A lot of the
spiritual science of classical music draws inspiration from the beauty of
ordinary life, and folk concepts. Inspired by the flight of a particular bird,
the gait of an animal, or the dart of a fish, masters developed and regularised
local sounds and rhythms, immortalising them in the classical.
One of the most appealing
examples of this transformation of life into art is that of the jhoomra tala,
the most vilambit or slow tala in Hindustani music, consisting of 56 beats,
divided into frames of 12 and 16, which is inspired by the gait of the elephant,
the constant sway or jhoomna in its walk. The secret of the tala is that each
frame of 12 must be played within the time period of 16, to get the rhythm going
evenly.
The story that he who
sees a part of the elephant and describes his understanding of the animal with
the partial experience of that part and not the whole, resulting in several
interpretations of the truth by several people, has a profound cosmic dimension.
So it is with the tala. The student who sings his raga in the jhoomra tala may
find himself trying to capture it from many angles and yet not be able to sing
the tala from a state of total mental absorption of the whole, all 56 beats of
the sway.
When Ustad Amir Khan
Saheb of the Indore gharana came to specialise his singing of the bada or slow
khayal in the jhoomra tala, he found that it suited his deeply meditative
temperament in the singing of the raga. And in this tala he took on the most
serious of ragas from the classical repertoire, to match. “The student
must first sway to the antar-laya or the inner cosmic rhythm within himself if
he is to sing his raga in the jhoomra tala” , Pandit Amarnath, also of the
Indore gharana, would often say, in the context of any student struggling with
the tala that he must first come full circle within himself, withdrawn from
external vrittis or tendencies as he develops the meditation of his raga in the
tala.
The joy of the tala — the sway
— lies in the interplay of three beats with four, expanded to a maximum of
four times each to get the figure of 12 and 16. When these 12 beats are sung or
played into the time period of 16, to work out an even gait of the tala, it is
done with a sway — the elephant’s sway within its heavyfooted gait!
It is the silence of the sway (in the three beats) along with the even
(four-beat ) walk of the gait that brings in the presence of the unheard in the
heard tala, and which triggers joy. In all art, these moments take it to the
state of non-materiality , to the abstract, and become its window to meditation.
Initially, this extra-slow
tempo of the khayal singing of the Indore style induces a deep sense of calm in
the mind of the listener, but as the mind slowly begins to get absorbed in the
gait, becoming one with it, it achieves absorption or the antar-laya , into the
universal silence, and lifts the mind to great heights. The experience becomes
liberating, and deeply peace-giving .
The musicians who have sung
the tala, truly absorbed in it, themselves came to represent this most profound
peace known to mankind. You could say they were letting you know what God is all
about.