What a week of khayal and dhrupad, both, actually does

Khayal on the sitar and dhrupad on the surbahar, in the same week and often in the same hour before work, is how I practise, and most Hindustani musicians would find that odd. The usual thing is to choose one tradition and one instrument and stay with them for life, since the choice settles how you are taught, what you drill and what a good session feels like. When people asked why I hadn’t chosen, I used to say that I was too fond of both to drop one, which was true and wasn’t the reason.

The two names need a word of explanation. Khayal is the style most people mean when they say Hindustani classical music today. The word means imagination, it is sung with the tabla, and it is full of movement, glides and shakes and fast runs. Dhrupad is the older and plainer style. It opens with a long, slow, unaccompanied section, and when the drum comes in it is the pakhawaj, a barrel drum with a deep voice, and not the tabla. Both are singing styles at heart, and I play them on two instruments, khayal on the sitar and dhrupad on the surbahar, which is the sitar’s bigger and deeper cousin.

What actually keeps both in the week is that each one leaves me somewhere different, near enough to opposite, and I only saw that clearly in the weeks when one of them dropped out.

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Table of contents

1. The fast kind of stillness
2. The slow kind of stillness
3. Two kinds, and neither is the lesser
4. Why the slow one is the surbahar
5. What the week gets from both

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The fast kind of stillness

Khayal on the sitar does not look calm from across the room. Its ornaments are the meend, a glide from one note to the next made by pulling the string sideways across the fret, the gamak, a shake on a single note, and the taan, a fast run through the notes of the raag, and a taan is practised by playing it again and again, a little faster each time, until it stays clean at speed or comes apart. Early in a session it is nothing more than that, effort and repetition, and I find the edge by running into it.

Then, some way into the repeats, something changes. The voice in my head that comments on everything, corrects the last phrase and plans the next three, goes quiet, and I never tell it to. It stops because there is nothing left over for it. When the fingers are going at that speed and every note has to land, there is no attention to spare, and a running commentary needs spare attention to live on.

That state has been studied, and its marks are the ones I recognise. The doing and the noticing become one thing, the commentary about yourself stops, and time goes strange, so that an hour of taan practice is over before it seems to have started. It only arrives when the thing you are doing is just about as hard as you can manage, which is what running a taan a little faster each time is designed to be. So the stillness in khayal is a stillness in the middle of motion, a mind that has no room to drift, since the hands have taken the whole of it. Coming off an hour of it feels closer to what a hard run does than to anything the word meditation would have covered for me before the instrument showed me otherwise. The sitar side of this practice is on the Bhimpalasi page, in the recording called “Aalap and Jor”.

The slow kind of stillness

Dhrupad on the surbahar sits at the other end, and it is the place I first learnt what stillness is. I practise the aalap more than anything else, the long opening of a raag, which has no beat, no drum and nothing under it except the tanpura, the instrument that does nothing but hold the home note as a drone. On the surbahar a note is slow to open and slower to fade, and the whole practice is staying with it until it has finished. Going to the next note too soon is walking out on the first one.

On some mornings there is nothing an onlooker would count as progress, no phrase added and no technique tightened. Those are often the stillest minutes of my day. They are nearer to sitting still than to making music, with the difference that the instrument lends the sitting a form, so that I am not simply left with my own head. Calm is not something I aim at. It comes from holding a single note well past the point where I want to leave it, until the wanting wears itself out.

The old yoga texts have two words for this that I find exact. Dharana is holding the mind on one place. Dhyana is what it becomes when the holding stops being an effort and turns into one unbroken stream, with nothing else getting in. On the surbahar the place is a note, and the aalap is the long walk from the first word to the second. The surbahar is on the same page, in the recording called “Gat in Chowtal”, which is from a performance.

Two kinds, and neither is the lesser

I once took “meditative” to mean a single texture, slow, hushed and visibly serene, and khayal, fast and showy, was ruled out by definition. I don’t think so any more. Khayal gives me a head too busy to wander, which is the flow state described above. Dhrupad hands me a mind whose only task is to stay where it is, which is nearer to what the word meditation usually means, spacious, slow and conscious of being slow. They are two different kinds of quiet, and neither is a scaled-down copy of the other.

Seven days of khayal alone leave me sharp and slightly wired, technically on song and never coming to rest, the way a week of running with no rest day would. Seven days of dhrupad alone leave the opposite gap, settled and unhurried and without the edge that only comes from being pressed against the limit of the hands. I doubt that either gap is about music at all. Two kinds of quiet have to fall within the same few days, and each needs the other.

Why the slow one is the surbahar

One instrument could not carry both, and the reason is in the instruments themselves. The surbahar is a bass sitar, built about two centuries ago to reach down into the range of the veena. It is tuned well below the sitar, mine to a G sharp where the sitar sits on a D, its playing strings are heavy, up to a millimetre thick, and its frets are wide enough for a single pull of the string to glide most of the way across an octave. A note on it speaks slowly and dies slowly, which is exactly what the aalap needs and exactly what a fast taan cannot use, since a run of quick notes on strings that heavy turns to mud. The sitar is the reverse. It speaks the instant it is touched and wants to move, and keeping it on a single note for a minute is a fight with the instrument.

The tradition had worked this out long before me. The surbahar was built for exactly this, the slow aalap and what follows it played in the dhrupad manner, and the school I learn khayal from is the one that developed it, so the split between a slow instrument and a fast one is not my invention, it is how the two came to be played side by side. So changing instrument is no small matter that comes with changing style. It is what allows each stillness to be the whole of itself instead of a compromise played on a tool made for the other purpose. Both of mine came from the same maker, and they could not be more different to sit behind.

What the week gets from both

I once assumed that the grown-up thing would be to specialise in the end, to choose a lane the way nearly everyone who has taught me chose theirs. I no longer think so, and it isn’t that one lane would take more discipline than I have. A week that holds both stillnesses is a better week than a week that holds one, keener and quieter at once instead of a trade between the two. I doubt I could make that case to anyone who has not lived both, but the week makes it for me, and a week with one of them missing lets me know before I can say what has gone.