Dizzy with Muezzins in Calcutta

The chairs were wooden. The stage was rudimentary. We sat under blurred Calcutta skies. But the sounds were heavenly.

Dizzy Gillespie was throwing his trumpet’s innovations to the self-professed cultural capital of India, Calcutta. Jazz. It may have been music, but for me it was everything – everything that was different from my teenage perception of straitjacket India and our old masters, stodgy rule-ridden backward and aristocratic England. Instead, it was America.

And all this before the real hallelujah moment.

A pause. The next number’s coming soon. The trumpet is at Gillespie’s lips. When suddenly another sound fills the air. It’s the muezzins from Calcutta minarets hailing prayer-time for the city’s Muslims. Clashing sensibilities – how dare our native sounds interrupt this 1st world gift!

But Gillespie, my American hero, is not thrown. Gillespie, he pauses, trumpet to lips, allowing his craven audience a moment to distance it self from coarser instant reactions. We begin to hear the muezzins anew. As mostly non-muslims, the sounds finally take on a haloed tone, framed as they are this evening by a foreign meter and a foreign man. As always in India, if the Western master honors, so do the colonial servants.

The muezzins’ melodies tail off. (Had I never noticed before that muezzins’ called out together, their voices interlacing in what seemed, through my overblown teenage imagination, to be in fact – Jazz?) And as the audience slowly readjusts, my American hero’s innovations take off. Gillespie takes the muezzins’ lead, picking up their melody, then taking it away to somewhere else.

And what an amazing place that was. The ascendance of America for me, was confirmed. Where else, I asked, who else, could produce this strange and wonderful music in this unpredictable manner. Who else could produce this ability to be so fluid with boundaries, driven only by the sense of possibility, and creating something unconscionably new.

[Post script: Of course, today I know that my foreign inability to parse out the different Americas allowed me to lump this uniquely African American musical tradition with it's built-in openness and innovation, with a monolithic perception of America. ]

America as Gillespie & Ali

It dawned on me recently that while I was growing up in Calcutta, a series of introductions to America were all black.

Two key informers of my vision of America, both mediated through my father, were Dizzy Gillespie (and jazz in general) and Muhammad Ali’s autobiography. The former as a live interaction under Calcutta skies, the latter, read off family bookcases, but reinforced and regurgitated as ‘Elocution’ at my school, La Martiniere. More on these soon.

Tomb’s Day

Artist: Atul Dodiya
I saw a show of Dodiya’s in Mumbai many years ago – that show was one that reimagined Gandhi. This piece though reimagines my head and points a laser-focused light right at it’s most discombobulated moments.

Gandhi, Truth & Me

“What I want to achieve – what I have been striving and pining to achieve these thirty years – is self realization … I live and move and have my being in pursuit of this goal. All that I do by way of speaking and writing, and all my ventures in the political field, are directed to this same end. But as I have all along believed that what is possible for one is possible for all, my experiments have not been conducted in the closet, but in the open; and I do not think that this fact detracts from their spiritual value. …

… Far be it from me to claim any degree of perfection for these experiments. I claim for them nothing more than does a scientist, who, though he conducts his experiments with the utmost accuracy, forethought and minuteness, never claims any finality about his conclusions, but keeps an open mind regarding them. I have gone through deep self-introspection, searched myself through and through, and examined and analysed every psychological situation. Yet I am far from claiming any finality or infallibility about my conclusions…”

- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi in the introduction to “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”.

There is a lot that both amazes and disturbs in stories of the Mahatma (“often the title has deeply pained me”). But of every person, time and situation there is something to be taken and to be learned. Gandhi as scientist, and as artist – this is what I take from him.

“I am not a seer or a guru of non-violence. I am an artist of non-violence” *

Gandhi’s science in entirety is not mine. His vision is one of ‘the truth’, the one truth, in his words “the Absolute Truth, the Eternal Principle, that is God”.

I veer away from that philosophy of truth, and indeed of science where one is continually on the path to achieving this singular thing. I see that there is a beauty in this vision, indeed, an inspiration in it – as well as a potent balm for the realities of our conflicted and seemingly patternless lives. So I see and appreciate the role of this version of “Truth” in guiding us down the paths on which we choose to embark and even in the “doing” of science, full of uncertainty and noise as it is.

But moving away from that utilitarian perspective on truth, I think science is about a continual progression of guestimates. How unassuring that sounds! In this view, we do well at any one point – any spatio-temporal moment – to make educated guesses; the more ‘educated’ the more successfully they can contribute to predictions for the state of some future window or for a differently positioned window in time and space.

* (as published in Dodiya’s monograph for his Gandhi show)