer Ajoy Chakraborty. “I get a symphony out of this instrument at certain points,” says Debashish, of whom his friend Sanjoy Chakraborty observes: “He can act in
different ways. If you can copy a hundred personalities, it becomes easier to become a great actor.”
The instrument Debashish uses to suggest such variety began evolving little more than a decade
ago from a simple six-string Hawaiian guitar. At the time he won the President’s Award in 1984, he was
grappling with its limitations. “When I was playing only gayaki ang [instrumental adaptation of vocal
style], it is okay. But when I played jhala [fast climax with pulsating rhythm], I used to play with the first
string as chikari [tonic drone string or strings similar to a banjo’s fifth string]. A continuous tonic with
rhythm, that is chikari’s work. It helps me make listeners aware of what I am going to do; it provides me
the rhythm. While I am doing chikari on the first string, playing on the open string to get the drone sound,
then I cannot touch it with the steel bar. I am sacrificing my first string, its quality of sound.”
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Photo by Mark Humphrey
Brij Bhushan Kabra had encountered the same limitation and added a single chikari string to his
instrument on the bass side. “In the Indian system,” says Debashish, “people play chikari in the back [i.e.,
bass side]. On sitar and sarod, it is easy to strum, because they hold the instrument perpendicularly, not
horizontally. But if I play guitar and the chikari is in the rear, it is far. The idea of a back chikari on guitar
I found is faulty. If you are to produce some good and intricate thing on your guitar, you have to feel
relaxed. So to facilitate my style, I put the chikari in front [i.e., on the treble side]. This chikari can
produce the fastest jhala on guitar.” Debashish has two chikari strings, one a tonic identical to the first
string and the other its octave (equivalent to the first string at the 12th fret) mounted on half-inch high
posts in the manner of sitar chikaris.
Next his guitar lost its bottom bass string and gained three treble-range strings on the bass side.
Debashish calls them ‘supporting strings.’ “In this regard I am a staunch follower of our gharana’s great
Ustad, Ali Akbar Khansab,” says Debashish. “He has also got the supporting strings on sarod. I like his
sarod style of strumming chikari, bass and supporting strings to create an environment with much more
use of open strings.” Near the high tonic string in range, supporting strings aren’t barred but are strummed
for color and rhythmic background. “I tune the supporting strings according to the first key note [i.e.,
dominant note, vadi] of the raga,” says Debashish. “I pluck these strings in between the phrasing of the
raga. I also keep in mind which notes are important. Suppose in Raga Charukeshi I tuned my instrument’s
supporting strings Ni [Ti one whole step below the top tonic string] flat, Re [Re], and Ga [Mi]. These notes,
together with Ma [Fa] and Dha [La] flat, creates a background which is like some Western chords but
which is somehow more enjoyable and brings a fresh mood of joy into it.”
The final addition Debashish has made to his instrument is a dozen sympathetic strings. Called
taraf strings on sitar, sympathetic strings are a characteristic of many North Indian stringed instruments
and vibrate in sympathy when an equivalent note is sounded. While this feature is considered unique to
Indian chordophones, in the 18th century various European viols featured sympathetic strings. The viola
d’amore was the most popular, and experienced sufficient revival in the 20th century for Paul Hindemith
to compose music for it.
Debashish tunes his sympathetic strings to match the contours of each raga. “Sa [Do] is our basic
note,” he says, “and I prefer to have more Sas in the drone strings. And I prefer to have two Panchams [Pa
or Sol] in ragas where Pancham is important.” But in a raga like Gurjari Todi, where the fifth is omitted,
the tuning of the sympathetic strings accentuates the notes given greatest emphasis: Dha komal (La flat)
is the primary note, called vadi, and Ga komal (Mi flat) is the secondary or samvadi note. Thus Debashish
tunes his sympathetic strings for Gurjari Todi to entirely omit the fifth and include two flat sixths and two
flat thirds.
As on sitar, the sympathetic strings pass over a separate small bridge, the javari. The curvature of
this bridge emits the nasal buzz characteristic of Indian strings. “Javari,” writes Thomas Marcotty in The
Way-Music (Deciso Editrice, Switzerland, 1980), “the art of grinding a bridge, literally means ‘to give life’
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The first Dev Veena. Photo by Mark Humphrey.
Bhabasindhu Biswas and custom made Dev Veena for blind guitarist. Photo by Mark Humphrey.
to the instrument. The bridge... is a little plate about the size of
a matchbox, consisting of bone, ivory, or stag-horn. To achieve
a perfect javari one must first flatten the surface of the bridge
and then carefully round it just a little bit... The vibrations of the
string must reach the bridge in the smallest possible angle...
The javari procedure is a very time consuming business, requiring a lot of experience and patience.”
Debashish asks his sympathetic strings to do more than
merely ring behind a plucked note. The strumming of them at
the opening of a raga (a silvery sound likened by Frederic V.
Grunfeld to “a hail of broken icicles”) announces to the trained
ear exactly which raga will follow. He also strums them (along
with chikaris and supporting strings) at various points in performance for emphasis.
1985 was the year Debashish sketched the transformation
of a six-string Hawaiian guitar into an ‘Indianized’ instrument
with 22 strings. The first guitar to be thus adapted was an Indian
Gibtone flat-top copy of a Gibson Dove. A year later, he received the instrument which he has used in concert ever since.
“When I went to my guru in 1986,” Debashish recalls, “he said,
‘Debashish, I have a nice guitar for you. It didn’t suit me, but I
think it suits you, because you have a tendency to do some
experiments always.’ He had found this guitar in Europe and
played it for ten years.” Like Kabra’s first guitar, it was a Hofner
archtop. Initially, Kabra was opposed to the modifications
Debashish made to the instrument, particularly the addition of
sympathetic strings, but he later withdrew his objections and
even christened the instrument. “He told me, ‘Debashish, the
instrument you are playing is the guitar I have given you, but
what you have done on it is something different. The style, the
technique, everything is different.’ So on a very holy day he
has given the name Dev Veena after long thought. Dev means
God: ‘The veena which has been sent to us by God.”’
The adaptations Debashish required for his Hofner were done
by Bhab-asindhu Biswas, whose workshop produces the Concord line of Indian acoustic guitars. You can buy a Spanish neck
flat-top guitar from him, but Bhabasindhu’s reputation is for
the finest Indian classical guitars: both Debashish and Vishwa
Mohan Bhatt play his instruments. (The Mohan Vina, Bhatt’s
instrument, is designed differently: it has back chikaris and only
three primary playing strings.) Bhabasindhu is often busy with
such custom orders as an instrument with sitar-like decorative
binding or a guitar with an exceptionally wide neck requested
by one of Debashish’s students who is blind.
“I tried to combine all advantages of vocal music, sarod and
sitar,” says Debashish of his efforts to Indianize his guitar. “I
gave another shape to this instrument.” But within it is a guitar.
Playing harmonics, he observes, “It sounds beautiful! Why would
I not use it, the harmonics? It’s guitar’s own tone with open
strings.” So Debashish evokes varied voices on a single instrument designed to combine strengths both Western and Eastern. “The point of view I am supporting,” he
says, “is that this instrument is more versatile than any other instrument.”
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Ragamala of Todi playing a rudra vina.
The Performance
The performance on this videotape occurred on the evening of November 17, 1994 at Max Muller
Bhawan in Calcutta. It was a significant day for Debashish Bhattacharya, for that morning he had been at
Kalighat Temple to receive the sacred thread worn across the shoulder and under the garment of adult
male Brahmins; it signifies maturity and without it a Brahmin may not marry, which Debashish did in
December. That evening he gave careful thought to what ragas he would present; his goal was to find
sounds accessible to Americans which were nonetheless idiomatically Hindustani.
His accompanists were Sutapa Bhattacharya, tambura, and Kumar Bose, tablas. Debashish’s sister, Sutapa, is
an accomplished vocalist and teacher of vocal music. The tambura, like the sitar, has a resonating chamber made of a dried gourd (tumba). Unlike sitar, tambura is never used as a melodic instrument. Its
singular role is to provide a constant drone of the tonic (Sa) and usually the fifth (Pa), though the fifth
isn’t a part of the drone in a raga like Gurjari Todi. (Ma, or the fourth interval, and sometimes the third,
Ga, may be substituted for the fifth, depending on their relative importance in a given raga.) Even when
the guitar and tablas render the tambura essentially inaudible, it is a key part of the ensemble, for it
provides an insistent tonic grounding.
While on this topic, it should be mentioned that traditional Indian music works around a fixed tonic
center. Key changes as we know them in the West don’t exist. This has invited no small amount of New
Age mystagogy. “Sa,” writes Joachim-Ernst Berendt in The Third Ear (Henry Holt & Co., New York,
1985), “corresponds exactly to the ‘year tone’—and there has not been any change for thousands of
years.” Berendt maintains that Sa, the central tonic note of Indian music, is immutably fixed at 136 Hz,
just below C sharp. “Indian music,” he asserts, “is organically and cosmically correctly tuned to Sa, the
‘Father of notes,’ the sun tone and its long-established relationship over millions of years with everything
that exists on the planet.” This, to put it charitably, is more imaginative than accurate. If you are studying
Hindustani music on sitar, your teacher may have you tune your instrument near the pitch Berendt calls
the Father of notes (sitarists tune anywhere from B to C#). If, however, you are in South India learning
about Karnatak music, you may tune your vina to F or F#. And if you are studying Hindustani guitar, your
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Sa will be D. If Sa was ever a single universal note, that hasn’t been the practice for quite some time.
Tablas, too, are tuned to Sa. These wonderfully expressive hand drums (the tabla proper is the
right drum, which is tuned; the bass drum, or bayan, is not) once were used for little more than time
keeping. Over the past couple of generations, however, tablas have marched to the front of Hindustani
instrumental ensembles. Tabla players keep the Tala, or cyclic rhymthic pattern well in hand while subdividing its beats, shifting its accents, and engaging in flamboyant improvisatory interplay with the melodic
instrumentalist. In his book, The Sitar: The Instrument and Its Technique, Manfred M. Junius suggested
things to note in a sitar and tabla performance, and the same elements can be seen in this video: “Now
watch the tabla player come in: he picks up the rhythm easily. First he produces some strokes with the
right hand on the tabla, then gradually the left hand brings in the other drum, the bayan. How expressive
this drum is! The sitarist continues to repeat the first part of the Gat [composition] known as the Sthayi,
the tablist is happily improvising, and with a brilliant cadence he opens his accompaniment till both
players end together on the last note of a phrase which is repeated three times; it is called Tehai. Each
time when both artists end together on the first Matra [beat] of the time cycle [beat 1=Sum], a wave of
relief passes through the audience. The Tala, the time-cycle, has been established.”
One of today’s leading tabla players, Kumar Bose, accompanies Debashish here. “I studied with
my father first, Pandit Biswa Nath Bose,” Kumar recalls. “My father was a disciple of Pandit Kanthe
Maharaj of Benares gharana; his son and disciple is Pandit Kishan Maharaj. After my father died in 1980,
I started learning from Pandit Kishan Maharaj also. So we belong to the same gharana, Benares gharana.
I started my life [i.e. career] accompanying Ustad Imrat Khan [master of sitar and surbahar, or bass sitar].
I toured with Imrat Khansab, [sitarist] Vilayat Khan-sab, and many other artists. Finally I joined Pandit
Ravi Shankar in 1981, and that was a big break for me. Panditji loved me and helped me a lot, and I’m
very obliged to him. He brought me to the world light. Then I just went on.”
The performance opens with a Dhun set to Raga Kirwani. Dhun is a type of light air or melody
with a repeated theme and improvised variations. It may be based on a folk tune or a popularization of a
classic raga. Kirwani is a Karnatak raga which has been integrated into Hindustani music by such instrumentalists as Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar, among others. Its basic scale, with a flat third and flat
sixth, you may recognize as our Harmonic minor scale. Santoorist Shivkumar Sharma has said of Kirwani:
“Its notes are such that in slow tempo the mood is one of yearning, longing and the pain of separation. In
fast tempo, however, its expression is light and romantic, so there is an interesting musical contrast.” The
Tala in this performance is a fast Dadra, a rhythmic cycle of six beats (3 +3=6). Debashish’s five primary
strings are tuned (from treble to bass) for Kirwani as follows: 1, D; 2, A; 3, F; 4, D; 5, A. He calls this D
minor tuning. His extensive use of harmonics here is beautifully guitaristic, while the singing quality of his
bar work recalls the emotional and highly ornamented Thumri vocal style.
(Indian music purists who may be shocked by a recital opening with a Dhun are advised that the
ordering of performances on the video was an editorial decision - the actual order in performance was the
traditional one, with the heavy ‘main course’ of a fully developed raga followed by lighter music. This
rearrangement is intended to ease the ‘culture shock’ of Americans unfamiliar with this idiom and hopefully in no way compromises the integrity of the music.)
The second selection on this video is the raga Gurjari Todi. Todi is one of the ten Thatas, or parent
scales, of North Indian classical music. Subtle variations on parent scales render such ‘offspring’ as
Gurjari Todi. Tori has a flat second, flat third, sharp fourth, and flat sixth. Ragas often follow slightly
different routes in ascent (aroh) and descent (avroh). Tori skips the fifth in ascent, but uses it (albeit in
passing) in descent. Gurjari Tori omits it altogether. “Gurjari Todi expresses the tragic part of love,” says
Debashish, who relates the tale of Lord Krishna and Radha as expressing the raga’s mood. “We are
involved with worshipping gods and goddesses through our music,” he says. “Pathos, remembrance of
past days, is the basic structure of Tori. If you get Pa in it, it’s the only expression of hope. So if Pancham
is left out, then everything is tragic. It’s basically a tragic rag.”
Ragas are rich with meaning and often imbued with extra-musical beliefs. Daniel M. Neuman
wrote of a singer who claimed to have cured a fevered Nawab by singing Gurjari Todi: “You know Gurjari
Todi can cure even the severest temperature if sung with perfection,” he insisted. Hindustani ragas have
time associations: this is a morning raga. Ragas have inspired poems, called Dhynamantrams, and paintings, called Ragamalas. Gurjari was personified in one as “A Southern girl, dusky, with splendid hair,
Gurjari sits smiling upon a bed made from the tenderest sandal trees of the Malaya mountain. Knowing all
the secrets of music, she plays, cheek leaning upon the lute.”
As Debashish sets the stage for this raga with a brief introductory alap, he makes expressive use
of his sympathetic and supporting strings to provide atmospheric shading of the notes he bars. When he
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plays in the mid-range, you may note a sarod-like sonority from his unwound bronze third and fourth
strings. (Only his fifth string is wound.) After the Gat, or fixed composition, is introduced, a variety of
right hand techniques lend accents to the melodic figure. The heavy staccato use of the thumbpick borrows from what Debashish calls “the power of the sarod,” which is plucked with a coconut-shell plectrum.
The Gat is set to fast Ektala, a rhythmic cycle of 12 beats (4+4+4=12). For Gurjari Todi, Debashish tuned
his primary playing strings thus: 1, D; 2, Bb; 3, F; 4, D; 5, Bb. “Bb (komal Dha) is the vadi,” says
Debashish, “and F (komal Ga) the samvadi.” He calls this tuning Bb major.
The final selection here is an exquisitely expansive development of the Raga Charukeshi. “It fits
my instrument’s character,” says Debashish. “Actually, Charukeshi is a South Indian raga. Over the past
40 or 50 years our great [North Indian] maestros, [sitarist] Nikhil Banerjee, Vilayat Khan, Ali Akbar Khansab,
Ravi Shankarji, everybody has taken advantage of Charukeshi to play, because it’s so joyous.” (The liner
notes to a Ravi Shankar recording of Charukeshi state the raga “depicts the mood of love and frivolity.”)
“Charukeshi,” says Debashish, “is a Karnatak raga, so it has no time limitation. It is well fit in the morning
as well as the evening. In this raga, we have many chances to experiment. From the Western point of
view, its quality is clear.”
Debashish explores the contours of Charukeshi, which has a flat sixth and flat seventh, in the
introductory alap: “We say opening the curtain for the show,” explains Debashish. The alap carefully
measures the character of the raga from various angles. This developmental process unfolds along
arhythmic lines until the Jor, the second section of an instrumental alap, introduces a pulse. The final
section of the alap is the brisk improvisatory jhala with its virtuosic barring and emphatic use of the
ringing chikaris.
“There are three Gats,” says Debashish of the raga’s development after Kumar Bose joins him.
“They’re set to Tintala slow (vilambit), Tintala fast (drut), and jhala respectively.” (Tintal is a rhythmic
cycle of 16 beats: 4+4+4+4=16.) “While I am playing this raga,” says Debashish, “I feel that my soul is a
little bit raised up.” His instrument’s primary strings are tuned thus: 1, D; 2, A; 3, F#; 4, D; 5, A. Debashish
calls this tuning D major. It is his primary tuning. Used by Hindus, Hawaiians, and Southern American
bluesmen, who sometimes called this tuning Vestapol, D tuning just may, if you’ll indulge the hyperbole,
be the “organically and cosmically correct” slide guitar tuning.
For their hospitality and help in Calcutta and West Bengal many thanks to Debashish Bhattacharya,
Sanjoy Chakraborty, Sumit Banerjee, and their families and friends.
Discography
Debashish Bhattacharya: Guitar
India Archive Music IAM CD 1007
Debashish Bhattacharya: Guitar, Young Masters Series, Music Today, A92067 (Indian cassette)
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