Essay " The Vilayat Option"
"The Vilayat Option"
A belated obituary (to the tune of four years).
By Al Gromer Khan (c)
In the most destructive of all centuries, the twentieth, Vilayat Khan the Indian sitar player appeared on stage and made western culture an offer.
The white race, traditionally leaning towards illusions of grandeur, dreamt up colonialism. It is generally assumed that colonialism simply stems from power, was simply about exploitation, about that inner unrest which spurns industrial growth and ´progress´, leading us to ever new technical inventions. Does this analysis stand up to careful examination? It doesn´t. It appears that older cultures without apparent clearly defined contoures or conformist forms of behaviour cause irritation in younger, less ripe ones. An element of irritation of this type made Hitler go after older souls with such a vengeance, they irritated him to a point of wanting to do away with Jews, Gypsies, gays, Bohemians altogether and for good. He was the ten year old boy in his ´safe´ universe of games, sports, technology and Autobahn - enemy at the gates, puberty imminent, threatening: the fourteen year old brother who has found neighbour´s daughter to be a paradisical being.
The years I spent in India during the Nineteen-Seventies have given me insights unavailable inside western institutions. And when I returned to Germany twenty-five years ago, it seemed appropriate to live a simple life in the West and convey some of the things that I had learned. This was not about Indian culture but about emotional states that didn´t exist here, in a land that put facts before feeling and becomes imprisoned by it in the process.
Visitors had to bear with me when I went on - and on - about Vilayat Khan. Not about newly learned musical material of the sitar, rather legends and stories about the man. I put forth these tales with unbroken enthusiasm, before, during and after music lessons. And before that Flower Power in London. How incredibly lucky for me to have been at the scene, man. (My Dad, at a similar age, was forced to drive an ambulance at the Russion front, carrying twenty-year old Germans who´s limbs and genitals had been shot off and who screamed that they didn´t want to die. This for the benefit of those who see in me their favourite victim of the London dinner party.) Well, what did your dad do in the war then?
Where were we? Yes, Vilayat Khan. Flower Power. Kings Road. Primrose Hill. Lexham Gardens, John Peel usually played him when midnight came, pronouncing the name wrongly. And here´s Viliat Khan! Flower children went to his concerts at the Royal Festival Hall. None knew what exactly these brown men in the colourful shirts and their exotic instruments were doing up there on stage, but it was always an excellent trip, splendid, superiour, first-rate, a joyous occasion, it never let you down. This was around the time when Vilayat Khan got disenchanted with the Bombay party scene. He took his crocodile-leather instrument case, his collection of chrystal chandeliers and moved - retreated - to Dehra Dun at the Himalayan foothills. Who starts looks for a simple life? Who gets easily bored with the party scene? One who knows something better.
"If you can play sitar you can do anything!"(Even in those days I already had immediate access to his soul) Later he made statements to the contrary: "If you play this kind of sitar, you´ll be rendered unfit for anything else!" Such opposing directions eliminated duality for me once and for all. Vilayat Khan´s music showed me areas of the psyche that simply did not exist in my own culture - Mid-Europe lacks the fertile soil for it. Allright, the hippie sitar came and went, as fashions do, and around 1980 it was like old Sunday papers. But Vilayat Khan, the emperor - melodic nuance constituating empire and state - remained untouched by this change of Zeitgeist. Only much later did I come to know what an unspectacular life he actually led: a simply curry, life in the country, a card game with the old men of the village, singing joyful songs with the servants´ children after sunset.
On my first night in India, Bombay, December 1971, war broke out with Pakistan and I fled. First to Goa then on to Pondicherry where I learned from Shri Aurobindo that God was subtle. Exactly - God and Vilayat Khan! In blackened and curfewed Bombay - it was murmured that Pakistani war planes were going to attack - Khan-Sahib delivered a raga Puryia Kalyan that would become the guiding line for my future life. This was on 19. December 1971 - on the tabla: Pandit Shanta Prasad. I left the concert, got beaten up by Indian youngster who for some reason hated hippies, which they thought I was one. I drank bad water, slept on floors, got hepatitis and some weird tropical fever, met a guru who was supposed to be God incarnate, but who turned out to be the head of the guru-business.
I stuck forty years with this strange exotic instrument and hammered out approximately forty-thousand hours of practice on it. Vilayat wasn´t your run of the mill Indian music virtuoso. And even though he stayed strictly within the boundaries of classical Indian music, his playing reached those parts other sitar players didn´t, reached strangely beyond the limits of religion, race or culture. He was the greatest music fan I knew in my entire life. As a young jazz guitarist I couldn´t have submitted to his influence so easily otherwise. Vilayat represented - till represents - the ancient mystical principle: you submit to an ideal and grow spiritually. Most difficult task on earth. Most importantly, it takes you to a level of operation where academic institutions have no access to. This new status ment less power and influence in society, not more.
It is the underlying motivation that counts. What is that about? In the case of Vilayat Khan it was beauty. Khan-Sahib was obsessed by it. He looked for it - and found it - in any situation, any context, any tradition. He put beauty above all else. In film song, in jazz, a simple pop melody, in banalities - he was constantly on the watch out for the aesthetically sublime, forever able to create something of exquisite feeling and grace from it. This was no superficial kind of beauty or a simple personal preference in taste and style - it was the thing you find and live through in visions. The sweetness in children, in animals, in nature. He became helpless, could be moved to tears, in front of Venetian - , of iridescent Bohemian glass, a subtle seductive scent, an ancient antique, Mughal miniatures and rugs, even something apparently ordinary as perfectly styled sunglasses, stuff that short-circuited you with other realms, other times, deja-vus, reminiscences. This helplessness was strenght, not weakness. Even his occasionally popping up vanity had charm. At this point one begins to realize: it is by submission that a person becomes part of a larger plan. In the case of Raga Jhinjhoti Vilayat Khan illustrated it thus: a small child, helpless in front of God. In this discipline where you don´t count the number of hours you practice but the number of hours that you don´t practice, fierce competition has always been prevalent. In his early years Vilayat was not free from competitive thinking. One aspires to be the best. However and unlike many of his sitar playing contemporaries and most of his followers, he was always ready to appreciate and honour originality or exceptional artistic quality in others. Wafting sound fragments from the distance put him in alert mode, triggered trains of thought and feeling, an unheard-of beauty - bhava.
"Let us see, what is more powerful, your pen or my plectrum!" A Journalist´s audacity to have pointed out a weakness in Khan-Sahib´s playing. Vilayat had detected the hack, the unlucky fellow, in the audience. In another performance he slipped into a profound trance- state and showed, childlike, twenty-four combinations of four swaras in a systematic way. This was in raga Bilaval. Now, to the connaisseur, one familiar with Indian music, this situation represents a rare opportunity to enter into an ecstatic rapture. Not so to another member of the writing profession: "Khan-Sahib, are you performing or practicing?" Maestro had little choice. Took his instrument, had the curtains shut, retreated. Only continous applaus made him come back. He played Raga Malkauns for another two hours. Buttery alapas tenderly incised openings in listener´s layers of muck covering their souls, made them change the level of sense-perception, made the world shine in a new light, laid bare philistine thinking and second-rate feeling, apparently by simply gently piercing the right nerve. Accupuncture with sitar music... The public wanted more.
Intuition, sensitivity, experience, an sense of the poetic - are there other criteria for art? Creativity - well, I try to avoid the term, it´s been misused. "What is it in your music, Khan-Sahib, that moves people to tears, puts them in a trance?" He answered me with one enigmatic sentence: "It is the time I take to move from one note to the next." Actually, I wasn´t any wiser after that. But the great Vilayat Khan had spoken. He had given me an original answer and he had put the question ad absurdum with his presence. How do you judge mystics? Or musicians?
There is a way. Are they good cooks? There is the timing, the loving care, the sweet concentration one proceeds with - the respect for the food. Vilayat and Cat Stevens, both close to me in my early years, both a great influence both excellent cooks. The five-star chef thinks of dinner long before anyone´s hungry, while other people still think of other things, he is capable of creating something delicious out of random findings, observes with a relaxed alertness, doesn´t serve too hot, allows the food to settle and thus develope taste and resonance. Vilayat: "After some time I listen with interest to my own playing, amazed at what I´m hearing." (Laughs) And when I came to him with certain problems of my own music he blessed me and called me his own.
Ravi Shankar - his opponent - , it has been said, attained stardom in the West on account of his surviver´s instinct to adjust. Like all career-oriented persons Shankar soon learned to fulfil the customers´ expectations, cunningly cultivating those acpects of Indian music that were more easily understood by the white man: virtuosity for its own sake, question and answer games for sitar and tabla-drum, and worst, adjustment to the emotive frequency of the restless westerner, while slyly abandoning the contemplative, the lyrical aspects of raga. The outer form was still the same, but the energy was wrong. This could still be called Indian music but when no one was looking lyricism had been replaced by look-what-I-can-do displays of instrumentalism. From when I first started getting interested in sitar music I felt pushed and shoved by Ravi Shankar´s and Imrat Khan´s tour de force ways of trying to impress. As a teenager when playing jazz on the guitar I used to go for T-Bone Walker, never for John Mc Laughlin. Technique and technology breed arrogance.
Vilayat´s concert were different. Whenever he seemed to be doing nothing special onstage, apparently just playing around with notes somehow, and just when I thought, well, haven´t we seen and heard all this before, something happened. Tears started coming to my eyes and I was transported to a state that contained the reason why I had come to love music in the first place and why I had begun to play music myself. You left his concerts refreshed and cheerful. Trying to find out how exactly Vilayat did this and what exactly happened to me on those occasions took up most of my adult life. Vilayat Khan had the technique, breathtaking technique. (His Dad had forced him to do the four-candles-practice.) Khan-Sahib also admired Technik. However, in the case of his person - and his music - technique submitted, bowed down, to poetry. Vilayat loved his motor cars, but at the same time he unmasked technocrats and philistines, those imprisoned in their small minded egoism. And even though his music goes back to a culture of ‘Khans´ who favoured masculine games on horseback, getting the male adrenalin going and founding empires on it, he refused to define his personality via tradition, religion (´Music is my religion´) or his motor car. I read that he later found fast driving ridiculous, childish, aggrivating. German cars for him were pieces of art, good examples for the kind of perfection he sought in his music. He admired Germany and shed tears when found Clara Schumann´s picture on a twenty Deutschmark note. "See in what in high esteem German culture holds its musicians!" I thought, dead musicians.The misunderstanding couldn´t have been greater.
Vilayat Khan taught me the most important lesson of my life: by changing one´s frequency of thinking you change your sense-perception. This is easily said and sounds like some academic bilge. But through the Vilayat-specific Alaap-anga access to exquisite aereas of thought became possible. On the outside the subject may lean towards eccentricity, contradiction and absurdity. If, on the other hand, things begin to rotate at an ever quicker speed, it will also create a kind of ´exciting´ music, a kind of madness, a pathological, destructive kind, not an inspiring one. Which, by the way, may just be what is happening on this planet right now. The decisions Vilayat Khan made during his Alaap work and the polyrhythmic development of the Jor brought about this said ritardando in one´s thought and feeling. The resulting emotion appeared as the Eternal Female, the Muse, enticed by Khan-Sahib´s relentless disciplin. Yang contains attraction for yin. If you have access to Vilayat´s Alaap work your emotionality will increase hundredfold. This is what a trance-state is: a flooding with emotion - the soul. Since ´The Enlightenment´ the concepts of soul and emotion has been viewed with suspicion in the West, have hardly been able creep in, hardly for short moments at all, at unexpected corners of art and literature. Industrialisation, technology, the electronic media have further obscured the soul. Consequently the protagonists of the rational mind have led mankind in a century of senseless technical innovation and extroversion, unbelievable and unmeasurable destruction of nature and everything else vulnerable and tender. What has this to do with Vilayat Khan the sitar player? Said materialistic insanity consists of a type of compensation that stems from lack of access to the soul. Humans strive for happiness, but why should so much hardware be needed for the task? I propose a little experiment in nature: If you sit quietly at a forest clearing, a point of unrest will appear after twenty minutes, if you force yourself to overcome the hurdle, certain things will become perceptable - wild animals will be attracted, details will be visible, stillness comes. If you don´t, the urge to saw down a tree, shoot something or dig a hole will come. Overcoming this `point of unrest´ was Vilayat Khan´s forte, his masterpiece, his lifetime´s achievement - irresistible, incorruptable. His performances demonstrated it with great elegance. Energy accumulated steadily, time passed swiftly. Energy through repetition. Good spirits were attracted. Even fast passages were anchored in stillness. You don´t find fulfilment by changing circumstance. Boredom sets in and we want more and more, and different things; arrogance takes over. With hanging tongue, with clenched teeth we strive to assert ourselves in imaginary competitions, or else we try to add more pleasure to the universe we are in: demonstrations of power, bathing in Champagne, Kokain, gang-bang, winner-status´. What was it the Mahatma said? ´Western civilisation? It would have been a nice idea.´ It would have been a good idea to look out for someone who is capable of producing maximum pleasure with minimum hardware - and trust them. Ustad Vilayat Khan´ hardware was his sitar, it had become part of his body: Khan-Sahib could have been a teacher for the Occident - was for me. I told an acquaintance, a German psychologist, that I had kissed Vilayat Khan´s feet. The psychologist shook his head in anger and indignation.
Ethno-musicologists did not help me in taking on the challenge to base my life on playing an exotic instrument. Some of my colleagues thought they´d just about seen enough of Westerners trying to pretend to be Indian! (re-laid by Peter Pannke) That was at the Parampara Festival 1992 in Berlin. The press wasn´t helpful either, nor the business people. Indian Restaurant owners in Germany used my vulnerable position to revenge ancient colonial humiliation. Cat Stevens - now Yusuf - a good friend from the hippie days of 1969, found world fame through his music. Everybody´s helping me. With my music I became everybody´s adversary. I tried to take it with equanimity and humour, just as I prosumed Yusuf would try not to become arrogant through his spectacular fame. Left-wingers found my life-style decidedly feudalist-reactionary, while right-wingers... Housewifes booked into my music seminars, eyed me with suspicion, left at the interval. Oh, I see, you are not actually Indian!. The catholic church felt threatened by the slow and erotic tendrils of sound in Khan-Sahib´s style: Abbot Odilo of Munich: We have been instructed from above not to have your music in our church hall anymore. From above? From how far above? Once or twice modern composers - the Stockhausens, the Doctor Mengeles of music - wanted to use ´zee long naked lute´ as long as the wave of exotisism lasted. Ven I gif ze sign you vill start viz your wailing. Institutions invited me and uninvited me after they learned that I was not a real Indian. They had not even heard my music. The had never heard of Vilayat Khan. At the same time the ´real Indians´ worked at Munich breweries, drove garbage disposal trucks; in their childhood they´d learned a little music. Their sound was rough, their song was uncouth from too much beer. And yet they filled the archives of Munich Radio with ‘Spring Songs´and ´Harvest Songs´. Ethnologists, esoterics, right-wingers, left-wingers, hippies, parents, psychologists, psychopaths, theologists, technologists, colleagues, bureaucrats, composers - I had them all against me...I had submitted to the Vilayat Khan principle.
But I had the music. When I start playing, something happens to me, every time, never fails, every time unexpectedly different and in astonishing contrast to everything else that is going on. The time I take to go from one note to the next. It leads to a magical manipulation of my system, a drastic change in mood. The more refined my own playing became, the more adversaries appeared on-stage - outside, within. The more genuine, the more valid my sitar work became, the more pessimistic I would become. But why complain, my music feeds me, nourishes me since forty years. And Vilayat Khan´s star shines brightly - the cheekyness of his taans, his precious alaaps elevate me from seemingly bottomless pits.
In the most destructive of all centuries, the twentieth, Vilayat Khan the Indian sitar player appeared on stage and made the western civilisation an offer. It would have been a suitable task for Western Civilisation to research and contemplate his universe, to compare it with other, known types of pleasure. To study what kind of fulfilment a person´s goals and aspirations are able to deliver and how humanity could be served from the proceeds of this learning. An interesting field of research for philosophers and psychologists - they usually want statistics confirmed, large concepts forced into small minds.
Without meaning to - en passant, lightly, pleasently, with poetry - Vilayat Khan has achieved this: to lay bare the nerve and the limitations of arrogance. You just needed to watch him hold a tea cup. The effect came with the person. He confessed something to me: "I have a hard life." I was surprised since he lived in almost paradisical circumstances at the Himalayan foothills, well off, famous, concerts all over the globe, wonderful children, a whole generation of admiring youngsters trying to copy his style, a house with fruit trees, a rosegarden. Yet he had become a beautiful loser. How could this be? Well, this is how mystics fail. Success is left to younger souls. He felt that something had gone wrong in the world, humanity, life, continously manipulated by humans, had gone out of control at the rudder. And artistic nobility, the protagonists of the soul had withdrawn from a perverted clime of ambition, like butterflies in winter. No one was interested in the sublime anymore. You could be a superstar if you confirmed the expectations of the masses. Vilayat preferred small gatherings.
´The others´ had stolen away the land when no one was looking. Sha Rukh Khan has replaced Vilayat Khan. Eros had become pornography and music noise. Vilayat moved from America back to India. The people were friendly in California but no one seemed truly interested in music. The Vilayat Option had not been accepted. The west, too deeply programmed to materialism, has exported its paranoid attitude to their former colonies - another, a late victory. These laughable modes of behaviour are now practised there to excess: student and guru have become rivals in a merciless competitive struggle. The disaster is inevitable.