Nine years ago a festival held in Chandigarh introduced me to Punjab's folk forms. Despite poor organisation and a hotchpotch of performers, the festival proved to be a rich and varied feast of the region's literature, rhythms and sounds. It pointed to a treasure waiting to be discovered. Thereafter, whenever and wherever I could, I made it a point not to miss a performance... I attended the weekly programmes organised by the Punjab Sangeet Natak Akademi and the North Zone Cultural Centre, and just about all other performances that came to the city. Slowly I became familiar with forms and traditions.
Deepening my knowledge through study was not easy since little has been written, and that too is mostly in Punjabi. Nevertheless, I went ahead, getting works translated, speaking to performing artists, travelling to remote villages to seek out particular forms in their purest style. I was intrigued to find that no one had made a serious study of the folk instruments of Punjab.
But why should I have been the one to plunge into this field? Childhood has something to do with it, I suppose. I was born in a family where music in particular was the life force of the household. My mother was a trained singer of the Gwalior gharana, and her favourite bandishes were the lullabies which put me to sleep. Belonging to a Brahmin household from Uttar Pradesh, rituals, beliefs and the celebration of traditional festivals were part of everyday life. I was educated in a liberal Western atmosphere but the traditional environment of the household was part of my upbringing
During the early part of my life I tried to block out all traditional influences and went on to pursue academics in the Western mould. After my undergraduate studies, I joined All India Radio where I presented Western music programmes as well as Indian classical music and dance. I also learnt Indian classical dance from the eminent exponent of Bharatnatyam, Yamini Krishnamurthy, and studied Indian classical music from Prayag University, Allahabad, as part of their distance education programme. While pursuing a post graduate course in history, I worked as a newscaster for Bombay Doordarshan, an association with the media that I have never relinquished.
Marriage brought me to Chandigarh, the joint capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana Initially I worked as a lecturer in the local Government College. At the same time I served as dance and music correspondent for the Tribune group of newspapers, a century-old news group that is more or less synonymous with the region. By 1992, I had received my Doctorate in Art History-a qualification that brought me into the Panjab University's Department of Fine Arts.
The combination of academic qualifications and constant exposure to performing artists, both classical and folk, slowly but surely began to turn me toward the living musical traditions that I saw around me. As a non-Punjabi, I was fascinated.
This book is a seminal work. It has a valedictory resonance to it as most of the instruments and their players that Alka Pande has researched through the length and breadth of the Punjab are fast dwindling in numbers and even as she was writing this book, some have passed away. There is little doubt that the music and the sounds of rural Punjab are being quietly forgotten and the electronic sound of Disco and pop are fast taking over.
This book is the result of a certain passion and single-mindedness which in fact is the substance on which a great part of our inner lives are built. Travelling widely into the remote interiors of a State that has no psychological territorial limits, Alka Pande has delighted herself in this research and issued a warning to those of us who still have links with the folk elements of our national life, what is most likely to happen to this inheritance, in the next millennium that is upon us.
Punjab has not been put together from pieces, it is single in its oaken integrity, and it is this integrity that is being scattered and bought. Written with great sensitivity and insight this book should be read slowly and savoured and its brilliantly lit photographs enjoyed one by one, by people who know us in this subcontinent for the life we have lived these many thousand years.
In a certain sense, this book written with great force and a certain tenderness, would be looked upon as a requiem for the life we are losing fast.
I would like this book to be widely read by everyone who truly cares.
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