The Music of Hindostan c5.21

c5.21

There is, it is said, no statement which will apply to the whole of India except the geographical one that it is east of Suez. But three statements can be made about it which no one will be disposed to deny—that it is old and large and hot. India has had time to forget more melody than Europe has had time to learn. The elements of tone and rhythm have been combined and recombined, and have left the theory a tangled mass of forgotten systems and the practice an ineradicable instinct. The veneration for the past because of its remoteness, the mental attitude which looks away from the categories of time and space and turns its attention upon the essence of the thing itself, the faith which links the present closely with the time when the gods walked the earth and still points to the visible imprints of their feet—all these have united to personify every element of their music, and piously to preserve names and attributes which have long lost their meaning; so that much of the theory is clear only to those who can read myth. Nor on the practical side has extemporization, as it is there understood, been learned in a day, nor even in the lifetime of any individual; it is, just as much as their fluent public speaking, an inherited instinct of the race. This is, of course, bound up with another peculiarity, the disinclination to spoil a good memory by reliance on the written word or note. The writer heard two girl violinists at Tanjore play by heart in unison for five minutes, and they never once betrayed by a wrong note or by false intonation the fact that they were two and not one. But it is age-long practice rather than memory which has placed at the command of the best singers that inexhaustible wealth of variation with which they make a melody their own, that gift of improvisation which takes on an epic quality, as all crafts do that are handed down from father to son. To walk on the Old Trunk Road is, it has been said, to step into a chapter of Genesis; and in the same way we catch, in these immemorial cadences, the very spirit of the rhapsodists of Homer. Their music is old, but with an age like the eternal youth of Greece, not with a second childhood like the stereotyped formulas of the Troubadours.