Times Quotidian

Voices in Time and Space, The Lost Recordings of Kesarbai Kerkar 

Bombay, 2010.  I was staying in a flat in Versova and taking the train daily to different corners of that endless city. Sometimes it felt like the train was going backward in time. I had read an article online about this man, Suresh Chandvankar, who had amassed over 10,000 records in his flat. An entire history of Indian recorded music. A photo in the article showed his shelves reaching up to the ceiling with shellac 78s, 45s, puzzle-discs, and on into the darkness of time and space. He was also the secretary of the Society for Indian Record Collectors, which sounded almost colonial. Somewhere I got a hold of his phone number and rang him up. He invited me and Paulomi over for tea that afternoon at his place in the Naval Yard area, where he worked as a physicist. As the sun set we sifted through his collection while he told us stories and lore in the most unassuming way. He was loath to boast of anything, sitting in his chair. We listened to some of his rare and precious sides, some over a hundred years old. Indian musical forms and scales are basically rigid and demand years of discipline, but within them is a topless, bottomless potential for improvisation and expression of mood. The penetrating vocal stylings of Abdul Karim Khan, the elegant Hindustani tapestries of Omkarnath Thakur, and the ragas of Nikhil Banerjee—deep as the night, clear as the day—the purifying of the soul in the crucible of musical practice. In the early days of the Indian phonograph, some pandits refused to be recorded because the purity of an endlessly duplicatable song was to be doubted.  Or as Gandhi said of the Vedas, ‘They are divine and unwritten. The letter killeth.’   - Aram Yardumian  ... [Read More]