Wednesday night Bhajans

The concert on Wednesday at Temple Sri Ganesha, Nashville’s Hindu temple, featured something a bit different with a concert of Sampradaya Bhajans. These are devotional songs from the South Indian Carnatic tradition which range from short, simple pieces one can teach to children to longer more involved works. Unlike other concerts of classical Carnatic music, the composed material is not the starting point for extended improvisations on the ragas and talas. There is improvisation, but it occurs more firmly within a hymnody context of structured songs, and like Western hymns these are meant to be sung by a congregation. The skill of the performer is manifest in the expressiveness with which the melodies are delivered.

This concert was presented by Udayalur Kalyanaraman, a vocalist from India with a group that included another vocalist, someone playing harmonium (and singing along off mike), and another man on the mridangam drum. In certain respects the music is similar to qawali in that it includes solos, unison singing, and call and response between the leader and the rest of the party. However, when I suggested this to Sankaran Mahadevan, the organizer of the event, he resisted the comparison, and with reason. The most striking divergence is the emphasis in qawali on featuring improvisatory virtuosity of the leader. The bhajans were more recognizably devotional, and in fact performance was presented as a devotional ceremony more than a pure concert. It began with the temple priests intoning a blessing on the musicians and bestowing garlands on them – the concerts in this space typically do not start this way. The audience was invited to remove their shoes, as is required in the upstairs prayer hall filled with the shrines of many deities, but not normally for concerts in the assembly hall.

Attending a Hindu devotional ceremony leaves a Christian with the question of what to take from it. I have some vague acquaintance with the broad outlines of Hindu theology, but I know nothing of the devotional practices. The songs were mostly in Tamil and Telugu, and in fact Kalyanaraman’s commentaries between groups of songs seemed to switch between English and I’m guessing Tamil. However, I gather that from the Hindu perspective, my lack of knowledge poses no great barrier. Several times Kalyanaraman said “even if I know nothing, still I can say Rama.” Invoking the god’s name appears to confer benefits, and I know that Indian music theory holds that the music confers spiritual benefits through the intrinsic qualities of the melodies and underlying musical elements. Different ragas and talas are understood to have different and reliable effects on listeners. Many classical composers had a similar belief in associating keys with different states of mind, and you find it more recently in those musicians who experience synesthesia, like Scirabin or Messaien.

The belief in this sort of power of words and music puts different demands on the music as a vehicle for devotion. In the West, our hymns are by comparison very wordy. They may tell a long story, or lay out an argument. Verse 1 goes “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing…on earth is not his equal.” Then the next verse explains how we would lose if “we in our own strength confide,” goes on to name this God as Christ Jesus, and the third verse talks about the devils filling the world but “God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.” And so on for another verse and a half. The lyrics explain several things, use different metaphors to drive key points home, and get into theological niceties like how God’s will manifests itself in the world through our actions. Bhajans allow a few words and the sound itself to do the work of transforming the soul.

That being said, there is Western religious music that approximates this lyrical simplicity: praise music, a form despised by serious-minded Christians like myself. Are these bhajans simply the Indian equivalent of an energetic song that repeats Praise God or some such phrase over and over? If that is the case, does this music interest me only because of exoticism? Were I to fully understand the language and the religious context, would I find it spiritually shallow? I resist these possibilities, and the alternatives comes down to something like finding a greater complexity and integrity in the sonic qualities of Carnatic music, the pure musical side of it. Much of my objection to modern Christian worship music comes from the sense that the music is denatured, made too smooth and characterless to engage the soul. But that contention does ask for some more objective analysis to back it up. The weakness could lie in specifics of harmonic movement, linear counterpoint, lyrical content, or performance style, but I’m not in a position to spell out those specifics. It remains a reaction.

Getting back to this performance, one thing that struck me about the bhajans was the variety in harmonies and particularly rhythms. Some songs move forward with very steady, straight beats, others break down into syncopation. Kalyanaraman himself has a wide range, with a strong mid-range voice that he occasionally took into almost a falsetto or dropped down into a low range that sounded like the strings on a guitar being loosened to slackness. However, in the end I find the classical performances more engaging with their longer, complicated elaboration of material. Which of course makes sense, in that I approach Carnatic music as a concert goer, not as a religious devotee, no matter how much open-minded ecumenicism I may bring to this as spiritual expression.

It doesn’t have anything much to do with the bhajans, but I wrote the following a couple of years ago after first seeing Temple Sri Ganesha’s prayer room. The power placed in the name of the gods reminds me of the visual elements of devotion in that place.

Siva in Nashville

Our Siva is shaped like a lozenge,<>
Compact concentration and
Collapse of the universe into
A dark, dense mass.

<>Of course it sits on a
Golden throne, dressed for
Adoration, surrounded by gifts.
You peer through the dressing
To praise the pull of black fire.

<>The glow of distant places takes
Shape within its stomach.
Stare at it with laser mind,
To perceive shapes, colors, and motion,
The primitive moments of origination.
An object that blocks the view and opens a portal. <>

In Rothko’s panels, red and purple seep out the sides
And you get to the colors through the black field imposed on it all.
As you stare at the crushing center,
Patterns of paint wash and canvas weave emerge.
Solid dissolves into light whisked strokes.
Wait and you will see what comes of the dark,
Even more so in overcast hours when you see least,
After heavy Gulf storms drop down
And soak you on the way in.

If I get crushed by the black stone,<>
Will enough of me survive to regroup?
Will I catch fire and glow,
Or just expire?
I may have already collapsed,
Crumbled at the slightest gasp of wind,
Let the blood that would feed my family dribble away,
Through years of resentment and whining.