‘Sahela Re’: This novel is a melodious treat for readers interested in traditional music

Once upon a time, Girija Devi was my grandparents’ neighbour. Before she was the queen of Thumri, in the lanes of Benaras – a cultural capital in its own right then – she was a young woman whose talent was the local chatter. Much has changed since then. Culture in the city has slowly died of the lack of patronage, and the audience for the classical music she mastered is fast shrinking.

Sahela Re, written by Mrinal Pande and translated from Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar, is a novel that tries to unlock the doors to this past. The narrative is constructed through pieces of communication between characters we know only enough of to recognise their musical leanings, but they otherwise step away to make space for stories that are bigger than any individual.

Vidya, an academic and a lifelong admirer of Indian music, sets out with a vague idea to record the history of music performance and teaching in north India in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Nudged by her older brother and his friend, eventually, her project takes the shape of an exploration of a world that she has been fascinated with her whole life, but only now is coming to understand fully.

The story of four women

Reading Sahela Re feels familiar, like hearing well-worn stories from an older relative: it is tinged with nostalgia, not necessarily in some form of chronological order, and the details are magnified and minimised by the emotional intensity of the memory. Interspersed with verses from songs, quotations, and sayings, it is soaked in a syrup of melody – the nuances and the cliffs.

But you cannot love relics, you can only try to know them – Vidya knows this. The story roughly revolves around the lives of four women. Husna Bai, a singer who moved to Sherkothi after falling in love with a prince. In her tow comes her daughter, who grows up to be Allahrakhi Bi, one of Vidya’s chief sources.

Linked to hers is the story of Hira Bai, a famed singer in Benaras whose past is relatively unknown. Anjali Bai was her daughter – beautiful, incomparably talented in her craft, and successful in making a switch to more modern forms such as singing on the radio, she came to be the subject of almost obsessive adoration and spite.

The stories of these personalities of yore are intertwined with memories of Vidya’s own family members, who open up slowly, but once they have warmed up to this project that will memorialise the defining art form of their lives, their generous accounts become the connecting links between tales scattered across place and time.

As we find out more about the lives of these famous tawaifs, an interesting contrast in their experience emerges. Despite being indispensable to the cultural scene, they were always outsiders in the societies they inhabited. Widely sought after whenever a mehfil was to be organised, they remained the object of men’s feverish adoration and women’s envy, often disdain. In relationships exploitative or consensual, the best a tawaif could be was an illegitimate wife, their possibilities as members of the society limited to the peripheries of household life. This offered them a rare perspective on the cruelties that sustain polite society, and how to leverage them for sustenance, but also for the benefit of their beloved art.

The story of a dying art form

Pande’s storytelling also makes amply clear how often talent suffers the fate of its bearer. For example, Thumri, to this day, is considered a semi-classical art form – sung primarily by women, it came to be considered somewhat frivolous because of this gendered association, a treatment not extended to the serious Dhrupad, a male-dominated singing form.

Even at the height of her career, an experienced tawaif could bestow upon a pupil her learnings and the best-kept secrets of her art, but the stamp of legitimacy came only from training under an ustaad, a male teacher. This hierarchy was, of course, further cemented by the associations their respective vocations carried.

A male singer, dancer or performer of instruments would be an artist, perhaps a genius if he excelled at it, whose tantrums were to be borne with humility, even servitude; a tawaif was, at the end of the day, an easy woman, she could be bought with money, her musical prowess never quite taking away the fact that providing sexual services in exchange for money made them dirty in a way that could not be washed off.

In its devotion to a world gone by, however, the narrative in Sahela Re is also sensitive to change – its inevitability, its pain, and its possibilities. Spanning from the gardens of Lucknow to the mansions of Calcutta, and the kothis of Benaras to the hills of Ranikhet, the narrative chronicles the spirit of inventiveness that made possible these tunes and voices not only survive all these years but also thrive. One of its most evocative sections is towards the end, where a dispatch from New York hints towards emerging directions.

Written in the style of bringing together threads from the memories of family members and acquaintances, reading Sahela Re will be a treat for anyone interested in the world of traditional music that is fast losing popular attention. At one point in the novel, a character expresses his agitation over the suggestion that he recalls his own stories around music in English; to him, the charm lost in that translation is the loss of all vital lifeblood. Priyanka Sarkar accepts this, and Sahela Re, instead of taking his rejoinder as a challenge, repurposes it into a kind of mission statement: where language fails – as it will often – perhaps only a melody can best fill the vacuum.

Sahela Re, Mrinal Pande, translated from the Hindi by Priyanka Sarkar, HarperCollins India.