[Reader-list] Learning to Close My Eyes: Aman shares his journey with Kabir

[anuradha mukherjee]

Thanks Chintan for a lovely piece once again.I have heard Shabnam Virmani
sing on the Internet. Is her documentary available in stores?
Best
Anuradha
On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 11:47 AM, Chintan Girish Modi <
chintan.backups at gmail.com> wrote:

> From
>
> http://sunosadho.blogspot.com/2011/02/learning-to-close-my-eyes-amandeep.html
>
> *Learning to Close My Eyes*
>
> By Amandeep Sandhu
>
> My journey towards understanding the fires that had until then driven me
> into clinical depression started when Nilanjana sent me two music files by
> a
> singer named Prahlad Tipanya who sings Kabir.
>
> It was the summer of 2007. My mother lay dying in a small town called Mandi
> Dabhwali in the Malwa region of southern Punjab. Prahladji is also from a
> region called Malwa but his Malwa is in Madhya Pradesh. His language was
> alien to our ears and my laptop computer had no external speakers. Still,
> from time to time, mother asked me to play the songs to her. In spite of
> the
> two Malwas, in spite our different languages, in spite of the two thousand
> kilometres that separated us, his message of submission and humility
> permeated into our ears. While cancer spread in my mother’s body a fire
> raged in our Malwa. Mandi Dabhwali was at the centre of a violent battle
> between the Sikhs and the head of a sect called *Sachha Sauda*. The Sikhs
> were angry because the head of the sect, Gurmit Ram Rahim, had appropriated
> icons from Sikhism and had attracted a certain caste of Sikhs to his fold.
> The reasons for the fight are complex but the gist is that Sikhism, which
> was conceived as casteless by Kabir and contemporaries Guru Nanak and other
> Sikh Gurus, had actually discriminated against its own lower castes who had
> in turn sought salvation in other sects which were more inviting. As a
> result the Gurdwaras were missing out on donations. My mother’s death was
> simpler. She was a life-long Schizophrenic, who had developed severe
> cardio-myopathy, and was now in breast cancer Stage IV. The secondary’s
> spread to the rest of her body. She died. Punjab burnt as vote bank
> politics
> and monetary gains stroked the fires.
>
> I came back to Bangalore and Nilanjana told me she goes singing Kabir with
> someone called Shabnam Virmani who, every morning, opens her home to anyone
> interested in singing or listening. In February 2008, Nilanjana told me
> Shabnam is singing at the annual cultural festival on the outskirts of
> Bangalore -- *Fireflies.* I went to listen. For years I had been listening
> to a Kabir cassette by Madhup Mudgal but again the language was slightly
> alien to me. A friend’s mother had told me there was someone called Kumar
> Gandharv who used to sing brilliantly. I had never heard him.
>
> At *Fireflies* I could understand Kabir. Shabnam’s translations in a mix of
> simple English and Hindi and her singing made the songs so easy to
> comprehend. After the concert I told her that couplets from Kabir open my
> first book of fiction and thanked her for giving me an opportunity to
> listen
> to Kabir live. She looked at me kindly and asked indulgently: ‘Have you
> never heard him live before?’ I said no but in that question of hers I knew
> that I had failed to access the 500-year old poet who I had only
> encountered
> in school text books, on thin shabby pages. He had survived the oral and
> written traditions and has existed alive and available to us. Now the
> question was what route should I take to access him?
>
> I heard Shabnam thrice before her festival in Bangalore in 2009. But it is
> at that festival when she sang *Munn mast huaa re phir kyaa bole* ... that
> I
> closed my eyes. Now I tend to close my eyes every time I listen to music.
> It
> does hamper my work or even life at home. But it happens and I lose myself.
> Then I saw the documentaries Shabnam had made through her *Kabir
> Project*and picked up Kumar Gandharv’s
> *Avdhoot.* Since then, in the last two years, every morning I have listened
> to any one of the Kabir singers collected in Shabnam’s *Project* or to
> Kumar
> Gandharv and I just recently discovered MS Subbalaxmi. I do not have any
> knowledge of the terms of music. It helps me that Shabnam claims even she
> had never sang before she got onto the *Kabir Project*. I, in fact, know
> nothing about what has invaded me so beautifully for the last two years
> that
> now I have found newer loves – classical music.
>
> Yet, through all the music and the films I learnt something that comes up
> fairly early in *Had-Unhad* when Prahladji asks a young man who hates
> idolatry and leans towards the formless to explain if his own body is not a
> form and towards the end of *Koi Sunta Hai* when singer Dhulichand, a
> rustic
> villager, flips his hand and says that what we are all looking for, the
> ‘word’ that denotes it, can only be found if one turns one’s focus to the
> inside rather than looking for it outside.
>
> This was my conflict. Until then I had looked at events and phenomena
> through the labels I had learnt. When they clashed with each other I felt
> the fires burning me. I learnt that not knowing that these are mere labels
> makes the fires blaze and knowing that these are ‘mere’ labels gives you a
> sense of being able to harness the fires, channelise the self. In my case,
> finish my second book, which again opens with a couplet by Kabir.
>
> My journey led me to Kumarji’s home in Dewas in 2010. I had learnt of
> the *Kabir
> Mahaotsav* in Lunyakhedi, Prahladji’s village near Ujjain. Nilanjana had
> once said that thousands gather for the festival. I wanted to be there and
> I
> had wanted to see Ujjain. I was experiencing the ease of the state without
> external labels *(Nirgun*) but I was still interested in *Matsyandar
> Nath*and the
> *Mahakaal* temple (*Sagun).* The temptation to see Kumarji’s home where he
> had lain for many years, stricken by Tuberculosis, and listened to beggars
> sing Kabir and wanting to see the *Sheel Nath Dhooni* where Kumarji had
> seen
> written on a mirror *Ud jayega hans akela*... pulled me to the festival.
>
> The festival was a miracle of sorts. Lunyakedi did not have metalled roads
> yet people from nearby villages and far off cities had gathered and with
> them had gathered the modern power paraphernalia: IAS and IPS officers, and
> politicians and Kabir Panthis. This was realpolitik. Through all this,
> cutting through symbolism and iconography, one singer after another touched
> our hearts. This was *Sat Sang*, the concept that is a recurrent motif in
> all of Kabir’s and Shabnam’s work, as Shafi Mohammad Faqir, from (now)
> Pakistan says: *mil baithna, saat suron ka sangam*.
>
> After the night long singing I went to Kumarji’s house and was admitted to
> the room where he lay ill and where he regained his voice and sang so
> wondrously. Coming out of the room I spotted a tobacco box and asked how it
> had reached the pious room. Kumarji’s grandson replied: ‘Kumarji kept
> chewing until the end.’ So this was how the great singer who dealt with TB
> and kept feeding himself the poison that caused the mighty illness and who
> was once a patient and then a healthy body found and sang the essences. He
> once said: ‘*jo sunta hoon, who gaata hoon*.’ He did it by seeing what each
> state was and then by going beyond them.
>
> That evening, behind a tent, in the light of one yellow bulb at Lunyakhedi,
> I told Shabnam, ‘Seven times I have heard you sing a song about a forest on
> fire in which a bird keeps going back to sprinkle water on a burning tree
> that has earlier housed her. Each time I listen to it, it reconfigures my
> associations. The characters in the song: the tree, the bird, the fire, the
> lake take on ever shifting personas in my personal life. Sometimes I feel I
> am the bird, sometimes I am the tree, at other times I am the fire and I
> look for the lake.’
>
> If I am rooted in the tree I find myself burning and if I fly like the bird
> I feel self-righteous. Both of them are ego states. Beyond the forest and
> the lake lies the experience of the story. That experience is beyond words.
> It can be found, as the singer-villager said, when you turn the knowledge
> of
> the story inwards. I now recognise that my own experience is ever changing,
> ever informing. This knowledge liberates me from the explicit need to label
> it. What right do I have on an emotion I feel in a moment which the next
> moment will alter? My journey with Kabir has been one of recognising the
> value of the markers of my identity, questioning them, and then stripping
> down these markers and finding myself shorn of them. I try to walk this
> path
> with my mind aware and my eyes closed, in faith.
>
>
> ---
>
> Amandeep Sandhu has no permanent address. These days he is a neighbour of
> Amir Khusro in New Delhi where he feeds birds on his terrace. He is the
> author of *Sepia Leaves* (Rupa, 2008) and a to-be-published novel *Roll of
> Honour. *
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