For Pandit Rajan Mishra, the music was both extraordinary and ordinary

There are so many more conversations I still have to have with him, many more times just to be around him. I will always have a dialogue with him, always in the middle of a music lesson.

I would enter his room in Delhi, the house he shared with his brother, my young guruji, Pandit Sajan Mishra. He would sit quietly in a white kurta pajamas, his money paan comfortably closed box, lost in a cloud of thought. He was the kind of person who didn’t want to fill the air with unnecessary sounds. It would take a moment to recognize you, and when he did it would be the quickest and sharpest gaze, the smallest of smiles often just a Gold? and a glint of the eyes.

You can hear that glow in her song. At the beginning or at the end of a sentence, it takes the form of a curve of the voice, a small flourish of the note. It permeates the irony of the gravest sentences. It is a framework, a clue, a warning. A gesture that he knows that this too is a performance, just another expression of the words he sings: Jag sapne ki maya or Jag Jeevan Thora

He was special in that Banarasi way, to believe that everything is ultimately some kind of game. In his own words, he didn’t see himself as a great singer, but as a ship, and therefore only able to perform. During his lessons he was telling us, his disciples, if you want to sing, you have to turn into water How can you sing about a woman who longs for her lover if you don’t let go and feel like that woman, mind and body? Even if you are a man you must to become this woman.

Listen to the metaphors that came to him, that he gave us while training us. Once, having improvised a sentence, seeing it take shape before his eyes, he stopped and said in amazement: Dekho, hawa me ganth bandh rahe hai (Look, I tie knots in / with / out of the air).

Another time, after delivering an exquisite phrase to us to follow, and having failed us disastrously, another pause, this one fading, then, with a sarcastic laugh, to an invisible audience: You go to the market to buy something, but when you put your hand in your pocket, you see that you don’t even have money! As much as he was a serious and meditative person, he had laughing and light-filled eyes; he would burst into silent laughter, his shoulders trembling.

Another time, in the middle of teaching, recalling a performance as he often did, this time about Pandit Kishan Maharajs accompanying theka: Aha aisa lag raha tha jaise ki khichri me ghi mila rahe hai! (He was playing as if he was stirring ghee in khishri.)

And yes, for him, music was like ghee and khichri, extraordinary and ordinary. Extraordinary for its necessity and its omnipresence, like the breath. A thing of everyday life. A thing of worship. The thing you do everyday that turns you into a wizard and a servant. A mundane thing of practice and routine, which makes the everyday everyday. The hardest thing in the world, which proves life is too short for perfection, which always keeps arrogance at bay. One easy thing, because all it is is a thing of beauty and a reflection of the soul, all you have to do to find that beauty is recognize it and become one with yourself.

But also, something that never belongs to you. He often stopped in the middle of singing, at home or at a performance, as if he had seen something amazing happening, outside of himself, and pronounced, Aha or Kya beats hai. It’s only fitting that he had a musical partner, his brother, both a double and another, almost a twin in the sense of being his second body and second voice on stage, but with a distinct personality. Their voices overlap, echo, play with each other, one filling the silence of the other, making sound and silence together. What’s so amazing about them is how silence is as much a part of their music as the sound. He believed in listening and told us in his lessons: Beech beech me ruka karo, apne ap ko suno, tanpura ko suno (Pause, shut up, listen to yourself, listen to the tanpura).

Rajan and Sajan Mishra in concert in Bhopal, 2015. Photo: Suyash Dwivedi / CC BY-SA 4.0

He had beautiful hands which seemed to conduct both sound and silence, which moved like water as he sang. For me, he had the same aura as his father, my first guru, Pandit Hanuman Mishra, a sorcerer of both the sarangi and the voice. When he held a long word, his hands fell naturally into the gesture inherited from his father, of drawing the bow of the sarangi. He was always aware of himself as not only a practitioner, but as a sort of archival practitioner, a holder of more wisdom, not only musical but also philosophical and practical, which he could never claim to master, than himself. gave the gurus. whose photos he had framed along the walls of his ancestral home in Banaras. These characters were not only name gurus, but also individuals, humorous, angry and stubborn, each with their own stories that they delighted in repeating. And they were also divine, in their abilities, their moods, their many faces. Kya buzurgo ne dekha hai rag ko he said with admiration and appreciation. A raga is something to see, a vision, but also to hold, by the hands, like a beloved in the flesh.

It was the sense of respect and intimacy that he inherited from his father and mother, extended family and Banaras, where he truly felt at home, a sense of grounding and reciprocity that does not not completely from the modern world. The music he made was special to sound, always, like a dialogue, with himself, his partner, his listeners, with the music itself.

Above all, I want to enter once again that courtyard of Banaras, paved and framed by blue windows, where his father was sitting facing the ferns, and where he was sitting, relaxing or resting, waiting for the right time of the evening to get up and go to the music room, to tune the tanpura to Bihag or Kaunsi Kannada, to take you into an ocean of magnificent sound.