Rajeev Taranath’s sarod played in the shared space of music, poetry

Pandit Rajeev Taranath, sarod maestro and disciple of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, had a PhD in TS Eliot’s poetry but continued to quote a more romantic WB Yeats while discussing music. An irremediable romantic on the sarod, Taranath passed away in Mysuru on June 11, aged 91.

I have always considered him an intimate outsider in the fabled world of the Maihar Allauddin gharana, as everyone there, except him, defined illustrious lives only through music whereas Taranath led an intellectual’s life in music. Borrowing a thought from him when he was narrating his first encounter with his ustad’s music: “That evening came, and the concert began with raga Puriya Kalyan. Chaturlal waited behind the tabla. Soon, this strange balding Buddha on the sarod, draped over his exotic instrument, just took off, soared, explored the dark silences, and burst into volcanic fury.... metaphor fails me! I was a changed man. My world was emptied of everything, except that man and that sound.”

Rajeev Taranath was 19 years old then. He was reading Eliot those days. “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” Until his encounter with Khan’s music, he was a singing young man. He had his initial tutelage in vocal music under his father Pt Taranath and later under Panchakshara Gawai and Venkata Rao Ramdurgkar, senior disciple of Sawai Gandharva. Rajeev Taranath’s vocalism had roots in the Kirana gharana style, and he had unambiguous clarity about the role of vocalism in Indian classical instrumental music, whether in north or south India. It was Pt Ravi Shankar who insisted that Rajeev leave his English professorship at the Hyderabad Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages to pursue his passion for sarod under Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. He remained a student of the ustad till the latter’s demise in 2009.

While narrating about his ustad’s music, Rajeev Taranath said once, “It was fullness, a fullness of emotion and experience. Khan sahib’s gift to our music is the exploration of sound.” As a student of literature, he had a passionate liking for soundscapes in Eliot’s metaphors and, after becoming a student of sarod, he continued his exploration of images of sound in music.

While writing this tribute, I am listening to a recording of a 1998 concert that Rajeev Taranath gave in Colorado, US, where Ustad Zakir Hussain accompanied him on the tabla. It is a dazzling Yaman. Yaman was among his favourite ragas and he once said in an interview, “I feel and have felt that I could go on playing that raga throughout a lifetime. And without repeating. It is like many of these continuous processes that our body has – like breathing, it goes on over a lifetime. Our relationship with a raga is like that.”

Eminent Carnatic musician TM Krishna in his condolence message called Rajeev Taranath “a brilliant artist and a brutally honest human being with such an exciting modern mind”. The last part of these attributes bears a little more emphasis. Among his generation of Indian musicians, Rajeev Taranath stood as an exceptional modern mind. His life has been a modern moment in 20th century Karnataka, and let me validate my statement with a quote from him: “A hundred years later, an UR Ananthamurthy or a Rajeev Taranath will not be known, but a writer like Chandrashekhara Kambara will be remembered. Because writers rooted in the soil will only be remembered.” Rajeev Taranath played a seminal role in the making of the progressive Navya movement in Kannada in the 1960s and 1970s through his brilliant writings in Kannada and English. He had a lasting influence on all major modern Kannada writers in the last century.

Rajeev Taranath and Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia did the music score of G Aravindan’s one-of-a-kind Malayalam movie, Pokkuveyil (Twilight, 1982), in which Balachandran Chullikkad, an eminent, modern poet in the language played the protagonist. While writing this tribute, I called the poet and asked him about those days. He said, “I remember an evening in Madras. Rajeev Taranath, G Aravindan and T Pattabhirama Reddy (poet and film director) were sitting quietly in a room for hours. There was music in that silence.”

I called three more people before writing this tribute. All three live in the city where the musician lived all these years. Historian Ramachandra Guha told me that when I called him he was listening to Rajeev Taranath’s Manj Khamaj, a favourite of his guru as well. Guha told me that Rajeev Taranath was truly a rara avis, a rare bird, “a musician among the scholars and a scholar among the musicians”.

Vidushi Lalith J Rao, eminent musician of the Agra gharana, and N Jayavanth Rao, historian of the Agra gharana and musicologist, residing in Bangalore, say, “Rajeevji was a brilliant sarodist, truly multifaceted in different fields, extremely talented, a very friendly person and a good human being. Even at the age of 90, he did riyaz for three to four hours a day, and used to say that that is what kept him alive.”

S Gopalakrishnan is a writer, broadcaster, and founder of the podcast, Dilli Dali. The views expressed are personal