P. V. in Perspective
By Ubaya Warnakulasooriya
Music is meant for listening, and in Indian classical tradition it is practiced as an audio-aesthetic art valued for its melodious content enriched with Rasa and Raga. However, in a deeper examination we find it to be more than a mere aesthetic listening experience. It broadens the universe of our brains, sharpens our judgement, purifies our souls, and cleanses our visibility of the sublime. Well, if you pray for, in genuine concentration on a particular particle of a musical note in the Indian classical tradition, the resulting ecstasy will surely lift you to heaven of tranquility – the Moksha."
Sangeet Nipun P. V. Nanadasiri took to practice of music and mastered musicology like a scientist who knows that nature would unfold before us for the questions we ask the nature. A Chinese wise saying has it that the rivers leave the mountain tops and flow down to ocean not because they dislike the mountain tops or not because of their love for the oceans but just as decreed by nature.
P. V sincerely believed that the Sri Lankan brand of-music is one that has come under the influence of Indian tradition not by subtle contrivance but through a process of multi-faceted interactions with India over centuries. Well, the more we seek to distance ourselves disregarding our lip to lip cultural, religious, political and trade relations with India the more we get as closer to her as we are to the Palk Strait that thinly separates our two nations.
Those who theorize for a wholly indigenous set of notations independent of Indian tradition seem to have forgotten the fact that the Indian classical and folk music had sprung up and developed from among the people whose living and life’s sorrows and pleasures are originating from the same sources and the same life styles as Sri Lankan people are used to, the difference being the vastness of scale and variety. For instance, for one patch of our green field, there she has hundreds of millions and for a single simple folk song sung by a single peasant woman in one harvested field here, there in India they have many hundreds of thousands of them singing such songs at any given time.
P. V. Nandasiri and family with Ustaad Afaq Hussain Khan (center)
Lucknow, India, 1988
A press reporter once asked Pandit Nehru how many problems he had got to grapple with, and he in his witty reply, he said “three hundred thirty-six million” implying India’s population at that time which in comparison with ours under D.S. Senanayake, his counterpart in Sri Lanka was only as small as six million. One can imagine the vastness and diversity of India versus ours on the cultural front alone. Even in the Buddha’s time when Sri Lanka had only three small states, northern India alone had as many as sixteen states each one of which was as big as the whole of our country. While we have less than fifteen thousand villages, India counts as many as two million villages.
Well, we need to take stock of these factors analytically in order to understand the complexity and depth of the differences between India’s classical music tradition vis-à-vis our folk music.
It little matters whether music tradition had its origin largely in the Hindu temples performed in praise of Hindu pantheon or whether the rhythms of our drums had developed in association with the devil dances and Buddhist rituals. What really matters is whether we are sincere in our convictions that the widely practiced popular music or the academic music we learn in schools and universities here is that of northern Indian Hindustani classical origination and orientation.
P. V, who was well versed with both the local and the Indian traditions, was genuinely convinced of the limitations of attempts at theorizing a wholly indigenous musicological system independent of the Indian Rasa-Raga tradition. Of course, he believed in a cohabitation where there is space for a Sri Lankan identity in which her regional folky poetic styles of singing can find some limited notational range of musical expressions that can be articulated in terms of Indian classical musicology. Well, in regard to communally inspired search for a characteristically wholly national identity in Sinhala music, he in his inimitable humility would say “God give me courage to change what I can and humility to accept what I cannot”.
"P. V. Nandasiri practiced music as a truly scientific discipline, delving into its finest details and kept away from the campaign for a wholly indigenous system of Sinhala music which according to him was nothing more than a politically viable farce."
However, in his almost single handed unbudging attempts at defending his stance, he was seen as arrogant and ardently Indian among his peers and contemporaries. Yes, of course, he was, in his sacrosanct duty of teaching music which he held dear to his heart but none at all as for the alleged arrogance and the Indianness.
P. V. practiced music as a truly scientifically disciplined artist delving into its finest details and kept away from the campaign for a wholly indigenous system of Sinhala music which according to him was nothing more than a politically viable farce. He faced up to bouts of hypocritic public confrontations on this score.
However, his personal convictions apart, he had been in the forefront of linage of teachers who took upon themselves the rigorous task of building a generation of musicians capable of maintaining the dignity of profession of what one may call the Sinhala music in this country.
(Pictured above) P. V. Nandasiri with Pandit Ravishankar
