Gurudev's Drumming Legacy

Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati of Gurudev Patwardhan

James Kippen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780754654247
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351564724
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

The 1903 Mrdang aur Tabla Vadanpaddhati is a revelatory text that has never been translated or analysed. It is a manual for playing the two most important drums of North Indian (Hindustani) music, the pakhavaj (mrdang) and the tabla. Owing to its relative obscurity, it is a source that has never been discussed in the literature on Hindustani music. Its author, Gurudev Patwardhan, was Vice Principal of V.D. Paluskar's first music school in Lahore from its inception in 1901 to 1908. Professor James Kippen provides the first translation of this immensely important text and examines its startling implications for rhythmic and metric theory. It is the earliest work on Indian drumming to contain a notation sufficiently precise to allow definitive reconstruction. The compositions are of considerable musical interest, for they can be readily realized on the tabla or pakhavaj. Kippen sets the work and objectives of the original author in the context of a rich historical, social and political background. By also discussing radical differences in the second edition of 1938, published by Gurudev's nephew, the vocalist Vinayakrao Patwardhan, Kippen illuminates the process by which 'tabla theory' was being created in the early 20th century. Both Patwardhans were enthusiastic supporters of Paluskar's nationalist imperatives, and active participants in his drive to institutionalize music, codify and publish notations of it, and promote a modern, Hindu vision of India wherein its identity could once again be linked to a glorious golden age in distant antiquity.

PART 1
Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati

The Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati – an instructional manual or notation-based ‘method’ (paddhati) for playing (vādan) the mr̥daṅg (also very widely known as the pakhāvaj¹) and tablā drums – is by any standard an entirely remarkable and unique work. First published in Lahore by the Mufīd-e ‘Ām Press in 1903, it provides 173 drum pieces using a notational system that differentiates between the right and left hand parts, specifies precise fingerings, indicates patterns of stress and even suggests pitch inflections on the bass drum of the tablā pair. Additionally, Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati (MTVP) provides a good deal of technical information on drum strokes as well as a few references to lay (rhythm, tempo) and tāl (metre, metric cycles). Such a level of detail for a book of that era clearly marks its author as a man of exceptional vision. He was Dattatreya Vasudev Patwardhan, better known by his alias ‘Gurudev’. A close associate of the vocalist and educational visionary Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Gurudev became vice principal of Paluskar’s first public institution for instruction in music, the Gāndharva Mahāvidyālaya, established in Lahore on 5 May 1901.

Gurudev’s work offers us a window onto the musical past, and we would do well to investigate the clues it presents to a theory and practice that has since changed in many significant ways. Naturally, one cannot presume that the author’s musical knowledge was representative of the general state of drumming knowledge in the early years of the twentieth century: one assumes that there must have been widely divergent repertoires and styles in different regions of the subcontinent, just as there are remnants of those divergences today in what have become known as the gharānās (stylistic traditions) of pakhāvaj (Kudau Singh, Nana Panse, Punjab, and so on) and tablā (Delhi, Lucknow, Ajrara, Farukhabad, Benares, Punjab, and so on). And yet, in the repertoire Gurudev gives us, we find many compositions that are familiar to twenty-first-century players of the pakhāvaj and tablā, suggesting that the material presented in MTVP is far from being an obscure and idiosyncratic body of knowledge.

Gurudev was no doubt inspired by the published works of his mentor, Paluskar, as both they and many other Maharashtrians² embarked on an evangelical mission to spread Hindustani music to the Indian bourgeoisie and to set down the intricate properties of its oral traditions in written form. Neither their efforts nor their success should be underestimated, since the twentieth century effectively saw the gradual demise of the mainly Muslim hereditary occupational specialist musician and the rise to prominence of legions of mainly Hindu, non-hereditary, middle class practitioners and patrons. Indeed, Paluskar and his contemporary, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, are even today widely hailed as the ‘saviours’ of Hindustani music who wrested its knowledge from the clutches of a colonial rule that had allowed a once noble art to become the monopoly of ‘a small coterie of illiterate professionals who jealously guarded their art’.³ In reality, the transformation of India’s music culture was most certainly the result of a much more complex set of sociocultural and historical variables deserving of a far subtler and more detailed interpretation. At the same time, though, we should not lose sight of Gurudev’s purely pedagogical motive of teaching to others the music that he had spent his life learning: there is an enthusiasm and a certain ingenuousness about his work that is both compelling and inspiring.

While there are many familiar musical concepts in Gurudev’s work, there are also some surprisingly unfamiliar ones. The author’s views on tāl (metre), explicit and implicit, suggest several differences with the theoretical formulations with which most contemporary scholars and practitioners of Hindustani music are conversant. For example, the flexibility of his concept of beat in the most common of all tāls (metric cycles), tīntāl, helps to explain some of the anomalies of this tāl’s structure and prompts a re-examination of issues of lay (tempo). His annotations on lay itself suggest a conservative approach to tempo in general that has become obsolete, and this forces us to ask why Hindustani musical practice was subsequently pushed to the extreme poles of pace (in particular, the dawdling tempi of most vocal baṛā khayāls and the rapid blur of instrumental climaxes). Gurudev’s choice of titles for the genres of drum composition, too, raises questions about the evolution of the tablā drum repertoire in general: why, for instance, should a term now so fundamental to the learning, practice, and performance of the instrument – qāida – be absent in this text? Finally, and thanks to his meticulous notation system, it is clear that Gurudev’s expectations for the technical realization of the drum bols (strokes and their spoken syllables) for pakhāvaj and tablā differed in many significant ways from contemporary common practice.

And now comes the caveat: Gurudev’s work, if it is available to us at all, is not known through his original 1903 publication of the Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati. Produced in a very limited run, it is entirely unclear how many copies are now extant. The work may have run to other editions in other languages, but how many is unclear. It was not until 1938, 21 years after Gurudev’s death, that a second edition of his book under the slightly different title Mr̥daṅg-Tablā Vādanpaddhati was published by his kinsman, the distinguished disciple of Paluskar and vocalist of the Gwalior tradition, Vinayak Narayan Patwardhan, better known to us as Vinayakrao Patwardhan.⁴ This second edition was then reprinted in 1982 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi. If Gurudev’s work is known to us at all, then it is through this last reprint. However, even that seems to have earned little attention from scholars since there are almost no references in the literature to Gurudev’s book in any of its published incarnations.

A mere glance at the second edition reveals substantial differences from the first edition: the work is prefaced by a new introduction spelling out elements of the saṅgīt śāstras (ancient Sanskrit treatises on music) as they pertain to rhythm and drumming; additional tāls are given, including references to archaic or obsolete ones; the order of the repertoire has been changed; some of Gurudev’s original pieces are missing, and new ones not included in the first edition are notated. Perhaps most importantly of all, gone is Gurudev’s meticulous notation of right- and left-hand parts with precise indications of fingering and phrasing. This last point is crucial because, regardless of the second edition’s sections describing pakhāvaj and tablā bols, the music is impossible to interpret with accuracy. It seems clear, m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Orthography and Translation
• Part 1 Music, Theory and Nationalism in the Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati
• Part 2 Translation of the Mr̥daṅg aur Tablā Vādanpaddhati (1903) by Gurudev Patwardhan
• Part 3 Translation of New Material from the Mr̥daṅg-Tablā Vādanpaddhati (1938/1982) as edited by Vinayakrao Patwardhan
• Appendix 1: Translation of the Preface to Saṅgīt Bālbodh (vol. 1, 1901) by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar
• Appendix 2: List of Compositions
• Bibliography
• Index