#Scurf166: Prabha Atre, Pune & my Thumri Blues
A wee bit of Ali Sethi, too
I’ve been living away from my parents home for almost as long as I lived with them. In these years, my weekday and weekend mornings have had varied cadences. They have mostly been purged by a sense of lethargy from the evening before and then the rush of being late for work. I have been lucky that for the most part of my student and then work life, in these 15 odd years I have been the irritating person who wakes up before most others and reads.
At the private university that I attended for five years, I was one of the three people (in a batch of 47) who would attend all classes right from the first lecture which began at 8:45am. Before class, I would ritualistically shower, say a little prayer, have breakfast in the canteen or student mess and then sit and read for at least an hour before launching myself into the world of humanoids.
In 2015 I started working as a journalist, which meant my timetables were almost always askew. I would wake up as per the timing of the press conference I had to attend, or the interview I had to travel to undertake. Between waking up and leaving the house, I would squeeze in breakfast, self-care (mild workouts) and reading in equal volumes.
Coincidentally, work also involved reading in copious quantities. Soon, I would be tired of reading, searching for another form of engaging with everything beyond me first thing in the morning. That is when, living on Prabhat Road in Pune sometime in 2016, I arrived at the thumris of Prabha Atre and Kishori Amonkar.
It started mostly as a way of disciplining myself, especially on weekday mornings when I would anyway have little to no sense of time. I’d tune into youtube renditions of their thumris paying close attention to the words and sitar and harmonium. The alaps would fill up my senses (and my room) as the morning light flitted in. Gradually, I started waking up earlier to squeeze in at least an hour of meditative listening to their thumris before I allowed the world to cast its long shadow on my days.
What started as a way to tune my inner notes, soon took over as an indulgence. I started talking to friends and acquaintances about this form. I even back in time and found thumris that featured in old Hindi movies as songs. In all the depth, detail and stretch that I could muster, I wormed my way into the art form. I drew out the influence and presence of thumris in my life before the internet. Then my father would play these from old Hindi movies. Mughal-e-Azam had probably not one but two thumris, I would discover later that year. That was also the time when I got into enjoying (cheap, port) wine after work hours and would almost always find myself worming my way into listening to Mohey Panghat Par.
In that year Prabha Atre’s music made up the insides of my staccato weekend hours. Unable to find much resonance in any of the contemporary music, that year I mostly spent listening to Bob Dylan, thumris in Hindustani classical and the Inside Llewyn Davis album.
Atre’s sonorous voice, her raag, andaaz has stayed with me ever since. A few weeks ago, I returned home late at night from dinner with a friend. Turning the key into my apartment, I slid away my jootis, and felt my way to the iPad in the pithy darkness of the living room. In the warm glow of its offwhite late night light, I surfed through Youtube to play Atre’s Saawrey Aai Jaiyo. In that moment, I slipped into a moment of unison with myself and the world around faded into the background.
Listening to her thumris has been a way of finding a recharge point in a desert island, a drink of water in a cloudless moment in high desert winds. Across the streets of buzzing cities, Atre’s voice moves with me, crewing along as all of living disassembles itself around in the racetrack boundaries. These thumris, now that I have come to know them a bit (or so I assume, I guess) have made a bircolage, a kind of a smorgasbord of blinking retro bnw patterns on the blank, rugged background of my life. What composes the tapestry of my life, then, you ask? Who tf knows!
As I wait for the next (dry, dust, sand) storm to gather pace, this art form from a bygone era sweeps me up and cradles me in its jangly lap. While traversing in their tranquil terrains, strip signs from the 90s scream back to the mind. I dream a fever dream where these signs, which have now mostly been replaced with vulgar, garish, blue, in-your-face screens, are displayed on an office building’s side in a scooter lot. The building in my mind’s eye a stand-in for a displaced iconography, the thumri in my ears a stand-in for a d(m)isplaced, lost time.
Few weeks ago I found this silly video of Ali Sethi playing with our heaving emotions, singing ever so gingerly some of the popular-er thumris that there are. And there’s this WIP video of a flamenco thumri duet he seems to be working on. Really, the man can single-handedly fondle our senses without even ever coming in physical contact with any of us.
“My being is a dervish. You are the song. My existence is a note. You are the music. I cannot believe we are living in your era.”
Some YT rando on Ali Sethi
Earlier this week when I read the news of Atre’s passing, I smiled to myself. In the last few years, the thumri as an art form had become dearer to me than any other, and than ever before. I knew then that I will be listening to her all the more fondly, jostling into my turgid hours her mellifluous crooning, only to find that pause, only to claim that repose, that calm in the hubbub of all this living, where I can coil back to rest, to reflection to sometimes just not thinking. The divinity in the devoid.
Here’s a playlist for the thumri-ly inclined.