Musical Heritage.

Songs are the most precious heritage of mankind. What makes a song endure, with its music, words and rhythm, is that special moment of divine inspiration that gives it birth, a moment known only to its creator, but a moment that he passes on to the song in a silent kind of way.

Those who learn songs will know. For it is such a mysterious though delightful process, ‘getting’ the melody in bits and then as a whole, the words holding your heart as you cat ch the lilt, and the tempo coming along, like an organic part of the whole. No wonder once you learn a song, you remember it always.

Pandit Amarnath, who gave to the Hindustani khayal a vast repertoire of Sufi songs, referred to the song as a pearl in an oyster, produced by a moment of divine inspiration, a ‘noor ki boond’, or drop of the heavenly waters.

Like one evening when in a moment of inspiration, he suddenly became acutely aware of the joy of togetherness, seeing hundreds of sparrows chirping together on the boughs of a grove of eucalyptus trees before the cape of night wrapped the grove in silence. He then composed a haiku like piece in the raga Gauri – traditionally a funeral dirge – “Kohu na ikla daar daar/ Kohu need nahi peed/ sochat man baar baar,” “None alone, branch after branch/ in no nest any pain/ thinks my heart again and again.”

In the same intuitive way, the ‘thought’ or ‘khayal’ of painless, togetherness came to Panditji towards the end of life, when this song was composed, as against the ‘thought’ of painful aloneness which came during the early part of his composing life, when in the same raga, Gauri, he composed the lines in the raga’s traditional mood: “Take wind my soul-bird/ Little of the day is left/ All nestle in a home or other/ Lies in your destiny a disunion.”

The moment of inspiration is a moment that becomes heady, like wine giving way to an inner intoxication. Like Panditji’s song in raga Madhmat Sarang: “O bring the wine brim-filled,/ And pour with your mystic glance,/ Lots and lots for all. O wine True, and wine giver True/ Awaken That Truth intoxicating in the hearts of all.” In raga Kindoli he says: “Holy is the soul of the intoxicated one/ Who dranks from the cup of Love/ Bright shine his lights/ His days a Diwali have become”

In music the moment of inspiration also embodies to become the muse, known as the mitwa of innumerable songs, the beloved or the soul-mate, whose love is a message from the divine. In Panditji’s song for the raga shree, the mitwa is the ‘sakar’ or embodied from of the nirakar, the formless. “One form pervades my heart’s universe/ Which is endless boundless/ As form becoming the ‘meet’ (or mitwa).

The word ‘truth’ figures like a touchstone in Pandit Amarnath’s repertoire of lyrics for the khayal. Khayals are timeless truths, ‘unvelied’ to the composer now and then during his life of Sadhana: “Sing songs that are true/ They be, or be not now”, is a song in a raga he discovered byh the name of shyam bhoop, a song which then continues as “Tum he preet karo/ Be it requited, or be it not,” …. In the eternal symbiotic relationship of songs with Love that is both human and divine.