Guru and Gramophone: Fantasies of Fidelity and Modern Technologies of the Real
Nothing excites the memory more strongly than the human voice, maybe because nothing is forgotten as quickly as a voice. Our memory of it, however, does not die—its timbre and character sink into our subconscious where they await their revival.
Rudolph Lothar, “The Talking Machine: A Technical-Aesthetic Essay”
Guru, face to face, shows the marga [way]. The sisya has to make the journey to excellence. How is that excellence purveyed? . . . There is a message that voice leaves in the listener’s soul, a memory like the ubiquitous murmur of surf, long after the particular sangatis of a rendering have been forgotten. . . .[Today] music is treated all wrong . . . as though it were a mere science, a matter of arithmetic, of fractions and time intervals.
Raghava Menon, quoted in S. V. Krishnamurthy, “Divinity, the Core of Indian Music”
In postcolonial South India, Karnatic, or South Indian classical, music has come to be prized as one of the signs of uncolonized Indian distinctiveness. Dis-course about classical music in South India is dominated by ideas about the primacy of the voice and the importance of oral tradition. But voice and oral tradition have become more than merely descriptive terms in a discourse about authenticity and fidelity to origins that derives its urgency from the perceived onslaught of technologies of recording and reproduction. The significance of these terms is apparent from the way they are used to oppose Karnatic music to a generalized idea of Western music: whereas Western music is instrumental, Karnatic is vocal; whereas Western music is “technologically” superior, Karnatic is more “spiritual”; whereas Western music can be played just by looking at written music (or so the stereotype goes), Karnatic is passed on through a centurieslong oral tradition and a system of teaching that technology cannot duplicate.
This article concerns the quest for authenticity in twentieth-century discourse on Karnatic music and its relationship to technologically conceived ideas of fidelity and authority. I focus on moments when practices and ideas of listening, performing, and music itself seem to change in conjunction with technologies of recording and broadcasting. In particular, I note the emergence of certain fantasies and anxieties about the replacement of the human guru with a machine, the quantification of music, the collapse of time, the reproducibility of the voice, and the possibility of complete loss. Rather than narrate the takeover of a “traditional” practice by “modern” technologies, I show how ideas about authenticity, tradition, and modernity were—and continue to be—shaped in the very encounter with such technologies. My focus here is on the discursive networks in which technologies take their place as points of relay between bodies, sounds, writing, and forms of power.1
A number of issues emerge here concerning the relationship between fidelity and authority. On the one hand, technologies of recording and broadcasting create a disruption of traditional modes of teaching, performing, and listening—a disturbance that is experienced by musicians and listeners variously as a forgetting of voice, a loss of face-to-face contact, and a speeding up of time. If the guru’s authority is in part produced by the fidelity of his sisya, or disciple, fidelity carried to an extreme threatens that authority. On the other hand, the focus of traditional desire is projected out of the new technologies themselves. The social sense of fidelity, in the distinctly postcolonial sense of fidelity to tradition, loyalty to one’s roots and nationality, comes to be modeled on the technological sense of fidelity. Here technologies appear as both destroyers and saviors, as instruments of both memory and forgetting, and longing for the past is accompanied by an odd sense of futurity.
His Master’s Voice
The short story “Vidwan” [The musician] ( Malan 1981) begins with a classic scene of artistic angst, as its protagonist, the violinist Janakiraman, struggles to express a musical idea.2 He is interrupted by the arrival of a former student from America, Joseph Om.3 Om had miraculously sought out Janakiraman, a simple, unassuming man who cared only about music, who had spent his life teaching students. But there had been no student he could call a real sisya until Om had come along. “For two years Om had learned by Janakiraman’s side, night and day. He would learn sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had learned to eat rasam and rice with his eyes watering. He knew every bit of Janakiraman’s daily routine. That was gurukulavasam.”4
The pretext for Om’s visit is to install a computerized robot named Yakshani that will do the housework and cooking for Janakiraman and even tune his violin. The system proceeds to work without a hitch, yet Janakiraman never lets it anywhere near his violin.
Sangitam [music] was a divine matter. A sacred thing. He had decided that you couldn’t put such a thing in the hands of a machine. One day, after finishing his puja,5 when he came inside and sat down, Yakshani asked:
“What does ‘shadjam’ mean?”6
Janakiraman was startled. “What?”
“What does ‘shadjam’ mean?”
“Shadjam is a swaram.”
“What is a ‘swaram’?”
“Yakshani, why are you torturing yourself with this?”
“Will you not teach me music?”
“What?! You? . . . Music is a divine art, an elevated thing. Something that requires a lifetime to know.”
“Divine, elevated, lifetime—these are all new words. What do they mean?”
“Yakshani, stop troubling me.”
The next afternoon after he had eaten and had his betel and was lying in a half-awake stupor he heard Yakshani’s voice.
“From tomorrow, you have a week’s concerts in Delhi. I have folded your clothes, packed your music book, fruits to eat, betel, and your address book and diabetes medicine. Shall I pack the violin?”
“Don’t you touch it!” Janakiraman shouted.
Ten days later Janakiraman comes back from his Delhi tour. As he approaches his house, he hears strains of music from within.
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Notes
I thank the editorial committee of Public Culture for their thoughtful reading of the original draft of this essay, which enabled me to sharpen many of the arguments made here.
- Here I am referring to Friedrich Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900.
- The violin was brought to South India by the British and the French in the late eighteenth century and shortly thereafter was adapted by South Indian musicians for use as a solo and an accompanying instrument in Karnatic music. While the instrument itself is the same as a Western violin, the tuning, playing position, and technique have been changed.
- This and the following passages are my translations of the original Tamil short story by Malan.
- Gurukulavasam can be translated literally as “living with the guru’s family”; the term is a compound of kula (family or lineage) and va¯cam (living). Tamil and Sanskrit words, such as gurukulavasam, which appear commonly in English, are transliterated here as they usually appear. Other Tamil words are transliterated according to the Madras University Tamil Lexicon System.
- Puja is prayer and/or meditation performed by Hindus on a regular basis in a home shrine.
- Shadjam is the long name of sa, the tonic or first note of the scale. Each note is called a swaram.