CULTURE 16

ART, THEATRE, MUSIC

The Crest Edition

THE TIMES OF INDIA
FAMILY BUSINESS: Khans uncle, the legendary Vilayat Khan (left) and his father Imrat Khan (below)

SHORTS
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GHORE, AFTER YEARS OF BAIRE

Sitartist Nishat Khan is composing a live background score for the screening of the silent gem A Throw of Dice. And the pit orchestra will come from Bollywood
MALINI NAIR
TIMES NEWS NETWORK o 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 virtuoso 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 challenge 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 synthesised film music of today as the film plays out on the screen at Siri Fort on April 25. The special musicmounted show of the film, a print restored by the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), is a part of a five-day state celebration of a hundred years of Indian cinema.

CREATIVE GAMBLE: Khans score for A Throw of Dice will take listeners on a journey down 100 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 wanted to bring the project to India because it is my homage to Indian films, says Khan who also composed the music 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 Iqbal Ahmad Khan. The crowds were typically Delhi a fair mix of old-style gunis (connoisseurs) and more garden-variety concertgoers. This meant that there were loud wahs! and nodding of heads but equally loud rounds of applause. Khan is not complaining about the rapturous reception 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 gifted 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 memories of 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 entertainment today, he says. But we owe that to the present generation to hang on to important aspects of our traditions. This is who we are, isnt it?

Commonwealth Prize List

he Commonwealth Short Story and Book Prizesshortlists are out and several Indian writers have made it. Once again, Anushka Jasraj, whose story, Radio Story was the 2012 regional winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, is on it. This year, she has written Notes from the Ruins, a short story about a young woman who has just arrived in Bombay and interprets the world through myth, crossword clues and a travel guidebook. Jasraj is currently attending the MFA programme at the University of Texas at Austin. The Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist features Nilanjana Roy for The Wildings, Jerry Pinto for Em and the Big Hoom, Mishi Saran for The Other Side of Light and Jeet Thayil for Narcopolis. I

Pronouncing Jhabvala

uth Prawer Jhabvala, the Booker Prize-winning novelist and Oscarwinning screenwriter for the Merchant-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 obituaries, thought fit to educate readers on how to pronounce her surname. While the WashPost got it right, pronounced JAHB-vah-lah, the NYT just didnt: pronounced JOB-vahla. I

Mrs Thatchers Knives

aragret 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 poem Deception. What a chilling line and how well it describes the controversial but remarkable woman who committed it to memory.

A gentile writes back

A Goan professor has penned a retort to Portugals 16th-century epic poet Luis de Camoes to tell him that the Goans werent the unlettered people the Portuguese believed them to be
ALEXANDRE MONIZ BARBOSA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK tionary and written books on the succession and inventory laws applicable in Goa. Regarded as Portugals epic poem, The Lusiads is a fantastical interpretation of Portuguese exploratory voyages that resulted in the discovery of the sea route to India. Camoes did make the sea journey to India in the 16th century, though not with

DIGNIFIED RESPONSE: Author Ave Cleto Afonso taught philosophy at a Panaji college, contributes to the newspaper columns, and has compiled a KonkaniItalian dictionary, (below) statue of Luis de Camoes at the ASI Museum in Old Goa

he 16th-century epic poem The Lusiads by 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 European 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 prophecy of 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 philosophy in a Panaji college. Hes also dabbled in journalism, compiled a Konkani-Italian dic-

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 the battles fought by the then Portuguese governor Castro in India as follows: And then, this one in the field shows up, / Strong victor and brave, before the mighty / King of Cambay, 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 goes punishing Dabul on the coast. / Even Ponda in the wilderness escapes him not. Afonso has a different take in O vaticino do swrga, which he says, may be seen as a reply of the erstwhile gentiles to the glorification 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-

While The Lusiads borrows from Greek mythology, O vaticino do swarga dives into Indian mythology, and begins with an invocation to Ganesh
bolically repaired. This is a modest attemptrooted in firm conviction and utmost sincerity to pay tribute to the memory of ancestors who suffered at the paw of the colonialist adventurers and their fanatical co-religionists-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 has expanded 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 Greek mythology for its characters, O vaticino do swarga dives into Indian mythology, with the arrival of the gods for the council being described thus: Of the first ones to arrive, Surya was already there / With the aditya that suited him well then / (Thereafter came others as it pleased them), / But Soma, commonly Chandra, himself was delaying. / Parashurama in hurry clouds was leaping. / Since the matter pertained him more. / Rama and Sita escorted by the loyal 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 / Of those who endeavour with letters and pen; / Wise Sarvatman, merciful / To all those who seek your boon; / Hale Vakratunda, brave son / Of noble parents whose valour the worlds fear, / Grant me of thy skill, of thy art, / 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 literary work of ingenious poetic history, it is hardly a record of pure history.