Thotha Gyaan Pagharo

Composition

The journey of the play «Kabir Khada Bazaar Mein», written by Bhisham Sahni and directed by MK Raina in 1982 in Delhi, has been adapted to the genre of rock opera by the Delhi-based art rock band Dastaan Live. Baan and Anant, members of the band, share an experimental track that juxtaposes two versions of «Thotha Gyaan Pagharo», the version that was a part of the original play and the one that has been reinterpreted in another musical idiom by the band in more recent times. The piece evokes a reflection on the relationship of the iconic play with contemporary times. The composition owes its periodic resurgence in its various forms to artists in the city who have kept engaging with it and shaping it as per the time.

«Thotha Gyaan Pagharo», transcribed into a play by Bhisham Sahni.

Translated by Dr. Anjali Raina

Somebody learn to reject hollow knowledge,
Discard the concerns of the temporal body,
Of worldly illusions
Do not fritter away your life
Without realizing the almighty

Hollow are the priests, hollow their sayings
Without «Hari» (the Almighty), the entire story is meaningless

The temples are hollow, all worldly pleasures are hollow
Do not waste your life waiting for the savior to appear

The truth is only in the Name
In meditation, in faith
In complete dedication
through the heart, words, and deeds
So says Raidasa

This track owes its origins to an iconic play «Kabir Khada Bazaar Mein» (Kabir is standing in the market) that has been adapted to the genre of rock opera by the Delhi-based band Dastaan Live. Dastaan Live is a collective comprising musicians Anirban Ghosh (bass guitar, spoken word), Nikhil Vasudevan (drums, backing vocals), Fidel (drums, percussions), Anant Raina (percussions), Sudheer Rikhari (vocals), Mohammed Faheem (spoken word, vocals), Jagtinder Singh Sidhu (vocals), Anjali Raina (spoken word, vocals), Amar Sukesh (guitars), Pranay Verma (guitars), and a growing set of visual artists, designers, and sound artists.

This opus stands as homage to the timeless wisdom of Kabir, whose words echo across epochs. The poem by Kabir, the 15^th-century poet and philosopher, became part of a play written by the legendary writer Bhisham Sahni, and conceived as a fictionalized account of the life of Kabir. Staged as a theatrical production of the same name by renowned theater and cultural activist M.K. Raina in 1982, and now reinterpreted into an a capella rock opera by Anirban Ghosh with the political art rock collective, Dastaan Live, in 2023, this composition traverses centuries. Etching its significance upon the tapestry of socio-political currents, it is a testament to the mutable meanings it accrues.

The original music for «Thotha Gyaan Pagharo» was composed by the late Panchanan Pathak, a noted theater musician and active member of the Indian Peoples Theatre Association.

«Thotha Gyaan Pagharo», the rendition by Dastaan Live, embarks on a sonic journey, revealing a rich canvas of sound with a maelstrom of voices. Initially appearing as a cacophony, it embodies the tumultuous spirit of the zeitgeist. Interwoven within this vocal chaos are dissonant soundscapes, capturing the unrest of current times. Amidst the pandemonium, a solitary voice – the bastion of reason – remains, struggling to be heard above the disharmony.

The composition evolves from a simple recitation, diverging into paths of differing time signatures, converging on resolute chants as tonal centers shift. This deliberate tonal interplay is accompanied by temporal and atmospheric shifts. Transitioning from pandemonium to tranquility, the audience explores embedded consonance and dissonance. Beyond music, it pays homage to Kabir’s wisdom across epochs.

The musicians, in their intricate orchestration, dabble with creating textures and exploring soundscapes with a range of moods. This delicate balance of textures and harmony adds layers and subtexts to the composition. The percussionists infuse different rhythmic and textural interpretations into the vocal cacophony, creating an ever-evolving auditory landscape.

This piece packs in the chaos inherent in the current times, providing a musical reflection of the complexities and challenges that shape our world today. When juxtaposed with the original rendition, which was characterized by mellow vocal lines and harmonious rhythmic construction, we are granted a poignant glimpse into the transformation that this corner of the world has undergone in the past 20 to 30 years. The evolution from tranquility to dissonance reveals the shifting tides and metamorphosis of artistic expression, echoing the broader societal and political changes and upheavals that have marked our collective journey. As the pandemonium recedes, a serene tranquility envelops the final lines, mirroring the calm that ensues after the tempest’s wrath. The opus toys with consonance and dissonance, embedding discomfiture within the composition, and inviting the audience to explore its depths alongside their own.

This composition is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Anirban Ghosh (Baan G) is a New Delhi-based interdisciplinary artist with over two decades of experience in music, sound design, composition, and production. He has studied bass guitar under legendary bass players Gary Willis and Karl Peters and is currently studying experimental music with Michael Harrison. He has contributed to critically acclaimed projects in film, documentaries, live shows, and interactive media, and has performed and recorded worldwide with renowned artists and musicians. BAAN G is also the founder of Dastaan Live, a political art rock performance project. He teaches a course on sound design and creative music exploration at Ashoka University, is the co-founder of a curatorial collective W.I.P LABS, and is the Managing Trustee of Aagaaz Theatre Trust, an arts-based non-profit in New Delhi. Follow him on Instagram, Spotify, or on his Website.

Biography

Anant Raina is a filmmaker based in Delhi. He has worked in various roles on a variety of fiction, non-fiction, and experimental projects. His work has led him to trek to the Everest Base Camp, shark dive in South Africa, and even spend a month walking in Sri Lanka with Buddhist monks. He also plays a number of rhythm instruments and is currently the percussionist for «Kabira Khada Bazaar Mein – a Rock Opera». His love for martial arts films and video games has also led him to practice capoeira and Pekiti Tirsia Kali. Follow him on his Website.

Shop

Delhi Sensate

€6.00

This is a collection of songs bringing together myriad voices from the city of Delhi, where multiple realities collide and co-exist.

purchase

Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on February 21, 2024

Topic

Performance

All Topics

Special

Norient City Sounds: Delhi

Snap

print as pdf

Cybernetic Improvisation

Audio Essay

by Philipp Rhensius,

MSHR

Improvising with machines. Listen to an audio essay featuring Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper from the duo MSHR, in which they discuss their sound installation at Klangmoorschopfe 2023 based on a cybernetic feedback system.

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived
isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome
and cybernetics, when we set up exhibits
in the cafeteria for the judges
to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.
[…]
(Hawthorne 1994)

List of References

Hawthorne, Alison Deming. 1994. Science and Other Poems. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press.

This audio essay was created by the musician, writer, and Norient editor Philipp Rhensius aka Alienationist in autumn 2023 at Klang Moor Schopfe 2023. Each piece features conversations with (and sounds by) the artists and their installations, merged with Rhensius’ own compositions, field recordings, and poetry. To open a speculative realm, each piece is assigned to a poem.

Biography

Philipp Rhensius is an editor for Norient, writer, musician, sound artist, sociologist & musicologist, and curator from Berlin. His work investigates the connections between the micro- and macro-political and is driven by the idea that «feeling the chains» is the moment when emancipation begins. His music and sound art projects (Kl.ne, aphtc, Alienationst) merge sonic fiction with sardonic poetry and visceral sound. His texts are published in i.e. Taz, Spex, FAZ, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, WOZ and several book volumes. He runs the music label Arcane Patterns and hosts a monthly podcast on Noods Radio. Follow him on Instagram, his Website, or LinkedIn.

Biography

MSHR is an art collective that builds and explores sculptural electronic systems. Their practice is a self-transforming entity with its outputs patched into its inputs, expressing its form through interactive installations, virtual environments and live improvisations. MSHR was established in 2011 in Portland, Oregon by Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper. Their name is a modular acronym, designed to hold varied ideas over time. Follow them on their Website.

Published on October 09, 2023

Last updated on March 26, 2024

Topics

Body

Technology

All Topics

Special

Sonic Natureculture

print as pdf

erase_Raise

Sound Collage

by Smita Urmila Rajmane

Since the past few years, the Indian Central Board of Secondary Education, a key body responsible for setting up the educational curriculums for schools in the country, has been censoring significant content from its syllabus about citizenship, communal violence, anti-caste and feminist movements, and more recently important chunks of the Mughal and Sultanate period histories. This sound collage offers a glimpse into this contemporary crisis in which the artist has decided to intervene.

For Norient City Sounds: Delhi, Smita shares an audio trailer, a sound collage of excerpts from an audio-visual game that she is designing and developing, in an attempt to reconstruct erased narratives and facilitate a participatory engagement with these censored histories.1 The excerpts that have been chosen refer to architectural spaces and monuments from the Mughal and Sultanate era that are situated in Delhi. Red Fort, Qutub Minar, Humayun’s Tomb, and many more monuments that are scattered all around the city are heritage spaces visited by throngs of people everyday. The erasure and reappropriation of historical content about these places from school textbooks leaves a gaping hole in the public imagination of the nation’s civilizational past and subsequently its future.

This is where Smita, a visual artist, intervenes. As an educator herself, she is working on developing an interactive and performative game format based on the classic board game Ludo, in which the stories of these sites return with fervor. Narratives of these architectural wonders, their construction, purpose, the empires and dynasties that they constituted, along with fables and myths surrounding them – all of this gets reactivated during the gameplay with her narrations.

As a part of her ongoing research into the (re)making of this repository of chapters from deleted history textbook chapters, she has been speaking with historians, poets, artists, scholars, and other contributors to populate the many perspectives that make up the heritage of Delhi. Amongst the key interlocutors are the people of the city themselves, who share their own stories, facts, questions, interpretations, and knowledge to problematize the question of history and to keep a public dialogue going.

The significance of the oral aspect of her work is shared in the form of these collaged excerpts that are put together to evoke a sense of urgency around the contemporary crisis in the city today, where heritage is being demolished and histories are being invented. At the same time, her approach is focused on continuing to «raise» questions, concerns, and curiosities through modes of speech, dialogue, and sustained engagement with young and old alike.

At the heritage sites, she plays prototypes of the game with enthusiastic visitors and collects recordings of her discussions with them. These sound documents are embedded with architectural resonances, ambient atmospheres, and the sonic habitus of these historic sites. They are woven alongside dialogues with historian, activist, and heritage conservationist Sohail Hashmi and found fragments from news coverage. The layered recordings and sonic atmospheres of these spaces are replete with wonder, murmurs, speculations by visitors, sounds of construction, birds, animals, and the life that inhabits these sites. We also keep returning to the question of language – the diverse sounds of which have been intrinsic to the vibe of this city. Listening to these sites, one hears a thick cloud of resonances that seem to raise the question – can histories, voices, experiences, dissent, and a spirit of inquiry ever really be erased?

1. The Delhi Sultanate was a late medieval empire based in Delhi that stretched over large parts of the Indian subcontinent from the 13^th to 16^th centuries. The Mughal Empire was an early modern empire based in South Asia between the 16^th and 19^th centuries.

Audio recording by Neelansh Mittra, sound editing by Suvani Suri. This sound collage is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Delhi», curated and edited by Suvani Suri.

Project Assistance: Geetanjali Kalta
Graphics/Visual Design: Upendra Vaddadi, Neelansh Mittra
Audio Production: Abhishek Mathur
Video Production: Ammar

Biography

Smita Urmila Rajmane is a public intervention artist, educator, and performer based in New Delhi, India. The major themes of Smita’s work deal with societal norms that arise from class, caste, and gender discrimination, communal violence, the projections of hate, and the differences that pervade today’s world. Her work deals with researching, unraveling, and highlighting these issues through archival installations and public performances. Recently she was invited to perform at Documenta 15, Lemvig Museum in Denmark, and Graz. She was a part of a show «Interrogations and Ideologies: A Quest for Equality» at the American embassy, Delhi curated by Prof Y.S. Alone; contemporary visual art projects in Mid & Western Jutland in Denmark; Pune Biennale curated by Zasha Colah and Luca Cerizza, the New Weight Biennale; the University of California, Los Angeles, amongst many more. Follow her on Instagram, Facebook, or X.

Published on September 29, 2023

Last updated on February 21, 2024

Topics

Activism

Agency

Censorship

All Topics

Special

Norient City Sounds: Delhi

print as pdf

Thotha Gyaan Pagharo

Biography

Biography

Shop

Topic

Special

Snap

Cybernetic Improvisation

List of References

Biography

Biography

Topics

Special

erase_Raise

Biography

Topics

Special

films

images

sounds

words