Sruti: A state of harmony

All musicians are introduced to sruti — the fundamental concept in music. Music learners are indoctrinated into the oft-repeated maxim ‘sruti mata laya pita’, highlighting at one go the importance of filial values and importantly the inalienable nature of sruti and laya.

My first sruti box was a quaint brown box with bellows. It had a curious clip that gently slid over the entire contraption and sealed it. When you pressed the box, the three-bellow section opened up. Within was a lining of a soft blue layer of cardboard, the colour of the sea. When the bellows opened and the blue expanded itself I would feel like the billowing waves of the sea. To this visual treat would attach itself the pristine sound that would emerge from the box. I was taught to respect this three-tone sound of sa pa sa that converged beautifully into that spectacular sruti. I was taught to adhere to the sruti, to respect it, to embrace it. Be one with it, just clasp it to your bosom, my mother would exhort me. This beautiful box, now long out service, still enjoys its place in my collection.

The love for sruti also came to me naturally. Our home for years adjoined the railway tracks. Trains were my constant companions and one of my favourite childhood exercises was to match the sruti of the trains. Each variety of train, its speed and the track it ran on gave it its unique sound. The raucous hoot of the fast train with its cascading sound as it grew near, the cross-sound between a goods train and a local train were such a pleasure to listen to! The shunting trains were my favourite with their slow deep rolling vibrations. I enjoyed equating my voice with the various srutis that I heard. At a given point my sruti would get completely fused with the pitch of the train and this gave me enormous satisfaction.

Any compromise with sruti seemed and seems blasphemous to my ears. At my yoga sessions we practice the famed Om chant. The incantation is preceded by the sound of an electronic sruti. When the chant begins collectively, my turmoil begins. More often than not, it is in perfect non-alignment with the sruti.  I can hardly chant an Om in this state of sruti disequilibrium. But not many seem to be in distress because they are unaware of this profound derailment. No one seemed to think about the existence of the sruti that played in the background. It exists because it leads and you are to follow it. But this is disrespected more out of ignorance than out of disdain.

My rapport with sruti is largely personal. In my intimate space sruti is a precious idea. I need to be in unison to maintain my musical serenity, I expect it in every music I hear; if not, my system rejects it. I am convinced that not just music lessons but also the fundamental cornerstone that is sruti, must be introduced at an early age in life. Sruti ensconces a state of harmony. It is being in synergy, accepting the ecology around oneself. At the forest last weekend I experienced this oneness as each time. Nothing seemed out of place in this space, no sound was beyond the gamut of the spectrum. All srutis in nature are perfectly aligned. It is a metaphor for being in accordance, for consonance. It is an innate capacity but can be developed too. If all srutis were aligned, there would be lesser space for discord or even if such was the case, it could be an example of cooperative conflict as Amartya Sen propounded. As we walk into 2017, I wish for a state of well-aligned Sruti — of each of us being in communion with the other and with the life-sustaining forces around us all the time.

Dr Vasumathi Badrinathan is an eminent Carnatic vocalist based in Mumbai. She can be contacted on vasu@vasumathi.net