Tern-year old concert pianist Ayaan Deshpande makes his Goa debut!

Our music charity Child’s Play India Foundation is fifteen this year, a milestone we have been celebrating with a slew of concerts, workshops and music camps since this year began.

It gives us singular pleasure to host the Goa debut concert at the Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1 Panjim on 27 April 2024 (donation passes at Furtados Music store and also at the door before the concert) of an exceptionally gifted child from Mumbai, Ayaan Deshpande.

Born on 27th December 2013 in Tokyo and raised in Mumbai, Ayaan has been studying the piano at the Symphony Orchestra of India (SOI) Music Academy, National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) since May 2021 under the guidance of Ms Aida Bisengalieva.

Six months later, in November 2021, at just seven years of age, Ayaan gave his first public performance with the SOI Chamber Orchestra under the direction of maestro Marat Bisengaliev at the Tata Theatre, NCPA.

Along with playing the piano, Ayaan also loves to compose. He has composed a Sonata, a Waltz, a Nocturne, a piano & strings Quintet as well as a few other pieces. Ayaan’s Goa recital will also feature his own three-movement piano sonata. I can’t wait to hear its Goan premiere!

In July 2022, Ayaan gave his debut piano recital on the Jamshed Bhabha Theatre stage performing the works of Mozart, Chopin, Debussy along with one of his own compositions.

Ayaan has also performed on various occasions at the Little Theatre NCPA, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, (CSMVS) Mumbai, Tata Theatre NCPA, Happy Home & School for the blind – Worli, Prithvi Theatre, Mazda Hall – Pune.

In May 2023, he gave his first international concerts at Kurmangazy Orkestri Kazakh Concert Hall in Almaty, Kazakhstan, performing a solo piano program, duets accompanying violinist Marat Bisengaliev, as well as performing with an orchestra of Kazakh folk instruments. He also performed at the School for Autistic Children and at the Republican Kazakh Music School named after renowned Kazakh conductor, composer and musicologist Akhmet Zhubanov (1906-1968).

Ayaan was selected as a winner at the Golden Key Music Festival of Vienna, 2023 in both piano performance and composition categories. He performed during the festival at Palais Ehrbar and the Bӧsendorfer Hall in Mozarthaus.

Ayaan performed at the Mumbai Piano Day in September 2023 playing a program of Jazz and Western classical music. On 31st October and 1st November 2023, Ayaan performed Haydn Piano Concerto No 11 with the SOI Chamber Orchestra conducted by maestro Marat Bisengaliev in Mumbai and Delhi.

In 2023, Ayaan was featured among the Unstoppable 21 talented youngsters by the Times of India, India’s leading English newspaper.

I was reading up on the concert hall Ayaan performed in last year, the Bӧsendorfer Hall in Mozarthaus Vienna. The Mozarthaus was the residence of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) from 1784 to 1787.

It is hallowed ground as it is where the genius composer wrote so many of his masterpieces, notably his operas, Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786) Don Giovanni (1787), 12 of his 27 piano concertos among so many others. What a rare honour and privilege to actually perform in such a space!

In fact, Ayaan performed one of those piano concertos (no. 21 in C major, nicknamed ‘Elvira Madigan’, K. 467, completed in 1785) just last Sunday in Mumbai with the SOI Chamber Orchestra to a thunderous ovation. He played his own composed cadenzas.

Mozart also features on Ayaan’s concert programme, a work from a little earlier, 1778, his Piano Sonata in A minor, K. 310.

Out of Mozart’s 18 numbered piano sonatas, only two are in a minor key, the other being the Piano Sonata no. 14 in C minor, K. 457.

Mozart’s compositions are not often in a minor key. Out of his more than 600 completed works, a mere 30 are in a minor key. Apart from the above two piano sonatas, there are his Fantasias in D minor (K. 397) and C minor (K. 475); his Piano concerto 20 in D minor (K. 466, 1785) his ‘G minor’ Symphonies (numbers 25 and the famous 40) and of course the Requiem in D minor (K.626).

Could it be that Mozart reserved that minor ‘mood’ for his weightier works? The great contemporary Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel said that “the minor confronts you in Mozart as the superior force”.

Mozart was aged 22, visiting Paris in 1778 when his mother passed away. His K. 310 sonata, written shortly after, is not mentioned in his letters, but we know he was grief-stricken.  In a letter to his father Leopold, informing him of the sad news, he wrote: “I have indeed suffered and wept enough – but what did it avail?”

It is hard not to imagine that the tragic loss finds expression in this dramatic, dark composition.

As any experienced musician will testify, Mozart’s music is fiendishly difficult to play well even when seemingly innocuous. There is just nowhere to hide, the texture is so transparent.

Emperor Joseph II (in)famously told the composer his composition had “too many notes”; this sonata has some bravura ‘moto perpetuo’ passages too. There are moments of uneasy tension, conflict and dissonance.  

 In the development section of the first movement, the right hand is called upon to play three ‘voices’ simultaneously. (Interestingly, this same movement has been transcribed for three classical guitars, performed by Trio Elogio on YouTube).      

The second movement, Andante cantabile con espressione, in a consoling F major, offers a respite, but the final movement, again in A minor, gives a few glimpses of hope before rushing to its conclusion in bleakness and despair, presaging the music of later composers such as Beethoven and even Chopin.

I have been hearing about the musical phenomenon that is Ayaan Deshpande ever since he burst like a meteor on Mumbai’s musical horizon in 2021. But I only heard him play live in February this year, quite by chance.

I had gone backstage at the Jamshed Bhabha theatre after the opening concert of the Spring 2024 concert season of the SOI which had featured Barry Douglas playing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto. Suddenly there was a stir; a visiting influential musician wished to hear Ayaan. It was an extempore request. Ayaan had come to attend the SOI concert, and now he was being asked to perform himself!

A small crowd gathered backstage around the Steinway concert grand piano as Ayaan began to play, from memory, divinely, Claude Debussy’s ‘La plus que lente’. Sitting on the edge of the piano bench so that his feet could work the pedals, he cast a spell that made all of us forget the lateness of the hour or anything else.

After he had finished someone wondered in a whisper, “Where does such a gift come from?” I think the answer is obvious. Listen to Ayaan play and to me that is proof that there is a God.

Come here him yourself. It will be an evening you will tell your grandchildren about: “I was present at Ayaan Deshpande’s Goa debut when he was just ten years old.” This boy is destined for great things.  

   (An edited version of this article was published on 21 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

‘It is accomplished!’: 300 years of Bach’s St. John Passion

I set aside some time this Good Friday to listen to the complete St. John Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).

Besides being fitting music for that day of the Holy Week, this year marks the 300^th anniversary of the work.

In Christian music, a Passion is a setting of the Passion of Christ (ie the short final period before the death of Jesus, described in the four canonical gospels and commemorated in Christianity every year during Holy Week). The word Passion itself comes from the Latin ‘patior’, “to suffer, bear, endure”. We have a similar-sounding word in Konkani, from this same origin.

From 1723, Bach was employed as Thomaskantor (cantor at St Thomas’s) in Leipzig.

The job description included, among other things, composing music for the principal Lutheran churches of the city.

According to his “Nekrolog”, the 1754 obituary written by Johann Friedrich Agricola and the composer’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, Bach wrote “five Passions, of which one is for double chorus”. The “double chorus” one is easily identified as the better-known St. Matthew Passion. Of the others, the St. John Passion is the only extant one that we know for certain was composed by Bach. The St. Luke Passion which was formerly attributed to him and even included in the BWV (Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, Bach Works directory) under the number 246, now appears under the heading ‘apocryphal’ or ‘anonymous.’

There are as many as five versions of this Passion.  The work is most often heard today in the 1739–1749 version (never performed during Bach’s lifetime). In 1749, Bach performed the St John Passion once more, in an expanded and altered form from the 1724 version, in what would be his last performance of a Passion.

German musicologist Christoph Wolff writes: “Bach experimented with the St John Passion as he did with no other large-scale composition. The work accompanied Bach right from his first year as Kantor of St Thomas’s to the penultimate year of his life and thus, for that reason alone, how close it must have been to his heart.”

I won’t get into comparisons between his two known Passions, apart from stating the obvious, that the St. John Passion as about an hour shorter, and the orchestration simpler than the later (1727) St. Matthew Passion. St. John Passion doesn’t get performed or recorded as much, and is therefore less well-known.

I found it helpful to listen with the score (you can get YouTube versions where the score scrolls in real-time with the music). I am able to follow the German text, but there are easily-accessible English translations online.

Bach uses chapters 18 and 19 of the Gospel of St, John from the Lutheran Bible, with the Evangelist using the exact same words. The Passio is divided into two Parts. Part One has two scenes, one in the Kidron valley (which separates the Temple mount from the Mount of Olives), the second in the palace of high priest Caiaphas. Part Two has three scenes: one with Pontius Pilate, one at Golgotha and finally the tomb site.

This is essentially an enaction, so there are ‘dramatis personae’. The narrator is the Evangelist (John here), a tenor. Jesus and all other male characters are sung by a bass (including Peter and Pilate) or tenor (servant); female characters (such as the Maid) are sung by a soprano, while the people who are often summarily called die Jüden (the Jews), the servants of the High Priest, and the soldiers are sung by a four-part chorus (SATB) in dramatic ‘turba’ or ‘crowd’ movements.

We get drama in spades in this Passion. From the very beginning we are cast right into the action: “Betrayal and Arrest” (the Garden of Gethsemane). The music is almost cinematic, the chromatic undulations in the violins, the viola line sometimes rocking like an anxious heartbeat (or is it hyperventilation?). There is discord and dissonance, resolved for a second, only to get ratcheted up a notch higher, an upward spiral of tension, release, even more tension; until the chorus bursts onto the scene. “Herr! Herr Unser Herrschen!”  (“Lord! Lord! Our Master!”). The exclamations “Herr!” are sometimes on the strong beats, sometimes on the weak, adding to the sense of unrest.

The contrasts are striking; for example, the calm measured pace of the recitative setting the ground for Judas’ betrayal, and then Jesus’ query “Who do you seek?” is answered frenetically by the ‘turba’ chorus “Jesus of Nazareth!”

The dramatic narrative is interrupted periodically by eleven chorales that allow the faithful, the congregation to participate in the Passion. Their text and even sometimes melodies would have been known to contemporary congregations but so masterful are their four-part harmonisations by Bach that they are held up to this day as templates for basic principles of composition. Many Lutheran chorales are still used in worship in German-speaking countries even today.       

The ten arias are an opportunity for us to reflect on significant points in the narrative.

There are so many remarkable moments in this work, but the one that stands out is Peter’s denial. Soon after the Evangelist recites ‘And Simon Peter followed Jesus’, there is a beautiful upbeat soprano aria ‘I follow you with eager steps.’ But this is immediately followed by Peter’s first denial.

The way the St John Gospel plays out, it is a while (the striking of Jesus followed by a beautiful chorale ‘Who has hit you like that, my Saviour, and ill-treated you?’) before the Peter is accused twice more. The second accusation by the chorus is particularly vicious, attacking Peter without respite. After the crowing of the rooster, the Evangelist sings plangently “he went away and cried bitterly”, almost sobbing the melodic line, commiserating with Peter. The following aria reflects Peter’s ‘troubled mind’? It is something we can all relate to. If we were in Peter’s position, what would we have done?   

Two more notable moments in Part Two: the bass aria ‘Mein teurer Heiland’ (‘My dearest Saviour’)

and the final chorus ‘Ruht wohl, ihr helige Gebeine’ (Lie in peace, sacred body).

  Bach was himself a deeply devout individual. Barely a year into his new post in Leipzig, this was his opportunity to show on a large scale what his music could do in defining and strengthening Christian belief. As English conductor and Bach expert Sir john Eliot Gardiner writes in his scholarly 2013 book ‘Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven’

about the first performance of the St. John Passion on Good Friday 7 April 1724: “None could match the depth of [Bach’s] elaborately patterned music-   his meshing of narrative and reflection of scriptural chronicles and theologically shaped poetic texts. In a university city famed for its theological faculty, it was a courageous – some might even have called it a brazen – statement, coming as it did from someone who was not a theologian and who did not even have a university degree.”

But such are the ways of the Lord. The works of the ‘non-theologian’, non-degree holder Johann Sebastian Bach have been the subject of study by theologians and university dons and academicians the world over for the centuries that have followed his death, and will continue to be so for centuries to come.   

 (An edited version of this article was published on 14 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A little Night Music

Each time internationally acclaimed concert pianist Marouan Benabdallah visits Goa, music-lovers know they are in for a feat of music, a night to remember. Child’s Play India Foundation is pleased to present him on Saturday 13 April 2024, ESG Maquinez Palace Auditorium 1, 6 PM. Donation passes available at Furtados, and at the door before the concert.

Benabdallah is indisputably the leading representative of his native Morocco on the international concert stage. With a musical heritage deeply rooted in the Hungarian tradition, he received his formal training at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary.

He first attracted international attention in 2003, following his triumphs at the Hungarian Radio Piano Competition and the Andorra Grand Prize. Later on, he was a prize-winner at the Hilton Head Piano Competition (US) and the Arthur Rubinstein Master Competition where the local media proclaimed his playing “miraculous” (Maariv).

Benabdallah has been praised for his “stunning natural virtuosity” (Nice-Matin), “delicate stylishness” (Cleveland Plain Dealer), “compelling sense of momentum” (Washington Post) and “resourceful pianism, lyrical instincts and thoughtfulness” (New York Times). He has been invited as guest soloist by numerous orchestras in Europe, Asia, America and Africa, and has collaborated with conductors such as Lorin Maazel, Charles Dutoit, Zoltan Kocsis, Iván Fischer, Renato Palumbo, Tan Lihua and others.

He has performed on stages such as the Great Hall of the Franz Liszt Music Academy and the Palace of Arts in Budapest, the Salle Cortot in Paris, the Laeiszhalle in Hamburg, the Forbidden City Concert Hall in Beijing, the Oriental Art Centre in Shanghai, the Teatro Communale di Bologna, the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires, the Maison Symphonique in Montreal, the National Center for the Performing Arts in  umbai, the Cairo Opera House, Carnegie Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Queen Elizabeth Hall.

Benabdallah makes his home between Budapest, Rabat, Paris and Beijing. He is a “Yamaha Artist”. He serves on the piano faculty of the Liszt Academy [University] of Music in Budapest.

As always, Benabdallah’s recitals are thoughtfully curated by him. The second half of his programme is devoted to ‘La Nuit’ (The Night): “The night is the realm of indistinguishability, the moment of revelation, of enlightenment. The night has always been paradoxical and malleable, it is reassuring as it is disturbing. It is a place of the imagination and the subconscious, a place that inspires artists and fires their creativity.

How do we depict the night? How do we give colour to such dark hours? How to make the night musical? Benabdallah invites the audience to an exploration of the night through paintings and music

focusing on French composers from the early 20th century,” ranging from the more familiar, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) and Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) to those perhaps less so: Henri Duparc (1848-1933), Mel Bonis (1858–1937), Abel Decaux (1869–1943), Gustave Samazeuilh (1877-1967) and Louis Aubert (1877–1968).

I’m just as excited about what is in store for us before that in the first half of Benabdallah’s concert: the not-so-frequently performed but extremely atmospheric Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor, Op. 28 by Russian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), whose 150^th birth anniversary we celebrated last year.

As their overlapping timelines indicate, all the composers mentioned above were contemporaries, so a juxtaposition of their works in one concert allows us to compare their compositional styles.

Rachmaninov was considered anachronistic even in his lifetime, as a 20^th century throwback to a Romantic era that had ended.

 The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians !1954 edition), barely a decade after his death, notoriously dismissed Rachmaninoff’s music as “monotonous in texture … consist[ing] mainly of artificial and gushing tunes” and predicted that his popular success was “not likely to last.”

But as Alex Ross put it in his August 2022 New Yorker article (‘How radical was Rachmaninov?’), “To be anachronistic is to be outside one’s time; it does not rule out belonging to the future.”

In my column last year to mark the Rachmaninov birthday milestone, I mentioned how it had taken hypnotherapy in 1900 to get him out of a depression trough after the vicious criticism of his First Symphony. Among the trio of “Dresden pieces” he wrote after emerging from that low point in his life were his Second Piano Concerto (which he dedicated in gratitude to his therapist Dr. Nikolai Dahl), part of an opera ’Monna Vanna’ (which was never finished), and this First Piano Sonata.

Although Rachmaninov soon abandoned the thematic idea (German polymath and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tragic play ‘Faust’)

Gretchen sentenced to death Joseph Fay (1812-1875) Colour lithograph, in ‘Faust – the Tragedy Part 1’, Paris 1846 Wikimedia Commons.

that was originally the sonata’s inspiration, traces of its influence still linger. Its three movements, structured like a typical Classical sonata, (fast movements surrounding a slower, more tender second movement), are based on the play’s three main characters Faust, Gretchen (short for Margarete) and the devil Mephistopheles respectively. In that sense it parallels Franz Liszt’s 1857 choral work ‘A Faust symphony in three character pieces’ which also reflect those characters.   

I rejoiced when I heard Benabdallah would be playing this “dark, demonic masterpiece”. It has formidable technical challenges. Rachmaninov himself wrote of it in a letter to a friend: “Nobody will ever play this composition. It’s too difficult and long.” The Russian critic Yuli Engel on examining the score said of it: “Unravelling this tangle of passages, rhythms, harmonies, polyphonic twistings, is no easy matter, even for an accomplished pianist.”

But its building blocks are deceptively simple: fifths, scales, and repeating notes. It is a mark of the genius of the composer that these musical devices can be employed to “paint” portraits of three completely different personalities. Rising and falling fifths in the first movement for example could be seen as Faust’s constant questioning, yearning for “more than earthly meat and drink” to give meaning to this life, even to extent of being willing to sell his soul to the devil to find answers to those questions. And the single repeating note in one motif, similar to a Russian Orthodox chant: is Faust hedging his bets here, appealing to God too, to whoever answers first?

In the middle ‘Gretchen’ movement, those devices paint a picture of innocence, virtue and bliss. The last movement is the headlong galloping descent into hell, complete with tolling bells and a generous quote of the first fragment of the ‘Dies Irae’ (the well-known Latin chant portraying the wrath of God) motif that Rachmaninov frequently inserted in so many of his works, a sign of his profound contemplation on the subject of death and mortality throughout his life. 

What makes Rachmaninov’s music so compelling is not just its complexity but how it invites you to explore the whole gamut of the human experience. I was struck by the various impressions of this work by listeners on a piano forum. To one, it felt like “you’re flying through the cosmos and witnessing planets being formed and destroyed.” To another “it has this grand, subtly storytelling, yet almost hypnotic quality that makes me think of atoms and stars and stuff like that.”

What will be your own experience? Why not come along to Marouan Benabdallah’s concert and discover the answer yourself?

 (An edited version of this article was published on 07 April 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A premature end to a Mehli-fluous sound

“American Youth Symphony Announces Permanent Closure” screamed the ‘breaking news’ headline on the Violin Channel newsletter I subscribe to.

Rubbing my eyes in disbelief, I read further: “Citing financial challenges, the orchestra is ceasing all operations as of March 15, 2024, after almost 60 years.”

Due to my interest in music education, I keep abreast of youth orchestras and ensembles around the world. The American youth Symphony (AYS) was particularly well-known to me because it was founded in 1964 by Mehli Mehta (1908-2002),

who is today better recognised as father of the celebrated Maestro Zubin Mehta.

But Mehta senior was an acclaimed virtuoso violinist (whose violin-playing can still be heard today in the All India Radio signature tune)

and conductor. It was the musical milieu in the Mehli Mehta household in Bombay that was the stimulus for the phenomenon that his illustrious son still is today.

Zubin Mehta acknowledged as much when he told at press that his father had been his first teacher, that he had grown up listening to his father’s symphony and quartet rehearsals and that, until he was 18 and went to Vienna to study, “everything I knew about music was from my father.”

The media spotlight on the son particularly in India has meant that the father’s life in music is that much less well known.

 Mehli Mehta founded the Bombay String Quartet in 1940. He spent five years in New York City studying with eminent Armenian-American violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian, who was the teacher of many seminal violin players including Dorothy DeLay, Itzhak Perlman Kyung Wha Chung, Glen Dicterow, Eugene Fodor, Ani and Ida Kavafian, Michael Rabin, Simon Standage and Pinchas Zukerman.

In 1955 Mehli Mehta moved to England, where he served for five years as Assistant Concertmaster and Concertmaster of the Hallé Orchestra of Manchester under Sir John Barbirolli. Mehta came to regard Barbirolli as “one of the greatest influences of my conducting life.”

He joined the Curtis Quartet of Philadelphia in 1959 as second violinist and toured with them across the United States for the next five years. In later years he was to state, “the string quartet has been the prime, basic factor of my entire musical philosophy.”

Mehli and his wife Tehmina then moved to Los Angeles in 1964 after Zubin was appointed conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was Director of the Orchestra Department at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) until 1976.

Within a couple of months after his arrival there in 1964, Mehli organised the AYS with students from all the universities in Los Angeles.

Its mission statement: “To train gifted young musicians for professional careers in symphony orchestras; to make music available to all segments of the community through free concerts and activities around town.”

“It takes a lifetime to learn symphonic literature. The students know nothing and they must begin somewhere to dedicate their lives to learning this repertory. When they leave the American Youth Symphony they will have performed all the symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Dvorak, plus the last six symphonies of Mozart, five of Mahler, two of Bruckner and all the Strauss tone poems. To be a musician, you must know these things,” he said.

He would lead the AYS for 33 seasons, retiring at age 90 in 1998.

The AYS audition information at the now-defunct website declared, “As a member of the American Youth Symphony, you will receive tuition-free training, have wonderful opportunities to enhance your musical growth, experiment, study new works, develop leadership skills, and perform at a high level of excellence some of the great repertoire required of a musician today!”

Each season, around 250-300 applicants auditioned to fill an average of 30 open positions. There was no audition fee.

On Beethoven’s 200th birthday, 16 December 1970, father and son conducted their respective orchestras in a twelve-hour Beethoven Marathon in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Mehli led the AYS in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, while Zubin conducted the LA Phil in Beethoven’s Sixth and the finale of the Ninth.

In his biography of Sir john Barbirolli, author Michael Kennedy quotes the great conductor as saying, “I… attended Mehli’s concert with the American Youth Symphony. I am glad I did, for dear Mehli was magnificent. Made those children play really quite splendidly. I was really thrilled and impressed.”

Mehli mentored many generations of musicians through the AYS. Violinist Lawrence Sonderling, a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 1977 and a former American Youth Symphony concertmaster, said that Mehli Mehta “did everything with great intensity and great purpose and great love for music. It was always the music that was the most important thing. In rehearsal with the orchestra, he would badger us, he would yell and scream; sometimes he would tell stories of things he had heard and seen in his musical youth. Always the intensity was there. And the passion.”

After his father’s death in 2002, Zubin Mehta told the LA Times: “Any concert of mine that he attended, there was no doubt to whom my message was going. That is what I will miss in Los Angeles, because he will not be there anymore.”

But the AYS lived on after him, performing five to seven concerts each season, the majority of concerts presented free to the public at world-class concert halls, including UCLA’s Royce Hall, Walt Disney concert hall and local community venues alike, with “the goal of welcoming anyone who is interested to enjoy this beautiful art form.”

 Press reviews spoke of the “assured maturity, polish and depth” of the orchestra concerts.

AYS alumni went on to play in major American orchestras. A 2014 survey found that thirteen AYS alumni performed with the LA Opera, seven with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and fourteen with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

The press release announcing the sad news of it closure stated: “AYS has played a crucial role in nurturing the next generation of professional musicians and fostering a vibrant artistic community. AYS presented ambitious seasons of thoughtful programming of exceptionally high quality, covering a breadth of symphonic music, including beloved classics, film scores, chamber works, and contemporary pieces, while championing many of today’s composers.”

It spoke of “insurmountable” challenges and an “unsustainable financial infrastructure.”  We have exhausted every effort and hope the larger orchestral industry and classical music philanthropic community take note to shore-up these important pre-professional orchestras like AYS which directly benefit them.”

This latest news is part of a larger depressing trend worldwide to cut funding for music education at all levels, from grassroots to the top. Last month there was outrage over “mean and nasty cuts” to Melbourne Youth Orchestras, Australia.

India unfortunately lags far behind, not having a national youth orchestra in the truest sense of the term, with several concerts each season annually, and with year-round world-class mentoring. As a nation, we have our priorities elsewhere.

And in global terms, a 1953 cartoon, “The restaurant serves only one person” is still sadly topical: waiters fuss over a bloated representation of War while other, emaciated customers, the Arts, Sciences, Healthcare and Education look helplessly on.   

 (An edited version of this article was published on 31 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

The flip side of ’12th Fail’

My son’s school took its 8^th and 9^th standard students earlier this month to see ‘12^th Fail’,

the 2023 Hindi-language biographical drama film directed, produced and written by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, based on the 2019 eponymous non-fiction book by Anurag Pathak about Manoj Kumar Sharma, who overcame extreme poverty to become an Indian Police Service (IPS) officer.

I totally get why school students should see it. It is an inspirational rags-to-riches story, with so many life lessons: Dare to dream big. Honesty is the best policy. Never ever give up. Try, try again until you succeed (or to borrow the film’s catchphrase: ‘Restart’).

I had heard a lot about ‘12th Fail’ but hadn’t yet seen it. Now that my son had gone to see it and liked it, I decided to see it too. (If you haven’t seen the film and wish to, stop reading here, as there are spoilers ahead).

I did come away impressed. But there was a disclaimer at the very beginning, that although the film was “inspired” by true events, “it is not a documentary/biography of any character depicted in the film. No scene should be construed to represent a true or accurate recreation of the actual events that transpired. The story and the relationship between the characters depicted in the film have been fictionalized. Any resemblance or similarity to any actual events, entities or persons, whether living or dead, is entirely coincidental.”

So: what in the film is “an accurate recreation”, and what is a “fictionalized” account? I found an English translation of the book on which the film is based, and read through it. Maybe it reads better in Hindi, but the English translation is rather clumsy. However, there are so many scenes in the film that one assumes were “actual events that transpired” (for instance the theft of Manoj’s bag with his grandmother’s life savings on the bus to Gwalior) that are absent in the book.

I realise of course that any ‘biographical’ film has to truncate a lot, but there is a dizzying and frankly rather depressing timeline of “attempts” of the three-step (prelims, mains, interview) sequence of the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) qualifying exam of not just the main protagonist but his friend circle, with so many “failures” along the way, compressed into a short span. And there are the various state-level exams as well, to further thicken the plot.

As one fellow aspirant ‘Gauri bhaiya’ (who is also not in the book) explains, the odds are rather sobering in what he calls a game of ‘snakes and ladders.’ “Out of 200,000 Hindi-medium applicants for the UPSC, only 25-30 become IAS (Indian Administrative Service) or IPS officers. The remaining 199,970 go back to zero. Restart.” 

‘Guari bhaiya’ seems an invented composite character just for the film (part of the ‘artistic license’), but was it really necessary to have this very character come from a ‘backward caste’, who then explains that he is allowed six attempts (rather than the four in the ‘general’ category), and have him then fail even that last attempt? Caste is strangely absent in the book, a glaring omission in caste-discriminating India.

And then, wonder of wonders, the ever-selfless ‘Gauri bhaiya’ instead of returning home, opens a tea-stall named ‘Restart’, a ‘free UPSC guidance centre’ (again not in the book).

All the motivational rhetoric is of course necessary for young minds to hear and internalize, but what comes across in book and film and is painfully obvious in real life is the yawning chasm between rich and poor. It is no coincidence that the rich kids are fluent in English and able to afford expensive coaching classes for these entrance exams (which are conducted in English), while those from poorer, rural India, educated in vernacular-medium schools have to compete with their affluent peers at these incredibly tough exams with this added handicap of language (which comes across poignantly when Manoj misreads ‘Tourism’ as ‘Terrorism’). To me ‘12^th Fail’ is not just “the gripping narrative of a man who put his heart and soul into making the impossible possible” (as one publicity blurb puts it) but it is also a deafening indictment of our woefully skewed education system that offers English-medium instruction to a privileged few in urban India to the neglect of the remaining majority of our children and youth in suburban and rural India. Surely the abysmal annual UPSC exam pass percentage (0.015% according to the film) could be far higher if English-medium instruction was more uniformly distributed?

Another issue I found disturbing is the subtle emotional blackmail, the family pressure “of only returning wearing a police uniform” i.e. having passed the IPS exam. Pressure like that can be a double-edged sword. I knew a young Indian doctor in my UK years who repeatedly failed the PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board), the qualifying exam to start working there as a doctor, incurring huge financial losses and borrowing money from friends and family, but felt he “couldn’t return home without getting a British postgraduate degree.” Eventually after many years it got too much for him and he did return, but the stress he endured was so unnecessary, from the real or imagined psychological pressure: “I can’t face my family and society unless I’m successful.”

There’s also the undiscussed issue of the girl-child’s education opportunities in the film. Manoj’s sister Rajni has to be content studying in the village and doing household chores. The only female students in Manoj’s friends circle are from well-to-do backgrounds. Maybe I’m nit-picking here, but it’s a thought.

What does one make of the media hype over lead actor Vikrant Massey getting a ‘tan look’ for the film? Would a lighter skin tone in hue-obsessed India make his role less believable? We can guess why. Poor India, literally, isn’t ‘fair.’

Around the same time, another article discussed school drop-outs and ‘12^th fails’ in celebrity Bollywood dynastic scions. What a stark contrast between the two Indias!

(An edited version of this article was published on 30 March 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)

Making ‘room’ for Fado

Looking through the list of films that bagged or were nominated for the Oscars this year, I realised I had seen a handful: Oppenheimer, Barbie, Maestro, The Last Repair Shop, The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar.

Until then I hadn’t even heard of ‘Poor Things’, the 2023 film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray. But as it won four Oscars this year and numerous other accolades elsewhere, I found it on a streaming service and watched it.

To say it has a bizarre storyline is an understatement.  Bella Baxter (played by Emma Stone, who won Best Actress for the role) is a young woman in Victorian London who dies by suicide by jumping off a bridge, is brought back to life via brain transplant (from her own baby that she was heavily pregnant with!) and embarks on “an odyssey of self-discovery.” The “odyssey”, surprise surprise, involves to a lot of graphic sex scenes and nudity.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure what to make of it at the end. Is this dark comedy, film noir? The protagonist’s “creator”, called “God”, Godwni Baxter (Willem Dafoe) looks like a ‘creation’ himself, of Dr. Frankenstein. The “poor things” ultimately seem to be a revolving-door of the men in Bella’s life who momentarily think they have her in their thrall. Is she a “poor thing” too? You be the judge.

Most of the reviews have raved over ‘Poor Things,’ calling it “wildly imaginative and exhilaratingly over the top”, and variations on that theme. There were a few dissenting voices, however.   Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle pronounced it “a 141-minute mistake” adding: “Worst of all, it’s dishonest. It purports to be a feminist document, but it defines a woman’s autonomy as the ability to be exploited and not care.”

Angelica Jade Bastién of ‘Vulture’ identified the decision to make Bella Baxter mentally a child as the “primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes…. In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur’s vision for and about women — particularly their sexual selves.” I quite agree.

To me there was a touch of the grotesque in much of the film. It was the idea of ‘using’ suicide as a plot device, a literal springboard for absurdist comedy, and the very thought of in effect murdering a live newborn just to transplant its brain into a dead adult makes my stomach churn. It’s fiction, it’s just a movie, yes, I know, but it was quite a revolting stretch of the imagination for me.

I looked up the book (‘Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer’) that inspired the film, but have no desire to actually read it from cover to cover. Life’s too short; there are many much more worthy books vying for my attention on my bucket list.

The only reason I sought out the book was to check how prominently Lisbon (which Bella visits on her “odyssey” in the film) features in the book. It is mentioned just once, and just fleetingly in passing, at that.

The film dwells on the city for a little longer, but it is a very surreal nineteenth-century Lisbon. In Bella’s imagination, its trams (‘elétricos’) glide in mid-air like ski-lifts between mountain-slopes.

She is introduced to the city’s fabled pastéis de nata (egg custard tart pastry) by her debauched escort Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) thus: “So nuns and monks would starch their clothes with egg-whites, and with the yolks, make these tarts.” Seems like a pat explanation for any dessert involving egg-yolks! And the advice on eating them? “Not dainty flake by dainty flake, but inhaled with gusto like life itself.” And “one’s enough; any more is too much,” something Bella proceeds to ignore when she goes off wandering the city’s streets on her own.

She soon sees and hears a woman on a balcony strumming a ‘guitarra portuguesa’ and singing a melancholy fado.

An audio-search revealed it to be ‘O quarto’ (The Room), sung by Portuguese superstar fadista Maria do Carmo Carvalho Rebelo de Andrade, better known as Carminho. She was invited by director Lanthimos to make a special appearance in ‘Poor Things.’

The fado (lyrics by Carminho) was chosen jointly by her and Lanthimos, and seems an apt one, chiming in with what Bella must be feeling.

The “small room” (her mind?) she thought was just hers is infiltrated by the poison (veneno) of “loneliness (solidão). The emptiness is suffocating and is compounded by the “invasion” of the cold.

As in so many fados, these outpourings seem to be triggered by “a heart that broke” (“um coração que se partiu”).  “You don’t even see me when you enter.” Who? The thought of the one who hurt her? Or the past in general in Bella’s case?

“This room is of no use,” where the air doesn’t even fit” (“onde nem lá cabe o ar”).

In ‘Poor Things’ we hear just a little over a minute of the fado before Bella is distracted by a squabbling couple, and then, climbing up a flight of stairs to take in a stylised version of Lisbon’s rooftop view of its skyline, her visceral reaction is to retch and throw up. If only she had heeded the warning not to over-indulge on pastéis de nata!

‘Poor Things’ elicited a similar regurgitating reflex in me in places. Don’t watch it if you’re under-age, or on a full stomach, or perhaps a prude like me. I don’t think I’ll be seeing it again any time soon. Like Wedderburn’s advice, once is enough; any more is too much.

Nevertheless, that one-minute spotlight on fado in an Oscar-winning film will do much to showcase it to a global audience.

Incidentally, a wag was recently heard saying that we are getting an “overdose” of fado here, that not even in Portugal is such fuss made over fado as in Goa.

To me it seems a case of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’. It’s bad enough that nurturing anything with the ‘Portuguese’ tag (except for ‘Portuguese’ houses on the real estate market!) is viewed in some quarters as ‘anti-national’, (which mysteriously never happens to the British legacy, say cricket, tea, or the English language). Had these aspects of our heritage been left to wither and die, we would have bemoaned their passing. So when they are revived and even made commercially viable by an enterprising, passionate handful, why is that a bad thing?

Coming to fado, as in any art form, there are the stubborn entrenched purists who feel it should remain fossilised in its purported 19^th century original state, extending only to its early to mid-20^th century heyday; and then there are the innovators who want to give fado a 21^st century relevance, context, and (shock horror!) even fuse it with music from other genres and other geographic regions than Portugal. If history is any indicator, innovation and evolution are what make any art form endure, even thrive. In more ways than one, ‘tudo isto é fado’. All this is destiny, all this is fado. Viva! 

 (An edited version of this article was published on 24 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A Fort-uitous Getaway -2

If you double the fortification of a city, what do you get? Eightification of course. And if you halve it, twentification. Yes, I know, terrible. My teenage son and niece thought so too. But when you visit one fort after another in just a couple of days, you become a serial ‘kila.’

In a recent previous column, I had begun the account of my serendipitous visit to Chaul (also called Revdanda fort), the historic fort ruin in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, a few kilometres away from Alibag.

 Senior lecturer in Portuguese history at the Université d’Aix-Marseille Ernestine Carreira’s book Globalisng Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire’

documents the history of this fort city and its strategic importance to the Estado da Índia. 

Chaul comes up in the context of the complex interactions between the Portuguese and the Marathas, and Carreira rightly quotes the landmark 1983 text (translated from the Marathi) by Dr. Pandurang Sakharam Pssurlencar, ‘Portuguese Maratha relations,’

so I looked this up too. 

What emerges is far from the black-and-white clear demarcations that 21^st century hindsight tends to confer on our past. Pissurlencar himself writes in the first chapter that “between the Portuguese and the Marathas alone, no less than 25 pacts and treaties were concluded.”

Pissurlencar in his second chapter quotes a 1636 letter from Shahaji (father of the eventual Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj) to the Portuguese captain at Chaul, seeking shelter to his family “as he had always maintained friendly relations with them” and his family’s safety was in jeopardy from the Mughals and the Bijapur sultanate. The Portuguese declined fearing the wrath of Delhi and Bijapur, but offered to covertly secure his safe passage onward.

Pissurlencar also quotes a source in the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Lisbon) which makes it obvious that there were Portuguese men serving in Shivaji’s army and in building ships for the Maratha navy, eventually causing alarm to the Portuguese authorities, as the ships could be “a source of trouble” not only against the Siddi [of Janjira] but against the Portuguese themselves.

In 1667, the Viceroy João Nunes da Cunha, Conde de São Vicente wrote to Lisbon: “I am afraid of Shivaji’s naval ships. We did not take sufficient preventive steps and he has built many a fort on the Konkan coast. Today he has several ships and they are large ones.”

In keeping with their guerilla tactics on land, Shivaji’s fleet consisted mostly of ‘galvetas’, small but speedy, a distinct advantage over the “slow large-sized Portuguese ships.”

“On 10 February 1670”, Pissurlencar writes, “Shivaji entered into a pact of friendship with the Portuguese.” One of its terms was that, since the Siddi [Janjira] had accepted the overlordship of the Portuguese, they were under an obligation to protect him, but since this ran counter to the “new friendship” between the Portuguese and the Marathas, the former would use their influence to conclude a mutually satisfactory treaty between the Siddi and Shivaji. Talk about ‘frenemies’!

 Carreira refers to the collapse of trade for Goa’s merchant fleet in the early 1700s “both in the Atlantic and within secondary networks in Asia, but Chaul, Bassein, Daman and Diu could take over on regional, coastal shipping, sometimes by joining up with Jewish and Parsi shipping companies from Surat.” Some of those Jewish merchant families must certainly have been in this region? Are some of their descendants still here, if they haven’t been part of the mass migration to Israel and beyond?

In the previous column I had highlighted the Bene Israeli settlement going back over 2000 years, and even being responsible for the etymology of Alibag (“Eli cha Bagh”, “Eli’s garden”). Although Alibag’s Magen Aboth synagogue was temporarily off-limits to us (as a precautionary security measure in the wake of the recent events in Israel-Palestine), we passed by the Bene Israeli cemetery in a deserted location in Korlai

and were able to get close to the few gravestones there, in Hebrew and Marathi, with names such as Eliyahu Solomon Sogaonkar, Michael Eliyahu Sogaonkar and Jonah Moshe Ashtamkar.  

Portuguese influence continued to wane, and Chaul fell to the Marathas in 1740, then to the British East India Company, and was already a ruin when J. Gerson da Cunha wrote his ‘Notes on the History and Antiquities of Chaul and Bassein’ (1876).

Da Cunha’s tone to the current reader smacks of what Edward Said called “the Orientalist gaze”, but he waxes almost poetic when he says in the Preface: “Even at the present day, among the thousand associations which crowd upon the mind when we gaze upon their ruins, none is more moving than the thought that we have before us the relics of a civilisation that, whatever its faults, or howsoever anachronistic its institutions may appear to the present dwellers on the globe, there is no doubt that it answered its purpose well, met best all the exigencies of the time, and when it became effete ceased to exist – a mere question of evolution, and not of revolution. To try to prolong it, however, beyond the period it was intended to serve in the economy of human society, to strive to extend it outside the sphere within which it was designed to move, would naturally amount to involving it in ruin. And that is precisely what took place.”

That ruin has undergone further decay since then to the time Amita Kanekar described Chaul in her valuable pocket-book on Portuguese sea forts

(which I sadly forgot to carry with me) and the downward slide (“evolution, not revolution”) continues.  

The only somewhat imposing structure still standing was the tower of the Franciscan convent of Santa Barbara, founded before 1564 but rebuilt after 1570. Kanekar informs us it was probably intended as a watchtower and navigational landmark. Two arched openings in its roofless upper storey (through which one sees bare sky) and a little window below give a ghoulish face to the façade, helplessly looking at the surrounding desolation. 

 

Subsequent visits to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS, formerly the Prince of Wales Museum) revealed two inscription headstones from Chaul in the verandah area to the left of its entrance. One records construction in the fortress between 1635-36, and that João de Veloso Thobar, its captain, adopted St Francis Xavier as patron of the city.

The second inscription documents the vow made by the King Dom João IV in the Cortes in 1646 to “defend by all means in his power the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary”, for which purpose a decree was passed to carve such inscriptions in every city and fort of the Portuguese in India.   

However, as we have seen, despite all the talismanic appeals for divine protection, barely less than a century later, there was a different writing, figuratively on the wall for the Portuguese in India. Surely there is a lesson from history here about the folly of mixing state and religion, which we ought to heed today?

We had met the Marathas in Kolaba, the Portuguese at Chaul, and now the Siddi were waiting for us at Janjira. More about them in the final column about this fort-uitous odyssey.    

 (An edited version of this article was published on 17 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

‘Eve’ning the Score

I’ve been listening to classical music all my life, and give thanks every day for the advent of internet radio since the beginning of this century, which has given a quantum leap to the breadth and scope of music  now at my fingertips, and lets me carry it with me everywhere. People of my generation thought Walkmans (remember them?) were cool; who could have envisaged this back then?

Two seismic events in recent global history have dramatically pushed even further the boundaries of and irreversibly altered (for the better) the music ‘playlist’, as it were.

One of those events was the “Me Too” movement that went viral around the world following the exposure of numerous sexual-abuse allegations against film producer Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. The other was the murder in May 2020 of George Floyd, a black American man by a white police officer in Minneapolis, sparking off outrageous protest first in the US that quickly spread globally.

They seem to have triggered some collective soul-searching among radio presenters, curators of concert seasons or music festivals and performers themselves, to shake off even more vigorously the stereotype that classical music was the preserve of “dead white men.” It’s not as if it wasn’t being addressed before, but now it took on a fresh urgency. Suddenly I was hearing music by composers on radio stations that had never graced their playlists before.

In this column, I’ll dwell on the positive fallout of the “Me Too” movement on the soundscape of classical music today.

In her first book published last year, ‘Quartet: How Four Women Changed the Musical World,’ multi-award-winning writer and historian Dr. Leah Broad, who specialises in twentieth-century cultural history, especially women in the arts, gives us a group biography of four women composers: Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell and Doreen Carwithen.

As you can expect, it is a long read, and I’ve barely scratched its surface.

She makes pertinent observations in the Preface: “Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, …it was thought not just unlikely but a biological impossibility for women to manage the kind of abstract thought associated with composition. It was begrudgingly accepted that women could write and paint because, as one author put it, these art forms ‘all have a basis of imitation.’ But music was different. Creating music required the ability to think both logically and emotionally, and involved no imitation of nature whatsoever. It was a talent considered beyond women’s reach.”

The lifespans of British women composers Smyth, Clarke, Howell and Carwithen cover 145 years. But today let me tell you about another woman composer from across the English Channel who precedes all of them and whose music literally stopped me in my tracks some years ago.

When I hear a snippet of classical music that I cannot immediately identify, I play a ‘game’ with myself, and whoever else around (my family) might be disposed to play along. From the musical style, the instrumental forces and other tell-tale clues, we try to narrow down the list of ‘suspects’ and then hazard an educated guess from among them. And if the snippet is on radio, I wait impatiently for the identity to be revealed, hoping there won’t be some inane commercial break instead.

In 2018 or so I happened to be at home and heard a work in mid-performance on Classic FM. The segment I had stumbled upon had vigour an almost unrelenting energy, always moving forward, modulating this way and that, with some lyrical oases for woodwinds along the way. Who could this be?  It was from the Romantic period, no doubt about it, judging from the orchestral forces. But it wasn’t any of the ‘usual suspects’ I knew and loved.

It turned out to be Overture no. 1 by Lousie Farrenc.

That was my first introduction to her and I have been a devotee ever since, encountering her again and again on the airwaves, and even in my son’s Trinity Grade 6 Piano syllabus, an eloquent, heartfelt Impromptu.

Discovering her music was a delight, but why did have only have to hear her in my fifties and not sooner?

She was born Jeanne-Louise Dumont in Paris in 1804, fortunately to a supportive family. Piano lessons began early in childhood with Cecille Soria, former pupil of the celebrated Muzio Clementi, (called ‘Father of the Piano’ for being among the first to write compositions and etudes expressly for the capabilities of the instrument) and later with other masters such as Ignaz Moscheles and Johann Nepomuk Hummel (about whom I’ve written quite recently).

At fifteen, when she showed promise as a composer, she studied with Anton Reicha, composition teacher at the Conservatoire de Paris, but only ‘privately’, as Conservatoire composition classes allowed only males as students. 

At seventeen, she married Aristide Farrenc, a flute student ten years her senior; the couple gave concerts throughout France and later opened ‘Éditions Farrenc’, which would remain a leading music publishing house for decades.

These activities and the birth of her daughter interrupted her composition studies, but she nevertheless earned a formidable reputation as a virtuoso concert pianist and in 1842 was appointed to the permanent position of Professor of Piano at the Paris Conservatory, a position she held for thirty years. Farrenc was the only woman to hold the prestigious position there throughout the 19th century.

But she had to fight her corner. For nearly a decade, Farrenc was paid less than her male counterparts and she was vocal about it.  Finally, after the extremely successful premiere in 1850 of her nonet (a work well worth listening, which as the name suggests is a chamber work for nine instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon, violin, viola, cello and double-bass)

she once again demanded equal pay, and was given it.

Farrenc also produced and edited an influential book, ‘Le Trésor des pianistes’, (The Treasure of Pianists)

about early music performance style.

A leading contemporary music writer and critic François-Joseph Fétis wrote about her in 1862: “The public, as a rule not a very knowledgeable one, whose only standard for measuring the quality of a work is the name of its author. If the composer is unknown, the audience remains unreceptive, and the publishers, especially in France, close their ears anyway when someone offers them a halfway decent work; they believe in success only for trinkets. Such were the obstacles that Madame Farrenc met along the way and which caused her to despair.”

Undeterred, she continued to compose for most of her life. She died in her home city in 1875.

I have so far explored and love all her three symphonies

and her two overtures. Among her chamber works. Same goes for the chamber works I’ve found so far: two piano quintets, two piano trios, the nonet I told you about earlier and her sonata for cello and piano. But there’s so much more.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, many radio stations gave the spotlight to women composers. Hopefully the time will soon dawn when their works are so pervasive and familiar that they don’t need just a day in the sun.

(An edited version of this article was published on 10 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

A Fort-uitous Getaway

The sudden rescheduling of the school exams and subsequent Diwali vacation due to the 37th National Games, 2023, being hosted by the Government of Goa left many of us wondering how best to spend the break at such short notice.

After much deliberating, we decided to go with extended family to Alibag. I had never been there before and was excited to finally tick that off my bucket list. I usually like to do some reading up in advance, but got so caught up in whatever was happening in our lives then that it got sidelined. The itinerary was being planned by my Mumbai family, so I decided to just go with the flow.

I knew that one of the highlights of the trip would be a visit to Murud-Janjira fort, that I had been wanting to do for the longest time. But that there would be a few more forts on the menu came as a delightful surprise to me.

The fact that these were sea forts along India’s western coast meant that their history was directly or indirectly intertwined with ours. In retrospect I wished I had packed my friend, the esteemed architectural historian Amita Kanekar’s hugely informative pocket book ‘Portuguese Sea Forts Goa, with Chaul, Korlai and Vasai ‘. But hindsight is 20/20.   

We got to Alibag by the Ro-Ro ferry. The only other time I had been on a similar contraption was the Dover-Calais crossing somewhere in the early 2000s.

That afternoon we visited Kolaba fort (35 km south of Mumbai), one of the chief Maratha naval strongholds under first Chhatrapati Shivaji (who strengthened and fortified it in 1662), later his son Sambhaji.       

Kolaba fort finds mention only twice in Ernestine Carreira’s ‘Globalisng Goa (1660-1820): Change and exchange in a former capital of empire.’ In the early 1700s, long after the death of Sambhaji in 1688, Maratha chieftains such as a Angres were “troubling” the Estado in Goa from here.

A 1723 report by viceroy José Sampaio de Castro describes a naval fleet engaged in warfare against the ever-growing maritime strength of the Marathas from their coastal bases in Kolaba and Gheria (north of Goa). Reading between the lines, the Estado powers-that-be grossly underestimated the Maratha threat, to their folly.

Elsewhere in the literature (although the source is not mentioned), one learns that on 17 November 1721, the British, “incensed at (Kanhoji) Angre’s activities”, joined the Portuguese in an expedition against Kolaba. A Portuguese land force of 6000 and three English ships under Commodore Mathews co-operated but the attempt failed. The British blamed the failure on the “cowardice of the Portuguese”.

We crossed over from Alibag beach to Kolaba at low tide, by tonga drawn by two weary horses, who had to plough their way at a trot through the shallow water, kicking up a dirty sandy spray in their wake.

It was interesting to learn from the tonga-driver that the horse trade, over which so much blood was spilled, battles won and lost, and kingdoms and empires rose and fell, still continues to this day. He bought his horses at an animal fair in rural Maharashtra (I forget where) for Rs. 10,000/- each some months ago. At the rate charged per round trip, and several trips a day, he would have recovered that investment quite soon. He assured me the tongas worked on a rota system, so the horses got some days of rest and recuperation.

We had to hurry to take in as much of Kolaba fort as possible before the rising of the tide.  

But from the sweeping views it commanded from its vantage point, it was easy to understand its strategic importance on the coastline between Mumbai and Janjira.

A Soviet tank T-55 relic from the 1965 Indo-Pak war with a detailed description of its vital statistics for some reason greets visitors to Alibag beach.

The beach itself is a cautionary tale for what Goa’s already devastated beaches should avoid degrading even further into: sand-buggy operators vying with each other to take tourists at breakneck speed along the shoreline, flattening any little crabs or other life forms that have the misfortune to be in their path;

piles of horse and camel dung from the poor beasts engaged also in tourist rides.

As we left the area, we could hear loudspeaker exhortations in Marathi, asking listeners to come to watch a film on Nathuram Godse, murderer of the Father of our Nation. It felt surreal, but nobody seemed to bat an eyelid one way or another.  

According to Indian Jewish historian Esther David, Jews (the Bene Israeli Jews) arrived in the region around Alibag over 2000 years ago, escaping persecution from the Roman Empire, when their ship wrecked here. It is believed that a wealthy Bene Israelite named Eli (Elisha/Elizah) lived here and owned many mango and coconut plantations. Hence the natives used to call the place “Eli cha Bagh”(“Eli’s garden”) which got corrupted to “Alibag”.

We wished to visit the Magen Aboth synagogue on Israel Alley nearby, but it had been closed by police order as a pre-emptive security measure in view of the recent events in Israel-Palestine. A couple of Bene Israeli descendants sized us up suspiciously, puzzled at our interest in their place of worship. We had to be content with pictures taken from a ‘safe’ distance.

We stopped at the samadhi

and larger-than-life bronze statue, defiantly brandishing sword and shield, of Maratha naval admiral Kanhoji Angre (1669-1729),

scourge of the British, Portuguese and Dutch fleets in the Arabian Sea. A plaque below the statue states it is “a gift from Indian Navy to the people of Alibag.”   

The highlight of the next day was meant to be Murud-Janjira, but an unexpected stopover en route was for me the fulfilment of a long-cherished dream: destination: Chaul!

Chaul has much broader representation in Carreira’s book, with good reason. The fort city of Chaul was the first Portuguese settlement in the Provincio do Norte. They arrived there in 1505 and established a feitoria (‘factory’) there in 1516.

It is situated downstream on the Kundalika river (therefore called Chaul de Baixo by the Portuguese) of a much more ancient entrepôt (that for the Portuguese was Chaul de Cima, Upper Chaul) that finds mention by Ptolemy and in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea. Kanekar calls it “the richest port of the north Deccan, for it was located midway between Khambat and Malabar, where textiles from the former could be traded for spices of the latter.” 

The Portuguese feitoria soon became a fortified city (São Pedro e São Paolo de  Chaul) that traded with the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and China, fostering an upstream hinterland that produced goods of high commercial value: wooden furniture, cotton fabrics, silks (the raw silk imported from China and woven here), satins and taffetas.  

We approached the present-day fort entrance by a road that ran parallel to the Kundalika river, parked nearby and walked in. After all these years of just reading about this place, without even planning it, I was finally here in Chaul!

More about this and other forts in another column.

(An edited version of this article was published on 03 March 2024 in my weekend column ‘On the Upbeat’ in the Panorama section of the Navhind Times Goa India)

Dispelling reservations about reservations

I was at a dinner party some months ago, when I heard snatches of conversation a few places down the table from me.

The topic was some bureaucratic appointment in a government department. “He can’t even speak English properly! Honestly, it’s high time reservations were scrapped. Everything should be on merit.”

And then the conversation drifted off to something else. I know I should have said something to counter the comment, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t. I can give a list of excuses why I didn’t: I was too tired to get into an argument; I felt it might dampen the mood; and perhaps most crucially, I felt it would not change the person’s viewpoint no matter what I said.

So I’m writing here what I should have said.

 Some decades ago, I too subscribed to the view that “everything should be on merit.” It sounds so egalitarian, so just, so logical, doesn’t it, on the face of it?

The first seeds of doubt to this view were sown in the wake of the massive protests nationwide against the implementation of the Mandal Commission report by the V. P. Singh government in 1990. I was a resident doctor then, and was initially impressed by NDTV coverage of young doctors like me, in white coats, stethoscopes around necks or in pockets braving water-cannons and lathi-charges on the streets. I was aghast by the self-immolations by students in protests, and their deaths in many cases.

But NDTV also covered the other side of the argument. A young Dalit asked, “Why is it OK to have capitation colleges for those who can’t get in on merit? If you have money, you can bypass the merit-based system and nobody questions this.” I had never thought of this before. I knew colleagues studying medicine and engineering in such colleges, and it was just accepted as ‘normal.’

I began to read up in earnest about caste discrimination and injustice a decade later for a whole host of reasons not worth going into here, when I really understood the fallacy of the ‘merit’ argument.

The idea of ‘merit’ presupposes the notion of a level playing field. The oppressed castes and other marginalized sections of society have had to endure systemic barriers to education, employment (except those considered demeaning and other sections were unwilling to do), nutrition, healthcare, housing, land ownership for so many centuries that they have been left far behind.

The caste system, in other words, has been in everything but name, another ‘reservation’ system where its benefits have accrued over centuries if not millennia, to the dominant castes. The inherent endogamy that keeps it alive to this day has conferred a ‘blindness’ to their own privilege and entitlement, and a blissful ignorance of and insulation from the hardships faced by those outside that ‘entitled’ ‘elite’ circle.

There’s an interesting video on YouTube called “Equal opportunity? Different starting lines.”

It has an American setting, of course, but the message is universal: Those born into privilege have a head-start in the “running race” of life. In the video, the youth with the head-start for example were those who didn’t have to worry where their next meal was coming from, didn’t have to help their parents to put food on the table and pay for rent and other living expenses. In the Indian setting, so many more privileges could be added to that list: just having a roof over one’s head, or indeed a stable address to allow one to have an Aadhar card and other essential ‘kaagaz’ (documents) that increasingly, ominously are tied to belonging and citizenship; access to electricity to be able to study at night; adequate living space without being cramped which became so relevant for social distancing during the Covid pandemic; ready access to running water; ease of transport to school or college to name just a few. The privileged among us are blind to these ‘head-starts’ but still talk of ‘merit’.

As for ‘fluency in English’: the privileged among us have had access to education for generations, and if that education was in English (which even in Goa is true for at least two generations or more by now), its byproduct is some degree of fluency in that medium of instruction. To hold a lesser degree of fluency against someone who is a first-generation learner in that family is churlish and unkind. I remember an instance at Dhempe college where one such first-generation graduate was working as a demonstrator in the chemistry lab, and the fact that she mispronounced the word ‘solution’ would draw smirks and snickers in the class. But she knew her stuff and actually that is all that should matter.

Isn’t it rich, how we find it ‘cute’ when visiting European speakers (for instance so many Portuguese academicians at Goa University, Fundação Oriente, Instituto Camões or elsewhere) get their English grammar mixed up or mispronounce words, but we cannot extend the same courtesy to our own first-generation student or graduate brethren, for whom English-speaking is just as challenging? We still collectively suffer from the white-skin worship syndrome.         

Also, as at the dinner party where casual casteism reared its ugly head, those who denounce reservations suffer from selective recall bias. They harp on one or two instances where a beneficiary of a reserved seat in academia or employment was (to them) found wanting. But instances where other reserved candidates were silently efficient, or instances where someone from the ‘general’ category was grossly incompetent, are conveniently ‘forgotten’ or ignored.     

As for the rhetorical question “How long do reservations have to continue? Haven’t they been around long enough to make a difference?”, the answer is: there is still much left to be done. Through bureaucratic sleight-of-hand stemming from casteism, reserved seats go unfilled or, on grounds of being ‘unfilled’ are filled by the general category. As long as societal caste prejudice persists, caste-based reservations should continue.

(An edited version of this article was published on 29 February 2024 in my op-ed in the Herald Goa India)