Mrinal Pande's Sahela Re Is An Heartfelt Ode To Hindustani Classical Music

When Vidya, a music scholar, sets out to write a book on the history of Hindustani classical music, she uncovers the remnants of a time and a tradition fast receding: when singers embodied the ragas in their purest forms; when patrons were worshippers, not followers.

Making our way through Benares, Calcutta, Bombay and New York, we meet Anjali Bai and Hira Bai – a mother-daughter duo known as much for their singing as for their beauty and intelligence; the gifted Allarakkhi Bi, a friend to Anjali Bai; the famous singer Husna Bai, Allarakkhi’s mother; and their descendants, who attempt to salvage what remains of the old music for new listeners on foreign shores.

Mrinal Pande’s Sahela Re, translated masterfully by Priyanka Sarkar, is a heartfelt ode to an era when music was sacred.

Here's an excerpt from Mrinal Pande’s Sahela Re

Let me begin my story with Dada-ji’s house, which was witness to all the important events of the early years of my hero, Radha Dada, and me.

You, too, might have your own memories of that house, but you had visited it only after Dada-ji’s death when that grand house had become rather rundown. While Dada-ji was alive, the unspoken but permanent tensions between my parents and the gossipy daughters of the house feeding them remained hidden. After his death, there were many awful fights and ugly disputes over inheritance and property. It was because of all that drama that Radha Dada ultimately left the city and moved far away on the pretext of running a publishing house he founded. Now, he only visits Kolkata and its outskirts for work, not Lucknow. Why, he asks, when I raise the topic, and something in his eyes tells me to leave things be, and I shut up.

After grabbing what they could, my father’s brothers sold off their shares of the property to outsiders and broke all contact with us. One after another, they were gone. And their sisters, our buas, who had witnessed and vociferously taken sides, have also passed on by now. The only person left behind was my mother, surrounded by the ghosts of the past. She now found herself surrounded by the families of two strangers and wondered who she could rely on.

We grew up with a deep and abiding love for art and beauty as our tonic. The family name, the money and property remained for us a mixed blessing at best.

Radha Dada and I discovered that relatives might have been affectionate and rich, but after all their small talk and niceties, something would be spoken politely and yet it would clearly reveal a deep dislike, laced with malice, especially about our family’s ties with the world of music. By an unspoken decree within our family, their opinions, if not rejected outright, were ignored. But the one person who paid a high price for this relentless internal battle was my simple, uncomplicated mother. She was a good homemaker, but she failed to meet the raised bar our arrogant family had set for its members when it came to music. It wasn’t just her lack of beauty but also her lack of interest in music and art that created a permanent wall between her and the rest of the family.

Radha Dada was older, and in trying to protect me and make a life for himself outside his family’s influence, he soon started feeling suffocated. True, he had friends like your brother Sanjeev and some others, and spent a considerable amount of time with them, but a certain dejection born out of the snobbery and bitterness within our large family gripped him tight. It reached a point where despite Amma and I persuading him hard, he still would not get married. Parents of many good girls showed interest, but Dada shied away. However, he made sure our mother never lacked for anything. But what went on deep within him, no one could see. To this day, only music perhaps can traverse its depths.

Radha Dada has a sharp intelligence and defiant temperament woven into his DNA. This is why he finally moved away from the family business altogether to start a publishing house in Lucknow, which is still very successful.

But money can’t buy everything.

In life, only a few relationships will, after they are formed, grow, and many of them will die. Most times, logic has no role in it. Partly because he remained introverted and partly because our mother, Amma, preferred silence to letting out her emotions, a steady bridge of communication could never get built between Dada and her. Later, Amma came to share a deep bond with my husband who belonged neither to their community nor was given to talking much.

As a man of few words himself, he perhaps sensed Amma’s unspoken fears and anxiety for her future after Dada’s departure better than me. He realized that, as she aged and grew frailer, she could not go on like this. And finally, on his advice, I asked Amma to move in here with us during her last days. I now realize that her last days with us were indeed full of a quiet joy.

Extracted with permission from Sahela Re by Mrinal Pande, translated by Priyanka Sarkar and published by HarperCollins India.

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