Everybody say Ye-Ye!

Michael E. Veal

A humid weekend night in the early 1990s. The scene: outside the Afrika Shrine nightclub in Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria, home base of the legendary Nigerian musician Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and his thirty-piece orchestra, Egypt 80. Even though the ubiquitous, machine gun toting soldiers of the Nigerian army have a well-deserved reputation for making the lives of ordinary civilians miserable, they are decidedly peripheral to tonight’s scenario. The Shrine is understood to be Fela’s autonomous zone, where his own anarchic, hedonistic law prevails.

The atmosphere is festive as the audience enters, a mixture of students, activists, rebels, criminals, music lovers, and even politicians, policemen, and soldiers arriving incognito. They make their way through the sea of traders hawking their goods by candle light snacks,drinks, cigarettes, and marijuana as the sound of the Egypt 80 spills from inside the open-air club. After purchasing a ticket and being frisked for weapons at the doorway, audience members enter the interior of the Shrine, a semi-enclosed counter-cultural carnival of funky, political music, pot smoking, mysticism, and provocative dancing. Four fishnet-draped go-go cages, each containing a loosely clad female dancer grinding languorously, rise out of the smoky haze. A neon light in the shape of the African continent casts its red glow over the stage. In addition to more food, drink, and marijuana vendors, the rear of the club houses an actual shrine a large altar containing religious objects and photos of Fela’s Pan-Africanist political heroes, including Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah, and Sekou Toure, and his late mother, Mrs. Funmilayo Anikulapo-Kuti.

The Egypt 80 band has been playing since midnight, wanning up the crowd with classics from Fela’s older recorded repertoire, such as ”Trouble Sleep” (1972), “Why Blackman Dey Suffer” (1972), “Lady” (1972), “Water No Get Enemy” (1975), “Opposite People” (1975),

“Sorrow, Tears and Blood” (1977), “Dog Eat Dog” (1977), “Beasts of No Nation” (1986), and bandleader/baritone saxophonist Lekan Animashaun’s “Serere (Do Right).” The band is awaiting Fela’s arrival, so these songs are sung by various band members, including

Animashaun (known around the Shrine as “Baba Ani”), second baritone saxophonist Rilwan Fagbemi (known as “Showboy”), Fela’s ten year- old son Seun, and artist/musician Dede Mabiaku, whom Fela often referred to as his “adopted son.” Fela, the “Chief Priest of Shrine,” finally arrives with his retinue around 2 A.M., to tumultuous applause. Dressed tonight in a tight purple jumpsuit stitched with traditional Yoruba symbols and shapes, he makes his way through the crowd to the stage and salutes his audience with the clenched-fist black power salute. He steps up to the mike and pauses, surveying the crowd with mischievous eyes while taking intermittent puffs from a flashlight-sized joint in his hand. Finally he speaks:

Everybody say ye-ye!

The crowd roars in response, and Fela segues directly into the profane, no-holds-barred criticism of the country’s leaders he has offered his audiences for the past two decades:

Bro’s and sisters, if you want to know how corrupt this country is, that word “corruption” has lost its meaning here! Fela arches his eyebrows, thrusts his chest and stomach out, and marches around the stage in imitation of the arrogant and obese ogas (literally “bosses”), men of importance who parade their wealth around Lagos in the midst of suffering:

“Yeah, I’m corrupt, man!”

The crowd bursts into laughter, and Fela continues his monologue:

In fact, corruption has even become a title in this country! In Germany, they have President Kohl. In America, they have President Bush. In England they have Prime Minister Major. Here in Nigeria, we have Corrupted Babangida!

At the mention of their president, the audience shouts in deafening unison “Ole!” (Yoruba for “thief”).

Fela switches into pidgin English and recounts an incident in which the president was snubbed by French president François Mitterand during a recent state visit:

When Corrupted Babangida go for France, Mitterand no wan meet am. He go dey send a cultural minister. He go say Nigeria be nation of thieves. The man was disgraced. When he came back, the fucking army was kicking ass all over Nigeria! Na how many students dem kill fo’ dat one?

The crowd roars in laughter and approval, the Shrine now rocking like a revivalist church:

You see, bro’s and sisters, I know dem. They are nothing but spirit beings. They are the same motherfuckers who sold Africans into slavery hundreds of years ago. In fact, the same spirit who controls Babangida controls Bush and Thatcher too. Everyone is here to play their same role again, and I want you all to know that tonight; Babangida, Obasanjo, Abiola, they have all been here before. That’s why I call this time the era of ”second slavery.”

They don’t have to come here and take us by force our leaders sell us up front. Everybody say ye-ye!

The audience shouts “ye-ye!” punctuated with cries of “yab dem!” (abuse them).

Bro’s and sisters, I’m gonna play for you now, a thing we call M.A.S.S.”Music Against Second Slavery.”

Fela spins around and sternly surveys the orchestra members, who stare at him intently. Slowly, he begins to clap out the song’s tempo to the band, wiggling his slender body to the rhythm. Though short in stature, he wields enormous authority onstage. A guitarist begins a serpentine single-note line, accompanied by a percussionist thumping out a thunderous rhythm atop an eight-foot traditional gbedu drum laid on its side. The audience indicates its growing excitement by yelling Fela’s various nicknames in response: “Omo Iya Aje!” (son of a powerful woman [literally "witch"]), “Baba!” (father), “Abami Eda!” (strange one, or spirit being), “Chief Priest!” “Black President!” Fela raises his hands above his head and waves the percussionists and rhythm section in. Time itself seems to slowly shift along with the sticks and the shekere rattle, whose steady chirping frames an intricate tapestry of spacy rhythm.

Stepping to his electric organ at center stage, Fela begins to improvise around the rhythm with greater and greater density. At the height of his solo, he waves in the ten-piece horn section, which enters dramatically, blaring the song’s theme. With instrumental solos, featured dancers, and audience participation games, it will be another thirty minutes before Fela even begins to sing, but the audience is in delirious, swirling motion. Another night at the Afrika Shrine has begun. Fela will perform from his arrival until dawn. This is partly in the tradition of Lagos night life, but it also results from more pragmatic considerations Lagos is one of the world’s most dangerous cities and travel is extremely ill-advised after dark. In keeping with his policy of only presenting unrecorded material in concert, Fela is playing a repertoire familiar only to regular attendants of the Shrine tonight. ”Chop and Clean Mouth Like Nothing Happened, Na New Name for Stealing” details the Nigerian economy’s plundering by successive heads of state; “Country of Pain” bemoans the hardships of life in post oil boom Nigeria; “Big Blind Country” uses the English blonde wigs worn by Nigerian judges and the hair straightening practised by some African women as metaphors for the “artificial niceness” of the country’s politicians; “Government of Crooks” details the siphoning of the country’s oil wealth by corrupt politicians, bureaucrats, and soldiers; “Music Against Second Slavery” decries the impact of Islam on contemporary Nigerian politics and power relations; “Akunakuna, Senior Brother of Perambulator” criticizes government harassment of petty street traders and other participants in the country’s informal

economy; and “Pansa Pansa” is a defiant battle cry composed in the wake of the brutal 1977 army raid on Fela’s Lagos compound, the “Kalakuta Republic.”

Like most of his music since 1979, these are all lengthy, complex compositions, often lasting forty minutes or more. On stage, Fela combines the autocratic band-leading style and dancing agility of James Brown, the mystical inclinations of Sun Ra, the polemicism of Malcolm X, and the harsh, insightful satire of Richard Pryor. Gliding gracefully around the stage in white face paint, which he says facilitates communication with the spirit world, he is not above interrupting the performance to harangue musicians, sound technicians, or audiences. However, the Egypt 80 band is in top form tonight, executing Fela’s music with energy, clarity, and whiplash precision. On up-tempo numbers like “Government of Crooks” or “Country of Pain,” Fela and the band play with an intensity that thoroughly possesses the Shrine audience. On slower, midtempo numbers like “Chop and Clean Mouth . . . ,” Fela’s highlife and funk roots are evident in the easy rhythmic flow of the percussion section; the chopping, stuttering guitars; and the blaring, syncopated horns. Above it all, Fela alternately jokes with the audience and spits out his political lyrics in angry, declamatory phrases darting between the shrill voices of the six-member female chorus and the guttural, baritone punctuations of the horn section. On “Government of Crooks,” he sings about the government’s complicity in the despoliation of southeastern Ogoniland by foreign oil companies, a state of affairs that had recently culminated in the state execution of Ogoni activist/playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa:

 

All of us know our country

Plenty-plenty oil-e dey

Plenty things dey for Africa

Petroleum is one of them

All di places that get di oil-o

|Now oil pollution for di place

All the farms done soak with oil-o

All the villages don catch disease

Money done spoil di oil area

But some people inside government

All of us know our country

There is plenty oil

Plenty resources in Africa

Petroleum is one of them

All the places where oil lies

Are spoiled with pollution

The farms are soaked by oil leaks

The villages are rife with disease

Money has ruined the oil areas

But some people in government

Dem don become billionaires

Billionaires on top of oil-o

and underhanded crookedness . . .

Have become billionaires

From oil wealth

and underhanded crookedness . . .

On ”Movement Against Second Slavery,” he takes his most insulting potshots at the country’s military government while subtly reprising his famous song “Zombie,” which precipitated a brutal military attack on his compound fifteen years earlier:

FELA: Now come look our president

CHORUS: Zombie! (repeats after every line)

FELA: Na soldier, him be president

He say he want to travel

Travel on a state visit to France

Na so him go,

He go Paris-o

And when he reach there nko

Na ordinary minister meet am

White man go dey tell-e dem:

“We don tire for soldier

Soldier cannot be president

It just be like robbery”

Like armed robber come meet you for house

The armed robber come take over your house

Chop all your food

Fuck all your wives

Take all your money

Hen! Na so soldier government be-o . . .

FELA: Now, look at our president

CHORUS: Zombie!

FELA: A soldier is president

He says he wants to travel

Travel on a state visit to France

And so he went,

He went to Paris

And when he reached his destination

He was met by an ordinary minister

The white man told him:

“We are tired of soldiers

A soldier cannot be president

It’s just like armed robbery”

Like an armed robber coming to your house

The armed robber will take over your house

Eat all your food

Fuck all your wives

Take all your money

Hmm! This is what a military government means . . .

Reflecting Fela’s feeling that his music was as much for education as it was for dancing and entertainment, the Shrine audience enjoyed the music in various ways. Tuesday night audiences tended toward reflection; while some danced singly or in pairs, most enjoyed the music from their seats, listening intently to Fela’s lyrics and freely offering responses or rebuttals to his comments. On these nights, the smell of Indian hemp mixed with the pulse of the hypnotic afrobeat in the thick tropical air, and the Shrine took on the ambience of a psychedelic town meeting held in a dance hall. Friday was mainly a dance night, with the house packed and people on their feet from the time Egypt 80 took the stage until dawn laughing, cheering, and singing along with Fela’s every line. Saturday when Fela presented his ”Comprehensive Show” complete with the Egypt 80 dancers and an enormous, ritual conical “cigar” presumably filled with marijuana and various native herbs was also mainly a dance night, with the most diverse audience of the week; listeners traveled from all over Lagos and beyond to enjoy the music. For some attendees, a visit to the Shrine, with its marijuana smoking, go-go dancers, and antigovernment lyrics, was an act of social rebellion in itself. Others came to engage, examine, or debate Fela’s political philosophy. Still other visitors were content merely to enjoy the music, irrespective of its political sentiments. Each show concluded at dawn with Fela pausing before the shrine in the rear of the building. With intense flames leaping into the air, the “Chief Priest of Shrine” paused, flanked by two young male attendants to salute his ancestors and Pan-Africanist heroes, before returning home as the rest of Lagos awakened with the dawn.

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Michael e. Veal is Professor of Music and African-American Studies,Yale University.

North Indian Classical Music in the ‘Long’ 1940s

 

Amlan Das Gupta

 

Two Photographs

 

Let me start by telling you about two photographs (that I usually show), one taken probably in the early or mid- 1930s; the other in the early 1950s. The dates are approximate and based on internal evidence. The first photograph depicts a a fairly intimate group of male musicians and patrons: some of the figures are difficult to identify but the four musicians standing in the first row are Ustad Manji Khan and his father Ustad Alladiya Khan of Jaipur-Atrauli; Ustad Faiyaz Khan of Agra; and Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana. The presence of Alladiya, Faiyaz and Abdul Karim, undoubtedly the three most influential and versatile male vocalists of the early twentieth century in the same frame makes the photograph a rarity. The first three decades of the century, as we know, constitutes a period of intense uncertainty and experimentation. Artists grappled with altered conditions of patronage and performance, the presence of new technologies of sound recording and dissemination, new norms of pedagogy, and above all, changes in taste and audience expectation impel artists to engage with new strategies of self definition and stylistic innovation. Three of the most important vocal styles to achieve prominence were clearly the Jaipur-Atrauli, the Kirana and the Agra, setting the scene for the next half century or so. Legend has it of course that the relationship among the three was sometimes stormy, and in a condition of decaying patronage, occasionally riven with rivalry and prejudice. Even at this late date, one might speculate, the photograph expresses the power of the patron, whose august presence holds together these angular and brilliant artists in a formal and grave unity. A point about habitus if one likes: five figures have walking sticks, the invaluable accessory of wealthy civility: others make do with umbrellas.

The second photograph, probably dates from the early 1950s (Ustad Vilayat Khan reportedly said he thought that was taken in 1952). Rajendra Prasad, the figure in the centre of this photograph, became president of India in 1950, and it captures in essence the world of North Indian music in early independent India. Most obviously, it is marked by absences. The “long” 1940s, if I could call it that, is most significantly marked by a number of deaths. First, the figures in the earlier photograph. Abdul Karim and Manji Khan dies in 1937; Alladiya in 1946; Faiyaz Khan in 1950. Other significant deaths around the same time are that of Ramkrishnabua Vaze in 1945; Abdul Wahid Khan of Kirana in 1949; and equally significantly, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande in 1936. The dazzling array of talent surrounding the symbol of the unified source of patronage, honour and reputation, is actually an attenuated one, marked by absence and erasure. There is no significant Agra or Kirana singer in the photograph: the single representative of Jaipur-Atrauli is Kesarbai. What the photograph prophetically suggests is the ascendancy of instrumental music in the post-independence decades: consider the second line of musicians: from the fourth figure on the left we have Keramatullah Khan, tabla; Radhikamohan Maitra, sarod; Ilyas Khan, sitar; Bismillah Khan, shehnai; Kishan Maharaj, tabla; Yususf Ali, sitar; Ravi Shankar, sitar, Ali Akbar sarod; Vilayat Khan, sitar. The seated figures in the front row are appropriately an older generation of artists: Allauddin Khan and Hafiz Ali; Omkarnath, Krishnarao and Anantamanohar Joshi; Mushtaq Husain and Nisar Husain, Burhanpurkarbua, Ahmedjan Thirakwa and Kanthe Maharaj. Another aspect to reflect upon would be the uneasy memory that the photograph bears of the jagged fissure caused in the musical community by Partition: a notable absence in the photograph is the sarangi maestro, Ustad Bundu Khan: absent too is Bade Ghulam Ali, who went over to Pakistan after independence, only to return in the 1950s.

The single woman in the second photograph is appropriately Kesarbai, seated cosily next to Rajendrababu. Her unparallelled reputation as the great exponent of Alladiya Khan’s gayaki and standing in the musical world, make her an appropriate inclusion, but she also appears here as a single exclusion to the general prurience of the cultural policy of new state. This is, as far as I can tell, one of the earliest examples of a formal “group” photograph which has a woman artist in it: there are of course earlier examples of family groups, or tawayefs with their male accompanists. The significance of this inclusion is not difficult to judge. B V Keskar had famously laid down that “no one (woman) whose life was a public scandal would be patronized” by the radio and presumably in the wider world of state ceremonial.  Women artists were sought to be recruited from music schools, or from “respectable” familiies. As a result the great bulk of women artists – who had kept, for instance, the gramophone industry going – were excluded from the radio. In point of fact, this system of screening was far less effective than one would have expected. Partly this was due to the general lack of interest in classical music among radio administrators: more importantly, at the local level, programme executives and station directors made and followed their own policies, with apparently little central interference. As a result, a number of woman artists were recorded in the 1940s and 1950s and some of these recordings still exist: the relatively longer formats make them a valuable supplement to the extant body of sound recordings. It would, I think, be more accurate to see this as an index of the popularity of woman artists and the popular demand for their music rather than a mark of special favour and generosity on part of the administrators. Thus though Kesarbai is silently coopted into the grand durbar of Hindustani shastriya sangeet, Mogubai, Laxmibai, Hirabai, Gangubai to say nothing of Rasoolan and Siddheswari do not figure in the photograph. It may well be that Kesarbai jibbed at their inclusion: reportedly,  she gave up singing for radio because Gangubai had been given a National programme!

Arrivals and Departures

What I have tried to suggest then is that the “long” 1940s marks a kind of watershed in the troubled and tension ridden history of North Indian classical music. If age, disease and accident cause a significant rupture, it also sees the arrival of a generation of artists, largely born in the first two and a half decades of the century, who come into musical maturity around the moment of Indian independence. From an archival point of view it would be important to point out that this is the first generation of artists whose reputations are significantly tied up with the means of mechanical reproduction. Many of them traverse the whole distance from 78 rpm shellac records to digital media. It is also this generation, which would include Ali Akbar, Bismillah Khan, Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan among instrumentalists and Amir Khan, Bade Ghulam Ali, Mallikarjun Mansur and the slightly younger Sharafat Husain Khan, set the norms for a new kind of performance culture. By this time the “music conference” is firmly established as the principal site of performance: along with the radio, the other great institutional presence in the field, it signals the emergence of a large heterogeneous audience whose tastes and inclinations must figure largely in the performance strategies of musicians.

In more intimate and reflective moments practising artists may be persuaded to slip out of the heroic tales of selfhood that they so often construct and retail, and reflect on the lachari, the force of necessity, that works upon the musician. Such reflections appear to me to recapitulate the history of music from its origins in the performative arts traditionally practised by occupational groups. If one looks at the condition of classical music around the middle of the 20^th century, one sees the presence of a number of powerful and charismatic artists, who on the one hand are closely rooted in traditional and orthodox discipline, but themselves achieve musical maturity at a time in which social and political change is as it were felt on the pulse. It is in this generation which would include Ali Akbar, Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan and Bismillah Khan among instrumentalists, and Amir Khan, Bade Ghulam, Mallikarjun Mansur and Sharafat Husain among vocalists, that the condition of modernity in Indian music is most clearly experienced, a process that probably began with the decay of traditional patronage of music in and around Delhi in the  mid-19^th century, and proceeded in the negotiations of classical artists with the changing maps of listenership and patronage. From the early the 20^th century musicians encounter first the technology of mechanical reproduction and somewhat later the technology of radio transmission. By the mid-century, the exclusive patronage of the aristocracy was more or less a thing of the past:  artists looked also to concert audiences, radio performances, recording sessions and teaching as avenues of sustenance. From the end of the 40s for some artists who were able to engage with the vagaries of the nation-state as musical patron – which effectively meant dealing with individuals who commanded influence in government circles – were able to add to these means the opportunities of foreign travel, first as part of cultural delegations and then by the end of the 60s cashing in on the increased possibilities of international concert tours.

It is interesting to speculate on the different kinds of audiences that artists were habitually addressing. Some were still familiar in terms of their scope, small performances for elite audiences, but others were unseen and heterogeneous, like those of radio performances or gramophone discs. The large concert audiences that emerge in a big way from the 1940s would also club together the expert and the novice, the committed listener and the philistine, in increasingly unequal mixtures. I think that the nature of audiences inevitably affects the ways in which artist project their musical identities. Since the artists that I have just mentioned (and others of the time) were recorded widely, both commercially and privately, and large parts of these recordings still survive, the archive illuminates these vital questions of competence, repertoire and performative choice. Ali Akbar for instance began his career as a radio staff artist, went on to become court musician at Jaipur, an unparalleled concert performer, made extensive commercial recordings and spent the last four decades of his life as a near-permanent resident of California. Some artists reveal themselves as being unwilling to engage in all these available fields: Vilayat Khan abjured the radio for the better part of his life, others showed little interest in seeking to project their music abroad. Yet all artists when they were performing for local audiences implicitly assumed a cultural connection with their listeners inasmuch as there could be no confusion about the recognition of music as music. Performing in metropolitan centres – where there  were the largest number of listeners, and also by the same token the most diverse audiences in terms of taste or expertise – artists often privately expressed their dissatisfaction with the lack of comprehension or the predictability of taste.

 

Evidence from the Archive

Till the 1940s, the only recording medium used commercially was the shellac disc. In its sole reign for about 4 decades, it acquired considerable importance, and became the site for displays of immense skill and virtuosity.  Kesarbai herself recorded seven Broadcast discs around 1936, shortly after her talim from Alladiya. Many of her recordings are from the 1940s., though: the thirties and the forties also saw recordings from nearly all the artists who would assume canonical status in the post independence era: Ali Akbar recorded his first discs in 1945. But the field of commercial recording, reviled and disdained in its early years, also received the patronage of an older generation: for example, Faiyaz Khan and Krishnarao Shankar Pandit (who cut his only two discs in 1946). But there are surprises here as well. Mallikarjun Mansur, notably, stopped recording in the 1940s, even after having released 18 discs in his Gwalior phase. After his talim from Manji Khan he recorded just two 78 rpm discs of supreme artistic merit. From the 1940s, however, other recording means were in use, at first sparingly and then in much more widespread manner, as new technology became more widely available. Let me begin this part of the survey with the radio. Early broadcasts were “live”, with radio broadcasts of artists singing in the studio. However, from the late 1940s studio discs were used for recording, facilitating deferred (and presumably repeated) broadcasts. Descriptions suggest that the medium used was the 16” transcription disc, perhaps those manufactured under the Presto label. They could record, existing reproductions suggest, up to 20 minutes of sound continuously. The discs themselves have not survived apart as collectors’ curiosities, but a small fragment of recordings made from them were transferred on to other media usually while they were being broadcast. The radio later shifted later to the use of reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorders and they were in use until very recently. It appears that radio archives still contain some part of the great wealth of recordings made by them over the decades. The entire corpus of radio recordings of Faiyaz Khansheb have survived through these means. Agra connoisseurs consider them a pale shadow of the ustad at his prime, but admit that they obviously provide invaluable data for the archivist and historian. The less snobbish, like us, of course think that they are are marvelous in every respect. The only surviving recording of any length of Abdul Wahid Khan, a two part Darbari of about 40 minutes, also owes its existence to this technology.

However, from the late 1940s reel-to-reel wire and tape recorders started being available in India, giving patrons and enthusiasts a chance of recording longer recitals. The most important fact about the very large body of music that exists in magnetic tape, and is still accessible, is that it was managed neither by commercial organizations, nor by broadcasting companies: they remained entirely in private hands. Spools were not sold commercially with “pre-recorded” music: they were directed towards private efforts, and music of all kinds – and of course all other kinds of recordable sound – were preserved in this format. A small part of this did at a later stage work its way back into the commercial sphere, but the greater part of this remained in private hands. These are obviously of great archival value, because they were in most cases unique copies: only after the advent of cassette tapes was there some dissemination of these recordings, again within a fairly small band of music enthusiasts. The reasons for prizing them so highly are many. Firstly, they are often of performances given in intimate surroundings, with often a knowledgeable and appreciative audience, who might spur the artist to produce an exceptional recital. The problem of time was all but eliminated: for the duration of the spool was usually more than that of the longest single concert. The concert recording also gives us a privileged understanding of the aesthetics of the mehfil or baithak, the conversation between artist and audience, the codes of appreciation appropriate to different kinds of concerts, explanation and comments by musicians. Briefly, the body of tape recordings gives us an insight into the practices of the musical world with an intimacy that is often missing in the more clinical sound of commercial recordings, or even of recordings made in large concert halls. 1940s and 50s recordings are prized highly for their relative rarity, and many of them have iconic status in collector’s circles.

 

Epilogue: Alarums of State

The new Indian state embraced classical music with great fervor. Veterans of the All India Radio at this time remember the common perception that the radio under Keskar and Vallavbhai Patel promoted classical music excessively: undoubtedly there was a concerted attempt at many levels to incorporate the wealth of traditional music into the ceremonial of state. The notion of classical music therein expressed of course bears little similarity to the realm of practice: the official discourse, inevitably, remained depressingly mired in the rhetoric of reform, familiar to all alike from British orientalist and nationalist musicology. The famous Keskar report placed the blame for the decay on music on North Indian Muslims, who “had appropriated and distorted the ancient art, turning it into the secret craft of exclusive lineages”: in Muslim hands music was no longer ‘spiritual’; it had become ‘erotic’, the special preserve of ‘dancing girls, prostitutes, and their circles of pimps’. With the state increasingly taking over as both patron and consumer, such an opinion, when part of an official policy document,  sounds dangerous in the extreme.  The great thing about absolutist state policy of course is that the more it seeks to create homogeneity and unity, the more things tend to fall apart: the gharenadar ustads who continued to perform merely made appropriate noises, reinvented their life stories, and continued much as before. Undoubtedly two great names in post independence khayal singing are Amir Khan and Bade Ghulam; in instrumental music we have Vilayat Khan and Ali Akbar. Earlier musicians had negotiated the wilfulness of aristocratic patrons; post-independence artists had to do the same with the pomposity of state officialdom.

The real casualties of the alarums of state I have argued elsewhere were the professional women artists, both singers and dancers: some managed to reinvent themselves forging kulin identities, or by sheer artistic genius commanding enough respect to keep questions of identity in abeyance. The presence of Kesarbai and the absence of Rasoolanbai in the darbar photograph of 1952 are alike indications of this. But even Rasoolanbai enjoyed respect and recognition for the better part of her singing career (sadly, only to die in utter penury and destitution). So many others simply disappeared, erased by repressive legislation, and middle class prejudice. Let me conclude by citing Munirbai of Lucknow, herself a reputed dancer and student of the kathak dancer Shambhu Maharaj, who attributed the final breakup of the tawayef community to three principal causes: Gandhiji, independence and the Arya Samaj:

“The Arya Samajis were always against us. They said we were a corrupting influence and deserved no place in civilized society.”

Munirbai’s testimony locates a major point of disjuncture in the history of women performers in India. Perhaps it also allows us to consider more clearly the legacy of the 1940s.

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Amlan Dasgupta is Professor of English, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

 

Gil Scott-Heron (1949-2011)

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

You will not be able to stay home, brother.
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out.
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip,
Skip out for beer during commercials,
Because the revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be televised.
The revolution will not be brought to you by Xerox
In 4 parts without commercial interruptions.
The revolution will not show you pictures of Nixon
blowing a bugle and leading a charge by John
Mitchell, General Abrams and Spiro Agnew to eat
hog maws confiscated from a Harlem sanctuary.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the
Schaefer Award Theatre and will not star Natalie
Woods and Steve McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia.
The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal.
The revolution will not get rid of the nubs.
The revolution will not make you look five pounds
thinner, because the revolution will not be televised, Brother.

There will be no pictures of you and Willie May
pushing that shopping cart down the block on the dead run,
or trying to slide that color television into a stolen ambulance.
NBC will not be able predict the winner at 8:32
or report from 29 districts.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of pigs shooting down
brothers in the instant replay.
There will be no pictures of Whitney Young being
run out of Harlem on a rail with a brand new process.
There will be no slow motion or still life of Roy
Wilkens strolling through Watts in a Red, Black and
Green liberation jumpsuit that he had been saving
For just the proper occasion.

Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Hooterville
Junction will no longer be so damned relevant, and
women will not care if Dick finally gets down with
Jane on Search for Tomorrow because Black people
will be in the street looking for a brighter day.
The revolution will not be televised.

There will be no highlights on the eleven o’clock
news and no pictures of hairy armed women
liberationists and Jackie Onassis blowing her nose.
The theme song will not be written by Jim Webb,
Francis Scott Key, nor sung by Glen Campbell, Tom
Jones, Johnny Cash, Englebert Humperdink, or the Rare Earth.
The revolution will not be televised.

The revolution will not be right back after a message
bbout a white tornado, white lightning, or white people.
You will not have to worry about a dove in your
bedroom, a tiger in your tank, or the giant in your toilet bowl.
The revolution will not go better with Coke.
The revolution will not fight the germs that may cause bad breath.
The revolution will put you in the driver’s seat.

The revolution will not be televised, will not be televised,
will not be televised, will not be televised.
The revolution will be no re-run brothers;
The revolution will be live.

Poet and spoken word musician Gil Scott-Heron passed away on Friday, May 27, 2011 at the age of 62. Scott-Heron, a classical rapper,  is most widely known for his 1970 poem/song, ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”

Guddu, I and the Qawallis at Vijay Mandal

Sambudha Sen

Several years ago, when I was only twenty eight, I spent an extended period as a tenant in a flat in Vijay Mandal Enclave. The Delhi Development Authority  had built this relatively new block of apartments in a terrain that was typical of Delhi. As part of the rapidly developing South Delhi , Vijay Mandal Enclave had been squeezed into a bit of spare land in vicinity of Mother’s International School and  the Indian Institute of Technology. And  because we lay directly under the air routes that connected Delhi to the world, I’d often hear the roar of low flying planes and dream about the day when one of them would carry me to Berkeley or Cambridge. But air routes and  institutions of modern learning were  only recent additions in a neighborhood wedged in by Kalu Sarai and Begumpur, two ancient settlements that had never really separated themselves from a Delhi ruined centuries before Shah Jahan began building, what is for us, the old city .

The ruins of Kalu Sarai were clearly visible from the narrow balcony of our cramped fourth floor flat. One  morning,  when I’d stepped into that balcony  to enjoy the cool, damp monsoon breeze with my coffee and cigarette, Kalu Sarai’s ruined 14th century mosque had looked particularly picturesque behind the fine rain screen. I believe that my long and intense relationship with that  place  began from that moment. I visited the ruins that very evening and was lucky enough to have  run straight into Guddu singing a qawalli. Khazan Singh told me, after Guddu had finished, that we were sitting around the mazaar of a saint whose name nobody remembered but who was universally acknowledged to be a kind and  benevolent spirit. Several people  from Begumpur and Kalu Sarai   visited the spot  to solicit the unnamed Baba’s help and ten or fifteen of them were sure to be there  on Thursdays when Guddu sang his qawwalis. A retired plumber from IIT, who called himself Maula, would come in early to sweep the area around the grave. Khazaan Singh also helped in the upkeep of the place with small financial contributions. He  was a Jat from Begumpur but  he put on a Mussalman’s skull cap whenever he visited the mazaar. And then there was Guddu whose qawallis, more than anything else, sustained the astonishing after life that the ruined mosque at Kalu Sarai had acquired.

Guddu always struck me as a very responsible man. He worked as an auto rickshaw driver and was married to a  hardworking woman who’d found employment as a full time domestic servant in a Vastant Vihar house. They had a five year old son and they seemed like a decent, stable, even upwardly mobile family when I’d visited them at the clean, well lit room that the employers of Guddu’s wife had provided for her. Guddu’s ordinary life, however, turned extraordinary in the evenings after he’d finished plying his auto rickshaw. He would then immerse himself in the activity he really loved – singing qawallis. He had a magnificent singing voice - melodious, supple but also rough and passionate. His repertoire of qawallis was large, and like many qawalls he did not hesitate to insert  verses of his own into the compositions of Habib Painter or even Amir Khusro. And although Guddu never went to school , he was an extremely gifted teacher. He spoke of  the complex analogies and metaphors of  qawallis, of  their  deep ambiguities,  and their effortless ability to move between different languages with such clarity that I rapidly abandoned my research in 19th  British culture to pursue anything that would help me to understand the amazing longevity of the qawalli.  I began purchasing translations of  Jallaluddin Rumi and Fariduddin Attar and the music of Jaffar Hussain Badauni, Ghulam Farid Sabri and even Nusrat Fateh Ali who was very far, then, from international star he was to become. A close friend led me to Regina Quereshi’s book on the qawalli and I made several trips to the Nizamuddin Basti to cultivate the friendship of Miraz, whose  knowledge of qawallis was, as Quereshi acknowledged , boundless . In an fit of enthusiasm, which I sustained for several weeks, I even made arragements to learn Urdu.

The Urdu primer and dictionary with which I hoped to educate myself , together with the other books and music acquired during that period remain lovingly preserved and I do what I can for Miraz who ,despite his great knowledge of qawallis,  languishes in a one room hovel in Nizamuddin. But a combination of ( I suppose predictable) factors caused me,  many years ago, to  abandon the work I began on the cultural afterlife of the Kalu Sarai masjid. Last month , though , while listening to Jafar sing Man Kunto Maula I was struck by a deep sense of longing for the work I’d set aside many years ago. Rummaging among my old papers I found a dusty notebook full of hazy and embarrassingly overwritten accounts of what went on at the mazaar : Guddu’s explanations of the songs he sang and of where they came from, the Maula’s descriptions of the unknown saint who regularly visited him during his sleep, my own immature thoughts on popular culture and on our syncretic traditions. One sequence , which I reproduce below,  is typical of the notebook . It falls repeatedly into rhetorical excess and is completely lacking in the  analytical sharpness that I aspire for in my academic writing.  Please think of it as you would of photograph taken long ago by an amateur with a primitive black and white camera-a photograph that is blurred, badly composed but which preserves the shadow of  a light that faded long ago.

 It had begun to rain quite hard now. I went across our narrow sitting room to shut the window that was letting the rain in. Beyond the broken walls of our compound, on a gently rising mound, overgrown  with  tangled shrubs,  the nameless saint lay restfully in his grave. The crumbling eastern wall ,that was all that was left of his ruined mausoleum,  stood out in the rain– dignified, decrepit and ransacked by the crazy green of creepers that ran amuck amidst its ancient stones. Two peacocks picked their way about in the rubble at the far end of the wall where  people from Kalu Sarai often emptied their bowels. And, as always, the hoary old Jaal tree, spared miraculously by the bulldozers of development ,  spread its tangled branches with their tiny green leaves over the Baba’s resting place.

On Thursday evenings,  when I  visited the Baba’s  mazaar to hear  Guddu sing his qawallis,  the Jaal tree would be full of sparrows. Sometimes a squirrel would drop from its battered trunk and scamper across the Baba’s grave and then across the cemented area where Khazan Singh and I sat . It never occurred to Khazan Singh to shoo away the goats when they arrived to devour the marigold garlands that some terrified woman praying for a male child had brought to the Baba’s court. “This mazaar has no walls ,”  Khazan Singh often said, ” Everybody comes here, eunuchs , men, women, animals. It’s a wonder no one sits down to shit here.” 

Yet , when I first picked my way to the Baba’s mazaar through a winding, shit spattered path, on that  rain swept Thursday evening, it had been impossible for me not to notice how under the arches of the ancient wall the air seemed instantly to lose its stink . The Baba’s grave and the tangle of tiny leaves that overhung it like a woman’s hair had seemed to float in ether. Khazan Singh had been preparing to light his petromax lamp, and Guddu’s harmonium was already humming. I’d sat down humbly on the mat of welcome that they’d spread out for me, and as the TV antennae of Sarvapriya Vihar disappeared bit by bit into the darkness, Guddu, equipped with nothing except his rough working man’s voice, dived deep into the oceans of our past.

On that magical Thursday  and then through every subsequent Thursday until he said goodbye one evening and disappeared for ever, Guddu’s songs swept aside the roadblocks that I’d built in my mind year by year through the all the  years of my English education. He led me through the mud-paths of our ruined past that were never very far from the predictable routes of my everyday life ,to Sheikh Nizamuddin’s khankah  in the wilderness deserted by the Jamuna where the blind mendicant first sang a qawalli  He showed me that there was no monastery, no religion , no language , no gender, nothing strong enough to contain the qawalli’s gargantuan unfolding. He said that it had transformed Amir Khusro from a sophisticated Turkish courtier to a woman mad with so much love that his austere aristocrat’s tongue was no longer adequate to express it; so Khusro grasped, Guddu said, the languages of the east with a thirsty man’s desperation for water; yellow mustard fields swayed by the Jamuna in his songs and Allah and  Parmatma became one. And Khusro, who exercised such mastery over language and music and even over the courts of emperors, had no control at all over his songs. Anybody who visited Sheikh Nizamuddin’s monastery could pick them up , Guddu said, take them back,  and sing them in new tongues, for new gods. That is why when Guddu sang Amir Khusro’s songs at the Baba’s mazaar,  amidst the ruins of a Dilli  Khusro knew very well, he reveled in unfaithfulness. He broke up the master’s verses and added verses of his own, he sang of the blackmarketeers whom Khusro never knew, of businessmen whose capital was religion and about an old woman who begged in the streets of Ajmer, because she did not have a shroud for her dead granddaughter even though she had spent her life on her haunches mopping the floors of a rich man’s house. Guddu sang with so much pain and so much passion that we didn’t even care when the approaching roar of the plane from New York or Paris threatened to drown his song because we knew he’d be singing long after that arrogant intrusion dwindled into a faint screech in the sky.

My visits to the ruins became irregular after Guddu disappeared. The Maula, Khazan Singh and I met at the mazaar after Guddu had failed to show up for three consecutive Thursday. We decided that one of us would have to visit Guddu’s home. I remember experiencing a sinking feeling even as I began climbing the uncharacteristically dusty staircase that led up to Guddu’s room, so I was depressed, but not surprised,  to see the big lock that hung on the door.  I left a note in Hindi for Guddu , but I realized very soon afterwards that  he would never read it because the  presswali , working outside the house,  told me that Guddu had been paralyzed by some illness and that the family had decided to return to his village.

During the next couple of years my life, too, went through some significant changes. We moved from Vijay Mandal Enclave because my wife had inherited a  relatively large house in Hauz Khas. My academic career, too, picked up. I completed my  PhD on the novels of Charles  Dickens and then, one afternoon,  I realized that  the fantasy, inseparable in my mind from the roar of aero planes flying low over Vijay Mandal, had become part of my real life. I remember that as I stared out of the aero plane window, enroute to Cambridge,  I was seized inexplicably by a bout of panic. For some reason I thought of the ruined mosque at Kalu Sarai and the shape of the jaal  tree and the chatter of  sparrows,  and I asked myself if I really knew what I was chasing across this vast and empty  sky.  Gradually ,though,  the whiskey I was sipping began to have its effect. My mood mellowed and I thought about  the material I’d find in Cambridge , the books and cds I’d buy and the live jazz at the Elm Tree, I’d read about.

I would be very far from telling the whole truth if I did not mention that I  ran into Guddu about a week before I left for Cambridge. Shubhadra, who works in our house,  needed to visit someone in Govindpuri. I was waiting for her outside slum cluster where her relative lived, when saw  I a man hobbling unsteadily towards me. His face was twisted , his mouth stained with paan, and the  bamboo pole that clutched with both hands to prop himself up seemed to be part of his body. But one look at his eyes and I knew who he was. “Guddu”,  I shouted overjoyed, “where had you disappeared , what happened to you ?”

Guddu told me his story over the next fifteen minutes . It wasn’t much of a story. He’d been waiting at Baba Khadak Singh marg  to pick up a passenger when suddenly he felt that his head was exploding.  He never found out the name of the good woman or man who took him to the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital , but when he came out his coma about two days later,  he realized that the right side of his body had become completely paralyzed. His wife lost her job about a week after they returned to their room in Vasant Vihar. She was told sarcastically that she should find a nursing assignment , since she spent the whole day nursing  her invalid husband anyway. The taunts continued, even multiplied,  when they moved back to the village to live with Guddu’s impoverished extended family. After four agonizing years , during which  his wife helped him every single day with the exercises that the physiotherapist at Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital had taught them, Guddu was able to hobble around. Very soon after that they’d returned to Delhi. Guddu’s wife had found work as a part time domestic help in four or five households and they lived in a tiny tenement in the Govindpuri slum. Guddu was in the process of making an application for  a STD booth under a  governmental scheme that promised to give preference to physically disabled persons. I offered to help Guddu with his application,  and before we knew it, the two of us began speaking enthusiastically of reviving the qawallis.

 “You’ve lifted my spirits, masterji” Guddu said to me,  just before I left,  “I’ve not felt this hopeful in a very long time.”

I left for England soon after this utterly unexpected meeting with Guddu. Cambridge proved conducive for my research and when I got back after a year, I was too involved with the book on the popular print culture of 19th century England that I had begun writing, to allow myself any distractions. As a result I never met Guddu again. I don’t blame myself too much for not having kept in touch with Guddu. I have many responsibilities of my own and I cannot be expected to get involved with every deserving person who might need my help. What does trouble me sometimes, though, is the thought that by letting Guddu and his qawallis slip out of my life I may have squandered the one chance I had of breaking out of my essentially mediocre existence.   

Sambudha Sen is Professor, Department of English, University of Delhi.

The Rienzi Effect

 

Hans Rudolf Vaget

Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler argues that Hitler’s entire political program was essentially an attempt to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and political reality. “The achievement of the Wagnerian world of the ‘work of art of the future’.” In everything he did, Hitler acted as the “agent” of the Bayreuth Circle, accomplishing the task originally set by that great prophet of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust: Richard Wagner.

Recently, Frederic Spotts, the author of a fine history of the Bayreuth Festival, took up the whole vexed matter and re-examined Hitler’s multifarious meddling with the arts – primarily architecture and music. In a thought-provoking and useful new study, boldly entitled Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Spotts laudably ignores those endless speculations about psychic and sexual abnormalities – the most eagerly pursued red herrings in Hitler studies – and proposes instead that the Führer’s social, racial, and geopolitical agenda was ancillary and subordinate to the realization of what was fundamentally an aesthetic project, namely, to create “the greatest culture state since ancient times, or perhaps of all time.”

What was the role of aesthetic experience in general and of Wagnerian opera in particular in the identity formation of Adolf Hitler? For the conscientious historian, however, the task is not to construct “Wagner’s Hitler”, despite that clever titular reversal, but rather to reconstruct Hitler’s Wagner. This is a far more difficult matter.

Some of the difficulties were duly noted by Joachim Fest in his 1973 biography. Striking as the affinities between Hitler and Wagner may at first sight appear – the outsider’s resentment against the bourgeoisie; the bohemian affect of an artistic existence; the basically non-political relationship to the world; the uncertainty about their ancestry; the morbid hatred of Jews – none can be simply attributed to the so-called influence of a widely idolized cultural figure. Much of what we find in young Hitler represents a constellation of phenomena perfectly typical of the era in which he grew up. The most characteristic elements of his Weltanschauung – nationalism, Darwinism, anti-Semitism – were in the air in Vienna at the time, which he could not help but breathe. Still, in Fest’s view, the Meister emerges both as the young man’s ideological mentor and as Hitler’s great exemplar.

Fest’s own assessment of the matter, though, is not free from contradiction. On the one hand he argues correctly that no direct succession from Wagner to Hitler can be established; on the other, he identifies Wagner as the Führer’s decisive teacher. He disputes the claim that Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism can and must be traced back to Wagner: the Führer’s racial anti-Semitism was uncompromising, he argues, whereas Wagner’s hostility towards Jews was selective and inconsistent.

Saul Friedländer, who noted (at the Schloss Elmau Symposium of 1999 on Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich) that Hitler, in all his speechmaking, never once invoked Wagner’s well-known hostility towards das Judentum. Why not? He could easily have argued that if the great Richard Wagner called for the elimination of Jews from German culture, then how could our current anti-Jewish laws and policies be wrong? We are simply carrying out what Wagner intended. But Hitler never said anything of the sort. Friedländer offers two explanations.

First, perhaps Hitler considered Wagner’s position insufficiently radical since both Das Judentum in der Musik and Parsifal leave open the possibility that Jews can find redemption by shedding their Jewish identity, as Ludwig Börne had done, and as the figure of Kundry implies. Second, perhaps the Führer’s very adulation of Wagner simply “did not allow for any disclaimers or any ambiguity”, so as not to call into question the lofty standing of Richard Wagner as one of the patron saints of the Third Reich. Third, if we may add a reason of our own, perhaps Hitler was astute enough to realize that mining Wagner for proto-Nazi ideas, and exploiting Wagner for crude propaganda, might have diminished his standing as the supreme example of the creator of an art that was thoroughly German, heroic, sublime, and highly auratic. A non political cult could be more effective than any propagandist exploitation.

This, then, throws into relief the crucial methodological problem and underlines the need for a new way of looking at the entire Hitler-Wagner complex. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the fixation of historians on the notion of influence. We can no longer use this term as trustingly as Viereck, Fest, Köhler, and a host of others have done. In reception theory, “influence” has given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient. Thus, what may look to the untrained eye like a direct line from Wagner to Hitler could in fact be an optical illusion – the result of multiple refractions. For what we call influence accrues from an entire constellation of factors involving language, media, cultural practices of remembering, and the various ways in which these factors interact within a sharply defined historical space. As in all cases of intellectual precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory fully applies to the case of Hitler and Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, bent and deformed.

As with “influence”, then, the very notion of mentor seems incongruous with Hitler’s study habits, which were those of an autodidact and dilettante. Furthermore, from what we know about young Hitler, the experience of Lohengrin and of Rienzi preceded his reading of Wagner’s prose tracts. And that adolescent aesthetic experience – more irrational and thus more idiosyncratically formative than the traditional master-disciple relationship – was by no means solitary or unique: Hitler shared it with great numbers of his contemporaries.

Wagner’s “grand tragic opera”, Rienzi, an early work that never became part of the Bayreuth canon, offers the most promising starting point for accessing the peculiar nature of Hitler’s Wagnerianism. As we know from the memoir of August Kubizek, a budding musician and Hitler’s boyhood friend, the two youths attended a performance at the Linz Landestheater early in 1905, when Hitler was fifteen, that appears to have had the impact of an epiphany. “In that hour”, he is reported to have said later on several occasions, “it all began.” But what, precisely, began in that hour?

His enthusiasm for Wagner? This is improbable, since he had earlier seen Lohengrin, at age thirteen. No, what more likely began was the elaboration of a particular fantasy triggered by Wagner’s opera – the fantasy of becoming the leader of the Germans and of restoring Germany’s greatness, just as Rienzi, the last tribune in medieval Rome, had attempted to do for Rome. As we shall see, Rienzi set one of the fundamental patterns of Hitler’s life. The significance of this youthful experience, then, can hardly be exaggerated. It shows, to begin with, that to young Hitler, as for untold numbers of Germans (and not only Germans), Wagner was primarily a great purveyer of overwhelming emotions, and only secondarily a purveyer of political ideas. Hitler’s youthful experience is furthermore crucial as much for the psychological pattern it reveals as for its content.

 Indications are that we no longer cringe when Hitler and art are discussed together in a serious fashion. This is terribly important. Much is to be gained from looking at young Hitler through the lense of a typology of the artist, for strictly speaking, as Otto Werckmeister has argued in “Hitler the Artist” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 1997), he was “a professional artist”, though clearly one “at the lowest level of the artistic proletariat”.

Once we look closely at the peculiar complexion of Hitler’s shaky status as an artist, a psychologically portentous aspect of the structure of his personality begins to come into focus. We see that two very dissimilar artistic sensibilities co-existed. In painting and architecture, his artistic impulse had but a modest potency. In music, on the other hand, he appears to have possessed an unlimited capacity for emotional transport, albeit of a purely receptive nature, as evidenced by his youthful Rienzi experience. Hitler may thus be regarded as a fairly typical dilettante in the sense that this term had acquired at the turn of the century, denoting as it did, one who led an inauthentic life based, in the last analysis, on imitation. Dilettantes populate the work of Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, of Heinrich and Thomas Mann.

In Hitler, the interaction of those two different artistic dispositions – one excessive, the other deficient – was controlled by no intellectual discipline. This appears to have led to a blockage and, eventually, a re-routing of his artistic ambitions to the field of politics, where he then was able to indulge his architectural fantasies on a much grander scale. As a budding painter, he was unable to imagine himself rising to the lofty level to which, the example of Wagner in mind, he secretly aspired. In music, however, where he had no practical skills, he seems to have had unlimited powers of emotional involvement which he would have had to invest in something altogether different – by becoming a populist leader like Rienzi. Such a realization seems to have dawned on him in 1919, when he discovered his talent as a political orator.

By reinventing himself as a politician in the image of Wagner’s operatic hero, Hitler the thwarted artist followed to perfection the typical psychological pattern of the dilettante – a stock figure of German literature since Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Indeed, it was Goethe who provided the classic definition of the dilettante as a would-be artist who “attempts to produce effects with the effects that affected him.” This was precisely Hitler’s case. Having failed as an artist, Hitler hitched his fate to a cultural icon whose national standing and international renown were beyond question. He began to practice a demonstratively non-political cult of Wagner, referring to the composer in public as the greatest genius that Germany had yet produced. This proved to be highly effective in the political arena: perceived as a devoted admirer of Wagner, Hitler was able to win respectability and cultural legitimacy and, eventually, to create a charismatic aura of genius for himself.

 In all of this, a key role must be attributed to the metapolitical notion of Erbe. It represents a privileged, even auratic form of reception in which the inheritor masks its basic character of appropriation by pretending merely to heed a call from the past. The importance of the notion of cultural inheritance to our understanding of the Hitler-Wagner nexus becomes immediately clear as we cast a brief comparative glance at the case of Anton Bruckner, who in June 1937, in a pompous induction ceremony at Walhalla, was inducted in the German Hall of Fame. The case of Bruckner, unlike Wagner, is one of wilful appropriation in the narrowest sense of the word.

Wagner had thematized again and again, from Rienzi to Parsifal, the idea of Erbe, even of Welterbe – world dominion. German Wagnerians thus grew up with the expectation that the Master’s heritage would one day be claimed. After Wagner’s death, the Bayreuth Circle, especially Houston Stewart Chamberlain, proceeded to radicalize the notion of a Wagnerian heritage by linking it to the hegemonic ambitions of Wilhelminian Germany. And throughout that post-Wagnerian era, a diffuse but vaguely appealing expectation was kept alive that one day a Parsifal-like savior would appear when Germany needed it most. Thus, when Hitler claimed that he was now wielding the sword that had been forged by Wagner and Chamberlain (as he did in his 5 May 1924 letter to Siegfried Wagner), he was in effect claiming to be Wagner’s political heir. The reference to Nothung, the magic sword handed down from Wotan to Siegmund and on to Siegfried, resonated not only for Hitler but also for his followers with powerful mythological and cultural overtones that lent him the aura of a potential savior in the manner of a Lohengrin, a Siegfried, or a Parsifal and, with that, the glamorous semblance of historical legitimacy.

Perhaps the most potent side-effect of Hitler’s cult of Wagner was something altogether different – the setting in motion of a messianic anticipation of the coming of a savior. The link to Wagner needed no explanation since the creator of Die Meistersinger, through the figure of Hans Sachs, had portrayed himself as a new John the Baptist – as someone who was merely preparing the way for the One who would not only sing, ‘Wach auf’, but who would truly awaken all Germany.

 Ian Kershaw, in his monumental biography of Hitler, has identified the widespread efforts to “work towards the Führer” – “dem Führer entgegenarbeiten” – as the key to understand precisely “how the Third Reich operated”. Hitler’s highly personalized charismatic rule “invited radical initiatives from below” and offered them backing as long as they stayed in line with his Weltanschauung.In other words, his followers were encouraged to tap into their own emotional reserves, their Wagnerian dreams, to help Hitler become the heroic leader and saviour that he wanted to be.

Against this background, then, we can now gauge more realistically the extent to which Wagnerian opera contributed to the identity formation of Hitler and his rise to power. I shall attempt, in this concluding section, to shed some additional light on this nexus by briefly assessing Hitler’s response to the three Wagnerian works that meant the most to him: Rienzi, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Parsifal. I hope to show that the psychological as well as the political significance of the Hitlerian cult of Wagner derived primarily not from Hitler’s engagement with these works but from that engagement’s interaction with other forces within the cultural space in which he chose to operate.

At crucial stages in his apprenticeship – in Karl Luegers Vienna and in the post-war Germany of l9l8/l9 – Hitler seems to have read history through the looking glass provided by Wagner’s Rienzi. It was evidently this opera that enabled him to see in Karl Lueger, as he wrote in Mein Kampf, the prototype of the modern popular tribune, “den gewaltigsten deutschen Bürgermeister aller Zeiten”. Historical reality seemed to validate Wagner’s vision of the charismatic Volkstribun and convince him of its viability as a political ideal. There are intriguing indications that, as he took his first steps in the political arena of post-war Munich, Hitler looked to Rienzi for guidance, as though this opera were his metapolitical compass. As Brigitte Hamann tells us in Hitlers Wien, he had observed that at the meetings of the Pan-German groups the overture to Rienzi was played. He adopted this custom for his political rallies in Munich and made it a ritual element of the massive Party rallies in the Third Reich. That piece – both military and solemn in character – served as a kind of signature tune of the Hitler movement and of the political liturgy celebrated annually at Nuremberg. So attached was Hitler to this music that, as Albert Speer reports in his reminiscences, he refused to replace it with any of the laudable pieces composed for the occasion by eager Nazi musicians.

In a particularly revealing conversation of 1930 (reported by Otto Wagner in Heny A. Turner’s Hitler Memoirs of a Confidant), Hitler pointed out that he had learned an important lesson from Rienzi. Wagner’s hero fails, he observed, because he has no political party behind him and because he neglects to destroy his enemies. And indeed, from the outset of his career we see Hitler determined not to repeat the “mistakes” of his operatic model For his fiftieth birthday, Hitler requested and received, among other Wagnerian treasures, the autograph manuscript of Rienzi. What may at first strike the observer as a whim was surely motivated by his emotional bond to this particular work. Far from being capricious, his request breathes the air of inevitability. Eerily, having refused several urgent entreaties to allow the precious documents to be taken out of Berlin to a safe place, he apparently took all his Wagner autographs with him to the Führerbunker, the final stop of his catastrophe bound life, where all further traces of them vanish. Even his pathetic end in the Bunker is reminiscent of Rienzi’s demise in the burning ruins of the Roman Capitol.

But the most striking similarity is that between Rienzi’s turn against Rome and Hitler’s turn against Germany. The end in sight, Hitler, in his Political Testament, cold-bloodedly dismissed his own people as the loser in a historic struggle, undeserving of the greatness he had intended for it. Given all the echoes of Rienzi in Hitler’s career, it was almost inevitable that his end would point back to the concluding lines from Wagner’s tragic grand opera: “The last Roman curses you. / Cursed be this city! / Decay and wither, Rome! / That is the will of your degenerate people.”

The political repercussions of the historical Cola di Rienzi upon the 19th and 20th centuries are today often overlooked. It seems indicative of the intellectual milieu that sparked Wagner’s interest in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Rienzi. The Last of the Tribunes (1835), the book from which he culled his libretto, that approximately at the same time the twenty year old Friedrich Engels drafted a play on the same subject, also based on Bulwer-Lytton and intended as libretto for an opera. Not only Hitler but also Benito Mussolini chose Rienzi as a model. This is presumably the reason why in some early analyses of National Socialism, such as Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942), Cola di Rienzi, rather than Cesar, is identified as the true historical prototype of modern fascism.

It is not difficult to see why Die Meistersinger also occupied a special place in Hitler’s mind. The community Wagner imagined and glorified in that opera comes close to the völkisch ideal of the Volksgemeinschaft, as opposed to a modern society. The corporate principles on which Wagner’s Nuremberg functions, the emphasis on community with its concomitant rejection of universalist values, clearly appealed to Hitler. Nor is it too obvious to mention that Wagner’s Volksgemeinschaft is led by a charismatic artist who enjoys the affection of the people. Unlike Parsifal, with its two momentous scenes of disarming and its message of compassion, Die Meistersinger contained nothing that could be perceived as undermining the war effort, which is probably the reason that this opera was played during the so-called “Kriegsfestspiele” of 1943 and 1944 almost to the bitter end.

The “Day of Potsdam” culminated, in a specially arranged, festive performance of Die Meistersinger in the Prussian State Opera. Wagner was to provide the capstone to this most successful propaganda effort of the new regime. At that performance on 21 March 1933, the people of Nuremberg were instructed, during the “Wach auf” chorus, to turn to Hitler’s box, thereby transferring their homage from Hans Sachs to Adolf Hitler. Perhaps no other moment better encapsulates the political uses of Wagner in the Third Reich than this unashamedly operatic gesture. The identification with Prussian tradition in Potsdam during the day and with Wagner at the opera at night achieved for the new regime an incalculable strengthening of its claims to historical and cultural legitimacy. It almost goes without saying that at the Bayreuth Festival that year, this theme was repeated in full orchestration and in deafening fortissimo: “As we listened to the conclusion of Die Meistersinger today”, wrote Hans Alfred Grunsky, “it seems to us as though we were hearing in our in- Parsifal provides the most illuminating example of the way in which the Wagner cult catapulted Hitler into the role of designated saviour of Germany. After Hitler’s first visit to Wahnfried, 30 September l923, Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner provided open letters which the aspiring politician gratefully used for his own purposes. It was the first time that Hitler received an enthusiastic endorsement from a widely respected cultural institution in Germany. Of particular interest are Chamberlain’s letters of 7 October l923 and of l January l924. Ailing and suffering since l9l4, he casts himself in the role of Amfortas who now feels comforted and relieved knowing that the new Parsifal has appeared on the scene: “Germany in the hour of her greatest need gave birth to a person such as Hitler.” Like Wagner’s Parsifal, Hitler is called upon to perform a “Heiltat”, but this time for Germany as a whole. His mission is to rid Germany of the lethal influence of Judaism – the “todbringendem Einfluß des Judentums auf das Leben des deutschen Volkes”. Chamberlain pointed out to the faithful that no one in Germany had the courage and the determination to carry out that necessary task – no one, that is, except Hitler.

Whereupon he virtually anoints the new Parsifal. In fact, Chamberlain gave Hitler a double role, that of Parsifal, the healer, and that of Siegfried, the liberating hero. When Hitler famously wrote that the spiritual sword with which he was fighting was forged in Bayreuth, he was actually taking a cue from Chamberlain. Apparently, Hitler had no difficulty imagining himself both as Parsifal and as Siegfried and encouraged his followers to see him in those mythical roles.

Those familiar with the Wagnerian code understood the implications of Hitler’s endorsement by Wahnfried. Hitler did not need to give explanations, nor did the public need them. From that moment on, Hitler could be certain that he was the bearer of a mission and that he could present himself as the political heir to Wagner. No transgression or misappropriation was required here. The role of the guardian of the Wagnerian legacy and of the future savior of Germany, as defined by Chamberlain, was offered to him, the devout, ostensibly non-political admirer of the Meister, on a silver platter.

Hans Rudolf Vaget, Helen and Laura Shedd Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Acid Rock, Mrinal Sen and The Seventies

Sharmadip (Toy) Basu

The Bengali Marxist film-maker Mrinal Sen’s Kolkata Ekattor, or Calcutta ’71, is celebrated in the genealogy of Indian New Wave cinema as an exemplar of dialectical storytelling. Released in 1972, it comprises four discrete short stories by different authors. In, and through, these narratives, Sen’s directorial gaze seeks to render apparent the ‘lie of freedom’—a powerful ideological orientation vis-à-vis 1947 that grounded Marxist criticism in India at the time. And like artistic productions emanating from this ideology, Calcutta ’71 is a scathing class-critique of the Indian nation-state’s diseased underbelly, during its immediate pre-natal past, and in the first two decades of its post-natal being. For someone unfamiliar with this second installment of Sen’s famous Calcutta Trilogy, the pedigree of the film would make it appear an unlikely point of departure for an essay that seeks to pursue the subcultural life of Sixties’ American music in the city. But Calcutta ’71 helps me enframe a couple of my concerns. How are the class relations worked out in which American music is represented to be embedded in mid-seventies India by a Marxist-Realist filmmaker, who claims a high degree of correspondence between representation-of-reality and reality-of-representation for much of his oeuvre? In the process, can we also chart a certain new cultural-musical subjectivity animated by re-articulations of Sixties American music in the city during the 1970s?

Positioning Rock Music in a Realist Narrative:

Each of the four constituent stories that comprise Calcutta ‘71 is grounded in a different decade, sequentially, from 1930s onwards. Each story follows disparate denizens of the erstwhile imperial capital, caught in different stations in life. Nonetheless, voluntarily or by ascription, the characters are also subjects of that of much fraught category: the genteel bhadralok class Training its critical lens on subjects of this entropic category, Calcutta’71 begins with a depiction of the dehumanizing compulsions of urban poverty in colonial Calcutta of 1930s. The second story addresses the utter vacuity of this genteel moral apparatus against the backdrop of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sited in a compartment of a 1950s Calcutta-bound suburban train, the third narrative concerns food-crisis and the ad-hoc violence unleashed on the under-classes by self-appointed protectors of bourgeois civility.

And then, follows the closing movement of Calcutta ’71. Set against the backdrop of far-left political tumult, brutal state-repression, and abject living conditions in the city at the close of the Sixties—something that would putatively find its democratic resolution with the election of the Left Front coalition government to the state legislature in 1977—it is this last story that sets my reflections here. Here, one is made to confront the total disjunct of the urban elite—of the corrupt politicians that this class yielded—from the life-worlds of the people that they supposedly represented. To set the tone of this narrative at the very outset, Sen deploys a signal audio-visual maneuver. If the day-train headed towards Calcutta provided the spatial and sonic setting for the third story in the film, the fourth begins abruptly on the downstroke of electric guitars in unison, enveloped by a 4/4 backbeat being pumped out of a drum-set, and flashing strobe-lights against the night sky. Thus, at the drop of a single frame, the audience is yanked out of the local-train and its concatenated rhythm, out of the 1950s, and launched straight into Calcutta of 1971, into the sprawling gardens of an elite hotel. In terms of the city’s present-day spatial layout, the hotel could be located anywhere on Park Street and its adjoining areas: once the heart of colonial Calcutta’s ‘White Town,’ and now the preeminent site of postcolonial desire and colonial nostalgia. There, an evening party is underway. The sonic cue of drums and guitars on which the film’s final movement begins is sourced to a four-man Rock band, in situ. From a corner-stage on the lawns the band churns out a stirring up-tempo jam (composed by Ananda Shankar). Its sound invokes similitude with that of the San Francisco bands of the Sixties’ Haight-Ashbury milieu: the sound of Acid-Rock music; typified by bands like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, etc.; replete, with their characteristic improvisation techniques, mediated by modal Jazz and the influence of Raga music on the latter. Yet, it is striking that no one in the party pays the band any mind; there is no active audience for their music. The cynosure of all eyes, and ears, instead, is Mr. Bannerjee—the industrialist-politician who, we are informed, secured his upward mobility in the class and political ladder by black-marketing food-grains during World War II. In fact, the only time the presence of the band is acknowledged explicitly in the narrative is when Bannerjee, facing the band, claims to his acolyte the credit for having hired them. In the film, Bannerjee is the manifest embodiment of the ‘lie of freedom’ that Mrinal Sen sets out to unmask. He is representative of the anglophilic, postcolonial urban bourgeoisie—that, in Sen’s gaze, merely replaced the British at helm of political power in 1947, while the exploitative structure of the colonial state remained intact in its postcolonial guise. Comfortably sequestered from the blighted everyday life of the masses, the field of power that Bannerjee defines cannibalizes everything in its ambit. It renders human relationships hollow and evacuates all revolutionary potential from art. It is an ideology critique. Hypocrisy of the urbanity and other concomitant sins drip from almost every statement that Bannerjee and the other partiers utter.

Their crudity gets gratingly heightened against Sen’s pivotal use of montages over events at the hotel. Apposing documentary-stills and moving-images of malnourished bodies, of political protest and State-violence, frames with only verbal text and communist iconography, these montages act as the mottled mirror of reality to the phantasmatic world that the party defines. Its worth noting though that each time such a montage takes off, and then returns to back to the party, it does so via the Rock band. The camera cuts to exclusive shots of the stage and tight close-ups of the musicians; the sound of music is foregrounded manifold. We see ecstatic expressions on the faces of the musicians as their rhythmic charge plays runway to the montages, placed strategically by Sen to hammer in the ethico-moral bankruptcy of the social formation which the party mirrors. This deployment of the band will become clear in the following clip where Mr. Bannerjee belabors his audience on the necessity of mobilizing a vanguard political party that will carry the new nation forward.

As the evening progresses and alcohol flows, the depravity of bourgeois decadence assumes burlesque proportions. Crucially again, it rests on the band to lead the hotel party to its logical end; or, at least that end, which Sen’s historical materialist critique envisages for the conjuncture of Calcutta ’71. The cinematic frame rides the jam to a sudden crescendo, and then skitters along with it; the music: into a dense feedback of techno-industrial noise, and the party: into a lifeless black-screen. In the process, yet another defining trait of the Sixties’ San Francisco sound gets tellingly invoked: the technique of leading an improvisatory jam into a feedback that either brings a piece to end; or, out of which, the melody of a new song emerges, and harmonic order is restored.

But Calcutta of 1971 could not allow Mrinal Sen to weave a new harmony out of the feedback. Instead, there appears out of the lifeless black-screen the face of a man, possibly a far-left Naxalite activist, or one identified as such by the police. He speaks straight into the camera and the audience. He tells us, he has just been killed. The head wound is visible and still running blood. In cinematic fact, he is historical time itself, both dead and alive. As an embedded witness to injustices and violence over time, the murdered man delivers a meta-commentary: on issues that the four stories in the film bring to play, on the pernicious and precarious state of the Indian nation. It is this that emerges out of the feedback of Calcutta ’71: a dead historical-conscience in its afterlife.

The Rock Band in/of Calcutta ’71:

From this rather long description of the party-sequence in Calcutta ’71, I would like to draw attention to two critical axes of signification that cross-cut each other in the film: (i) the social-formation that a self-professed Marxist Realist filmmaker like Mrinal Sen deemed to be the proper locus of American Rock Music in India; (ii) the deeply ambivalent sites and meanings actualized by the band and its music: composed for the film by sitarist Ananda Shankar, despite Sen’s definite efforts to ground it in the particular social formation. Led by guitarist Cyrus Tata—a Calcutta-born Parsi—the band is central to Sen’s narrative. In that, Sen situates the band as immanent to both the real-time of the hotel-event and the novel-time of cinematic representation. It is not simply there as the musical accoutrement for a high-society party. On the one hand, it acts as the background score, as aural atmospherics, of the film when the camera is trained on the partiers at the hotel. On the other, the band serves a specific musical function when Sen launches his montages of the world outside the hotel, depicting sites and signs where, paradoxically, music, as such, would be out of place as a phenomenon.

The band’s Acid Rock music, then, in Sen’s vision, is not just the soundtrack to the time-space of bourgeois merriment. It is, in fact, the soundtrack of the zeitgeist itself, the spirit of the global Sixties with all its contradictions. And this ‘global’ qualifier is of some importance here. If Sen’s goal was only to unmask the hypocrisy of the neo-colonial urban elite, he could have achieved this on the strength of the screenplay and the visual composition of the film alone: such is the stark opposition in which he places his characters vis-s-vis the historical times they inhabit, where even a dialectic is impossible.

Any other soundtrack, as atmospherics and/or music, would have sufficed without diluting the message that Sen wanted to convey. One could even argue that popular Bangla Adhunik (Bengali modern) music with its plethora of songs, weaved around themes of heteronormative love and good cheer, or that ultimate signifier of modern bhadralok musical advancement—Rabindrasangeet¬, would have worked better to further underscore Sen’s musical-historical critique of bourgeois insularity. While the specificities of the film’s setting, which mimics elite Park Street hotels that were famous for their live western music scene, negates the usage of other such music, the question still remains: why this pivotal staging of not just any band music—something that Hindi and Bengali popular cinema strategically deployed when it wanted the lead-pair to act ‘Western,’—but specifically an Acid-Rock band?

The latter’s intentional placement in Calcutta ’71, in my view, is to perform the dual operation of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The first operation projects Calcutta’s fulminating politico-cultural milieu as symptomatic of the same tumultuous condition signified by the world-historical signpost, the Sixties—something that exceeds the historical time-space of just the Indian nation-state. This move, then, places Calcutta of 1971 in the temporal locus of a specifically global historical-conjuncture. In that, America and Acid Rock serves as spatio-musical embodiment of the globally chaotic times.

In this deterritorializing movement, the specificity of Sixties’ America, simmering with the Counterculture, Civil Rights, New Left, and anti-Vietnam War movements, is of signal value, particularly as it pertains to music. Even if the last of these four movements canopied a constituency that cut across that of the other three, there were significant ideological differences between the other ones in terms of their politico-cultural orientation. Of particular importance here is the ideological asymmetry between the Counterculture and the New Left. Though cross-pollinated in terms of actual adherents, the former advocated withdrawal from not just the normative cultural values of a technocratic and atomized post-war American society. More importantly, it advocated active withdrawal from the political sphere, as such—a tendency immortalized by Timothy Leary famous utterance: “turn on, tune in, drop out.” The New Left, on the other hand, despite the internal differences over modes of political action, explicitly sought to fashion a counter-hegemonic bloc against both, the American State, as well as party-directed Marxist politics. Even though Calcutta ’71 does not shed any light on Sen’s estimation of the New Left, the import of his usage of an Acid Rock band in the film, ergo, his reading of the American Counterculture, becomes clearer in the light of the above discussion. Acid Rock was after all the musical index of the Counterculture when it gathered critical mass in mid-60s’ San Francisco, and burst forth to widespread media attention with the Human Be-in, on January 14, 1967.

The second of the two operations that the music performs follows a vector complementary to the deterritorializing function outlined above. In that, Sen reterritorializes American Acid Rock music in terms of its factual presence within the city-space of Calcutta in 1971. More importantly, he uses the music to reterritorialize its supposed consumers—the postcolonial urban elite, with its vacuous cosmopolitan trappings—firmly within the historical matrix of colonial oppression in India, and its persistence in the post-’47 epoch. It is, however, of significance to note that Sen does not allow the band and its music to escape the force-field of the artistic black-hole that this class wills into being. Ultimately, this music too turns into an object of bourgeois fetish, a mere ornament to the party at the hotel. For, if we recall, none of the partiers actually pays the band any mind. If the life-world of the urban elite is totally severed from that of the masses, it is well removed from that of the musicians’ as well. In fact, by themselves, the band and the musicians reference an almost autonomous cultural site in the film.

The affect Sen tries to generate through his visual treatment of band and the musicians is a further clue to this. In their total immersion in music, the rapturous expressions on their faces, their sartorial preferences, they are made to appear equally alienated from the reified realities that they provide soundtrack to: both, the elite party at the hotel, and the depredated masses in the city. In this, Sen’s acuity as a realist filmmaker stands out. Though he stages his dialectical critique in stark oppositional terms—something that, in fact, threatens to freeze the dialectic into a static dichotomy—his representation of the band as removed from the two polar life-worlds in the film, actually corresponds faithfully with historical reality.

For the band, its members, and its music, are a reflective constituents of the new politico-cultural subjectivity that first came into being in Calcutta in the late 1960s. Fundamentally mediated by the discourse and (musical) practice of the American Counterculture, this new subjectivity, constituted the near-end of the sociological short hand: the “generation gap,” a term that gained currency precisely during this time. The Acid-Rock band in Calcutta ’71, and of Calcutta in 1971, thus, marks a deeply ambivalent space, time, and social location. One could even say that it marks a heterotopic site, proliferated with difference: of power and desire, of dire need and dire excess.

In the context of the film sequence, the point that I want to make is that the band inhabits a spatio-temporal flux; it is neither inside nor outside the narrative and its historical time. The band, then, is of spectral essence to the film: its loud amplified music is there for everyone to hear, yet no one really acknowledges its presence. This cinematic representation of the band could have easily been the one in reality though—about which, some other day.

Sharmadip (Toy) Basu is completing his doctoral studies in Maxwell School, Social Science Program, Syracuse University.