7/28/2019 TCRM_2013_4_13_15

1/1

CULTURE 16ART, THEATRE, MUSIC THE TIMES OF INDIA

The Crest Edition

MALINI NAIRTIMES NEWS NETWORK

To re-imagine the background score of a film

made more than two decades before you

were born cant be an easy task, particularly

if it was a silent film. But Nishat Khan, 52,

is very much at home in multiple genres.

He has a formidable reputation as a virtu-

oso sitar player and he has played with

Eric Clapton, jazz wizards, flamenco artistes and western

classical musicians. Creating a live background score

music for the 1929 silent epic,A Throw of Dice, is a chal-

lenge that actually gets his creative adrenaline rushing.

Khan is pulling off a musical coup of sorts for the

event. The music will be played by a full Bollywood

orchestra the kind you rarely hear in the highly syn-

thesised film music of today as the film plays out on

the screen at Siri Fort on April 25. The special music-mounted show of the film, a print restored by the Nat-

ional Film Archive of India (NFAI), is a part of a five-day

state celebration of a hundred years of Indian cinema.

We will fuse the modern and the traditional in

a tribute that will be all about the musical journey

of Indian films over the last 100 years. Many of the

musicians who will be playing were part of this magical

journey, says Khan. Incidentally,A Throw of Dice has

another restored version, a project spearheaded by the

British Film Insitute, for which the music was scored

by Nitin Sawhney.This is not the first time that Khan has worked with

A Throw of Dice either. He had played a score for the

film during its screening at the festival of Indian films

at the Silent Movie

Theatre in Los Angeles

four years ago. I want-

ed to bring the project

to India because it is

my homage to Indian

films, says Khan who

also composed the mus-

ic for Sudhir Mishras

Yeh Saali Zindagi.

The Kolkata-born

musician, who is backed

by a formidable musical

legacy he is the son

of Imrat Khan, one of

the handful of surbahar

players of our times,

and the nephew of the

incomparable Vilayat

Khan was in Delhi

recently to play at an

event to celebrate the

work of Dilli Gharana

doyen Ustad IqbalAhmad Khan. The

crowds were typically Delhi a fair mix of old-style

gunis (connoisseurs) and more garden-variety concert-

goers. This meant that there were loudwahs!and

nodding of heads but equally loud rounds of applause.

Khan is not complaining about the rapturous recep-

tion even if it comes right in the middle of a complex

raga Saazgiri. Frankly I dont mind, he says with a

good-natured laugh. There must be a lot of people out

there who think they dont know enough to say wah or

aah and are more comfortable clapping. As long as I leave

them something to take home, I am fine.

He has been playing across the globe but the sitarists

glee at this typically Indian adoration is understandable.

He has lived in LA and before that London since he

was 16 and now that he is at a turning point in his

career, he is looking to spend more time at home. Home

is Kolkata, where he lives in a 136-year-old mansion gift-

ed to his grandfather, the legendary Ustad Inayat Khan,

by a student Rajendra Mullick. It is an ageing Kolkata

mansion full of dark corners and childhood memoriesof listening to and practising under his uncle and father.

I feel like I am completing a cycle, he says. In New

York, they will applaud talent with great joy but here

they connect to my music as a people with shared

culture. The daad(compliment) I get here feels different

from anything else anywhere.

Indian classical music went to the West in the 50s

and then established itself across Europe and the US.

The early decades were one of rapt devotion to anything

Indian and classical because it all sat in with an exotic

package of culture from the East. Slowly this music

lost its mystic aura, made itself at home in the West.

It continues even today to be hugely popular but

not quite in the way it was in the earlier decades.

It is not like it used to be, there are fewer concerts

today and Bollywood is becoming hugely popular.

There is also great demand for world music, news sounds

and collaborations but pure classical... says Khan.

Ironically, home is not what it used to be either and no

one is more keenly aware of this than Khan. This is a

time of incredible change in India. The visual element

is more important than anything else in entertainmenttoday, he says. But we owe that to the present genera-

tion to hang on to important aspects of our traditions.

This is who we are, isnt it?

ALEXANDRE MONIZ BARBOSATIMES NEWS NETWORK

The 16th-century epic poem The Lusiadsby Luis de Camoes, which sings paens

to the Portuguese adventures in the sea

and their reign in Goa, has just received a

response from a gentile.

Over 500 years after the Portuguese

captured Goa and 50 years after the Euro-

pean nation left Indias shores, a Goan writer

and retired philosophy professor has strung

together words and verse in Portuguese to

tell Camoes that his fantasy was not without

its flaws, and that the gentiles (the word by

which the Portuguese described the Goans)

arent the unlettered people the Portuguese

believed them to be.

O vaticnio do swrga (The prophecyof heaven) is a literary essay inspired by the

colourful mythology of India, with a view

to present a construct of the dignity of the

erstwhile scorned gentile from Goa, for the

sake of a more equitable and enriching

Indo/Goan-Portuguese cultural encounter

through the medium of literatures of the two

peoples, says Ave Cleto Afonso, the author

of the manuscript. Afonso, 69, taught philos-

ophy in a Panaji college. Hes also dabbled in

journalism, compiled a Konkani-Italian dic-

tionary and written books on the succession

and inventory laws applicable in Goa.

Regarded as Portugals epic poem, TheLusiads is a fantastical interpretation ofPortuguese exploratory voyages that result-

ed in the discovery of the sea route t o

India. Camoes did make the sea journey to

India in the 16th century, though not with Vasco Da Gama who had discovered the

route decades earlier, and spent time in

Goa. The poem drew from his experiences

in the land and also glorified the Iberian

adventurers of the sea.

For instance, The Lusiads describes thebattles fought by the then Portuguese gover-

nor Castro in India as follows:And then,this one in the field shows up, / Strong victor

and brave, before the mighty / King ofCambay, and the sight gives him fright /Of the ferocious throng of the four legged. /

No less his lands ill defends / The Adil Shah,against the triumphant arm / That goespunishing Dabul on the coast. / Even Pondain the wilderness escapes him not.

Afonso has a different take in O vaticino

do swrga,which he says, may be seen as areply of the erstwhile gentiles to the glorifi-

cation of the Portuguese heroes (including

the missionaries) whose feats in Goa caused

unending misery and injustice, which still

remain to be duly owned up and albeit sym-

bolically repaired. This is a modest attempt-

rooted in firm conviction and utmost sincer-

ity to pay tribute to the memory of ancestors

who suffered at the paw of the colonialist

adventurers and their fanatical co-religion-

ists-and to assert the cultural identity and

pride of the oriental race as well.

The book tries to follow the same course

of events as in The Lusiads, but Afonso hasexpanded and extended the ambit and

sequence of events with the introduction

of a few new historical elements generally

meant to bring to the fore the perspective

of the victim of colonial and missionary

atrocities as the dominant context of the

present narrative.

While The Lusiads borrows from Greekmythology for its characters, O vaticino do

swarga dives into Indian mythology, withthe arrival of the gods for the council being

described thus: Of the first ones to arrive,Surya was already there / With the adityathat suited him well then / (Thereafter came

others as it pleased them), / But Soma,commonly Chandra, himself was delaying.

/ Parashurama in hurry clouds wasleaping. / Since the matter pertained him

more. / Rama and Sita escorted by theloyal Hanuman, / Were entering alongside

solid Himavan.Besides a preface that is in prose, the book

has six chants in nearly 500 stanzas that seek

to follow camonian poetic style. Interestingly,

the poem begins with a chant to Ganesh.

hm!Gannshayah nmh kind god / Ofthose who endeavour with letters and pen; /Wise Sarvatman, merciful / To all those who

seek your boon; / Hale Vakratunda, braveson / Of noble parents whose valour theworlds fear, / Grant me of thy skill, of thyart, / Not more than a small part.

Afonso hopes that publishers in Portugal

and Brazil will be interested in publishing

his work so that the people in their countries

get a view of 16th-century Goa from a Goans

eyes. For though The Lusiads is a literarywork of ingenious poetic history, it is hardly

a record of pure history.

While The Lusiads

borrows from Greekmythology, O vaticino do

swarga dives into Indianmythology, and begins with

an invocation to Ganesh

DIGNIFIED RESPONSE: Author Ave CletoAfonso taught philosophy at a Panajicollege, contributes to the newspapercolumns, and has compiled a Konkani-Italian dictionary, (below) statue of Luisde Camoes at the ASI Museum in Old Goa

A gentile writes backA Goan professor has penned a retort to Portugals 16th-centuryepic poet Luis de Camoes to tell him that the Goans werent theunlettered people the Portuguese believed them to be

I Commonwealth Prize List

The Commonwealth Short Story and

Book Prizesshortlists are out and sev-

eral Indian writers have made it. Once

again,Anushka Jasraj, whose story,RadioStorywas the 2012regional winner of the

Commonwealth Short

Story Prize, is on it.

This year, she has writ-

tenNotes from theRuins, a short storyabout a young woman

who has just arrived in

Bombay and interprets the world through

myth, crossword clues and a travel guide-

book. Jasraj is currently attending the MFA

programme at the University of Texas at

Austin. The Commonwealth Book Prize

shortlist features Nilanjana Roy for TheWildings, Jerry Pinto forEm and the Big

Hoom, Mishi Saran for The Other Side ofLight and Jeet Thayil forNarcopolis.

I Pronouncing Jhabvala

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the Booker

Prize-winning novelist and Oscar-

winning screenwriter for the Mer-

chant-Ivory team, passed away last week.

Born into a German-Jewish family, she

married Cyrus Jhabvala,

the Parsi architect

who was the head of the

School of Planning and

Architecture in Delhi.

Both the Washington

Post and the New York

Times, in their obituar-

ies, thought fit to edu-

cate readers on how to

pronounce her sur-

name. While the WashPost got it right,

pronounced JAHB-vah-lah, the NYT just

didnt: pronounced JOB-vahla.

I Mrs Thatchers Knives

Maragret Thatcher, who died last week,

was criticized heavily by poets and

writers in Britain for her capitalist

policies. But one poet whom she liked

and invited to No.10 several times was

Philip Larkin, the bitter and brilliant

Englishman who

famously said that

deprivation to him was

what daffodils were to

Wordsworth. Though

he was flattered by the

attention, he asked Mrs

Thatcher to actually

quote a line from his

poetry. And she did.

All the unhurried day,Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,

from his poemDeception.What a chillingline and how well it describes the contro-

versial but remarkable woman who com-

mitted it to memory.

SHORTS

Sitartist Nishat Khan is composing a live

background score for the screening of the silent

gem A Throw of Dice. And the pit orchestrawill come from Bollywood

FAMILY BUSINESS:Khans uncle, thelegendary Vilayat Khan(left) and his fatherImrat Khan (below)

GHORE, AFTERYEARS OF BAIRE

CREATIVE GAMBLE: Khans score for A Throw of Dicewill take listeners on a journey down 100 years ofIndian cinema