Mynta and Mantras: A Meditation on Time and the Absurdity of Our Modern World

Listening to the Indo-Swedish fusion group Mynta after a long time a few days ago, I found myself remembering the great Zakir Hussain concerts we used to see in the Bay Area before the pandemic. How does one acquire such genius? And of course, that humility and reverence too… But of course! A few moments later I remembered that Mynta’s arresting tabla track came not from the Maestro Zakir’s fingers but those of his brother, the Maestro Fazal Qureshi. The first family of tabla.

Then, I thought of their father, from the words of a friend who had first introduced me to Mynta almost 30 years ago. Ustad Allah Rakha, my friend told me, used to play out the rhythms on his children’s backs when they lay on him as toddlers. This beautiful image of a tradition flowing from a father to his son then reminded me of another conversation about parents and children that took place just a few days ago.

After a gap of two years due to the lockdown, I was able to sit down with a priest from our local Bay Area temple to conduct the annual shraaddha ceremonies for my father. After the ceremonies, our priest told me that he is finding life very hard in the United States, economically, and that he worries most of all about the cultural alienation of his small children. He might go back home, though life is hard in his native village in Telangana, too, with their small ancestral temple and cow sanctuary forever under pressure from various sources.

But, he said, his children might acquire something of their elders’ knowledge over there, while in the United States, given work and school, there was virtually no chance for that intergenerational space to flourish. I thought it was a wise and noble move since I have heard often about the dilemmas that many priests have faced. Virtually none of our community’s priests here have children following in their path. This is the case, as many have documented, with traditional archakas in India too, where state-controlled temples and reckless commercialization have led to a devaluing of their role culturally and economically. Priests in some temples are reportedly paid as little as ten dollars a month.

The harsh truth is that while the urban and diasporic elites remain deluded in their image of fictional saffron-clad megalomaniac ‘Hindoo’ priests from Netflix shows like “Sacred Games,” those who lived by the code of that color from their childhoods find a body of knowledge passed on for generations being wiped out, contemptuously at that.

Colonial Differences

Between Mynta and the Mantras, it got me wondering about the absurdity of our modern world, of “coloniality,” as scholars call it these days. Here we have two great Indian traditions; Ustad Allah Rakha and his sons in one, and our priest, and his children, in another. Both traditions are about experiencing the divine. Both traditions are about beauty. Both, to a large extent, involve the oldest medium of communication there is in the world, and that is sound. Yet, only one of these two traditions is seen as art and worth cherishing. The other is overwhelmingly perceived in modern institutions as regressive, wasteful, socially unproductive, dishonest, and most of all, as a technology of reproduction for privilege and oppression. By all means, no one wants to let privilege and oppression run amok. But to dump that burden on ten dollars a month priests, in a world where a handful of billionaires are flying into outer space for fun while the planet burns? Really?

The harsh truth is that while the urban and diasporic elites remain deluded in their image of fictional saffron-clad megalomaniac ‘Hindoo’ priests from Netflix shows like “Sacred Games,” those who lived by the code of that color from their childhoods find a body of knowledge passed on for generations being wiped out, contemptuously at that. When the path of learning between generations is starved of traditional patronage, and actively demonized in modern institutions like the state, education and mass media, it is only the rarest of families that still decide to keep it alive for the future.

The passing on of knowledge from one generation to another, the practice of art, worship, craft, skill, ceremony, by all the ages together… we see it everywhere around us still, and yet, we balk with our warped modern minds when it comes to the dwindling world of the Brahmana who sees no future for this learning to ensure to his own children. Even in the West, to stay in the company of the greats of fusion music, we have seen the beauty of different generations in performance together, or in the process of passing on the torch as it were. I remember the moving dedication made by Pandit Ravi Shankar to the memory of his friend and pupil George Harrison, at a concert where Anoushka Shankar and Dhani Harrison played as well. Mahaan, indeed!

Fusion, in music, words, culture, is after all not only about East and West, about space, but also about generations, about time, is it not?

Endless Living

A few hours after completing my father’s annual ceremony, I received the news that my beloved aunt, one of the oldest and most loved figures in my life since childhood, had passed away in Chennai.

Every day since then, I have received from my cousin on WhatsApp a few carefully shared photos of the ceremonies, of the elders and the grandchildren, and the priests there chanting and guiding them, and most of all, the magnificent and moving sight of the two brothers on the steps after their trip to the middle of the river Ganga at Kashi.

Every day since then has been a reminder that we are not simply what we “identify” as, this body, name, role, label, and latest selfie on social media. But what we really are, should we try to feel it for ourselves, seems more like an endless living, thriving, socially, emotionally, and bio-culturally interconnected column of lives lived long and hard before us.

It is staggering, to stop and think of who came before, and to think of our helplessness before what will come inevitably for us too, and what might be the future for those we have acquired the responsibility of having brought into the world after our time.

Do we live in their memories after our time has run its course?

Or, do we watch over them from other worlds? Who knows these things?

Until one or two generations ago, most people had certainty over their understanding of the bio-cosmos. Now, we live in a quasi-modernized, quasi-secularized, or some might say, a quasi-Christianized world where we don’t have the certitudes of life beyond the material anymore (on this note, everyone should read Tom Holland’s “Dominion”). It’s just “YOLO” now.

But the great dilemmas apart, there is of course the tangible beauty of what we think lasts in this ever-receding, ever-flowing river of lives and some might say, souls. There is the thought that the maestro who elevates us to some divine inner state with his music was gifted that by his father, by the good fortune of his birth or destiny or call it what you will, to be instructed in a body of knowledge literally through his body.

Without the embrace of our worlds by our young, those worlds will vanish. Without the gift of the old worlds by our elders, we will vanish too, in a sense, bereft of an understanding of the bio-aesthetic depths of who we are, empty shells ready to be deployed as mere workers and consumers in an ever more ruthless economy.

Whether we like it or not, it is in time that we live, even as the illusions of our location in space keep us captured, distracted, colonized from the truths of it all.

Nataraja’s Smile

All my life, from childhood until my 20s, I lived in fear of losing my parents. One day, a friend said, as we were listening to the great Ghantasala’s Telugu song “Mukkoti devatalu okkatayinaaru/ Chakkani paapanu ikkada unchaaru (three crore deities became one, and presented the baby now here before us).” That’s how it is, he said. Once the babies come, the elders know it is their time to be content. For the generation in between, that was the great gift, the great solace, that I never quite knew then. We live with the horrors of time by knowing the beauties of it too. In between both, elders and infants, worlds gone and worlds coming still, Nataraja’s smile remains.

Besides those moments of clarity, born in grief, joy, or gratitude, in the mass of days that appear to us as our life in schools, offices, and the daily grind, we forget, mostly, that there is only continuity, only inter-generationality, only eternity. We see ourselves as individuals, separated in space, as well as in time. Our inner lives, our relationships and “work/life” priorities, our moments and attempts at intergenerational education as it were, are all limited, colonized. We carry the burden of having raced away from our elders to a techno-utopic future far from our native depths by making our children do the same, never realizing that this whole story, about past, present, future, progress, “YOLO,” was never our own. We borrow the myths, ideologies, slogans of our times, “development” in our parents’ generation, “justice” now, not even just as a starting point but overwhelmingly, uncritically, as the end. We do not stop our chain of thought, even when whole lives, whole beings suddenly disappear from around us.

But there are times, there are moments that remind us. It happened to me suddenly with Mynta. And Mantras. And my beloved Atthas, and my Nannagaru, and my Athagaru, and so many names that all say only one thing now. My ancestors are not gone. Neither are yours.

(Top illustration, courtesy, tirumalesa.com)

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Vamsee Juluri is a Professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. His latest book is “The Firekeepers of Jwalapuram,” part 2 of a trilogy titled “The Kishkindha Chronicles,” … “because the world was a better place when the monkeys ran the world.”