In early November, sitar exponent Shubhendra Rao was in the news when his musical instrument reached New York badly damaged before a performance. Mr. Rao wrote a long Facebook post about the incident, which was then widely reported by the media. He finally performed with his disciple’s sitar though it was “like walking on an artificial limb,” he said. Losing an instrument is akin to the loss of a dear one. Few other than musicians would understand this sentiment.
Many instances
Mr. Rao is not the first Indian musician to have undergone this trauma. Apparently, Indian musicians are regularly subjected to such travel woes when they go overseas to perform. Perhaps vocalists, flautists and violinists don’t have it as bad as sitar, sarod, sarangi, tabla, veena, and harmonium artists. Mr. Rao himself has been through three incidents of “vandalism,” he said. In 1997, Ustad Amjad Ali Khan’s sarod was damaged; in 2014, it was misplaced by the airline and later found and returned to him. In 2012, Ustad Aashish Khan opened his sarod case after a flight and found that the skin of the instrument had ripped down the centre. Veena exponent Jayanthi Kumaresh said she spends anxious moments at airports awaiting the arrival of her instrument.
A seat for my instrument, please
Some musicians prefer to reach overseas much before their performance having learnt their lessons from past travels. These are the experiences of well-regarded musicians, people with significant social and cultural capital and a fan following spanning across countries. But there are also musicians who are relatively unknown or perhaps not as well known and who face such tragedies. Many of their experiences go unreported. Do we even know how many instruments are lost every year in such ordeals?
According to popular folklore, Bharat Ratna Pandit Ravi Shankar used to book an additional flight seat next to him for his instrument for safety reasons. Musician Saskia Rao de Haas would buy an extra seat for her cello for more than 10 years until she designed a smaller electro-acoustic instrument that she now carries as hand luggage. This has become a norm with many musicians — they regularly travel with smaller, custom-made instruments to avoid casualties.
Cultural ambassadors
Is the quality or sound of music compromised in the process? Of course it is. And neither do smaller instruments have the grandeur of the ‘real’ instrument. This could be considered a significant artistic loss, an extinction of an aesthetic of sound. Will instruments like surbahar and rudra veena soon fall off the performance map owing to their length and thus complexities of travel?
In any case, the smaller instrument don’t end musicians’ woes because security and airline staff often don’t know their own rules. Further, airlines regularly require musicians to sign a limited release that absolves them of any damage of an instrument in transit. With such a rule, little can be done by way of remedy. Mr. Rao started a campaign on Change.org to have this rule abolished. More than 44,000 people have signed the petition but that’s an insignificant number in a democracy to matter.
Can our airlines and policymakers be more sensitive to the needs of travelling musicians? What about a special travel policy for musicians travelling with their instruments? Can airlines staff be trained or oriented to handle these instruments better? Music may not be an election issue for anyone, but we often hear that musicians are our cultural ambassadors. If vehicles of music are regularly damaged, how will this cultural transmission happen? Our musicians ought to speak out more and not wait for personal tragedies to happen. In this regard, the complacency and insularity of some Indian classical musicians has not helped the cause of Indian classical music. Their silence, which has long prevailed, must end because this music must stay and also evolve with time as any social art form.
Kunal Ray teaches literary and cultural studies at FLAME University, Pune
