Aalaap

[This post is about sacred music that stems from various Indian traditions, specifically some forms of Hinduism. It assumes you already are into this stuff.]

Kaushiki Chakraborty and Sandeep Narayan have a series of recordings from a concert they did together in 2023. Kaushiki, the daughter of Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, and Sandeep Narayan belong to the Hindustani and Carnatic schools of music. I listen to these recordings early in the morning, sometimes on loop. They talk to each other in music. The really high notes, in the Taad Saptak, acquire a presence in my ears that ushers in the divine. They make an extended aalaap in one of the pieces from this concert that goes on for about seven minutes. They laugh and cry in between, and still get back in the beat-logic of the mridangam. An aalaap, the Britannica website says, is an improvisation of a melody structure that reveals the characteristics of the governing raag. I say that an aalaap is a signature of play, where structure is momentarily obscured.

Does he come in this manner? In the playful voices of musicians, in the sun on the snow, in warm textures of bread. Must we go to the hallowed halls of iconicity to sense him?

I have written a few things on raag seva in the temples on this Substack. The Vaishnavas are hell-bent on singing their devotional thoughts. More, I suppose, than the Saivites. But the late Benares maestro Pandit Chhanulal Mishra messes up my clean divisions, singing of Siva’s Holi played with ashes. His rendition of the srirudrashtakam adds a sparseness to the elaborate musical landscape of the Braj traditions. Benaras sings out in play with Vrindavan.

In my early days in the Braj, I used to play on loop this Pandit Jasraj rendition of Govinda Damodar Madhaveti. Its percussive beats (I can’t say what drum this is, my guess is it is a pekhawaj) thrashed right inside my soul. There is no point describing sound. I have concluded after my longdrawn struggle with it. You can only describe what it does in and through you.

And finally, if you listen to Vedic sacred music, you will know that the Ramakrishna Mission monks are often the best singers. My Bangalore home has the good fortune of some of this live singing wafting in at 4.30am, as the monks’ residence is right next door. The low notes in which this hymn is sung in prayer to the Holy Mother has the effect of hypnosis. The Sanskrit words elude me; the hymn leaves behind a sense of pleasant tiredness.

The Vaishnava purchase on music is indubitable. But my search for salvation in music is beginning to teach me that the more sparse, reticent traditions have their musicality too. On the Vedantin side of things, the hymn Nirvanashtakam (from Sankara) is sung by many on the internet. This is the version I recommend, traversing in lower notes, and generating a distinctly hypnotic environment.

The words express the core of the idea of a nameless, timeless, formless, impersonal divine, that shapes Vedanta theology. It becomes my own form of aalaap.

[My attempt at singing the first stanza of the Nirvanashtakam, sung and recorded in Vrindavan (August 2025).]