What is old and what is really new?

Why do we keep listening to 'old' music? That which has been composed years back or centuries ago? How do you explain the angst that some of today's youth and probably some ‘not so young’ also face with respect to the old and the new, now and then, yesterday and today with respect to music? Last week, I had the occasion to think deeper on this subject for a talk I was preparing.

I have been invited time and again to Natraj’s music hearing sessions that take pleasure in playing ‘old’ Hindi songs, singing along, discussing or just merely rejoicing together in the shared happiness that comes out this activity. So, there is a ‘voice of Rafi’, as there is a ‘voice of Mukesh’, in 2017, specializing in singing and playing songs that have been immortalized by these singers. Why do you not sing ‘newer’ songs, I asked, tempted to put myself momentarily in the shoes of some others who put forth such queries, knowing completely what I could expect as an answer. Because, these songs have eternal life, they are beautiful and we identify with them. The ‘new’ songs do not linger much in our hearts and minds, were the ideas that I received. Without berating the ‘new’, it is of interest to rest a while on the notion of old and new and how strangely ‘old’ seems to be the antithesis of ‘new’ for many that I meet. The ‘new’ representing the fresh, the energetic, with longer life and the ‘old’, standing for something that has long finished its time and without much relevance today. Still it is a matter of curiosity that the past continues to inspire in more ways than one. I was watching a young Bharata Natyam dancer’s video link. It was a Jayadeva Ashtapadi. Perhaps we have watched and heard Yahi Madhava a million times and never tire of watching it a million times over again. Where does this timelessness reside? In an enduring quality that has universality, while having its own differences, in a capacity to endear, I would think. What today is old, was once new in its own time and age and moved forward. If Tyagaraja showed the model for the kriti song form in his simple, delightful lyrics he was a trailblazer even then for more than one reason. Moreover, the abiding quality of his music, lies in the music itself that is in self-maintenance.

If Jayadeva is presented as is, there is also the channel of depiction through the mode of reinvention. The representation of Draupadi in myriad ways, reinvented, redefined, reimagined through the prism of today's writer, poet, dancer, is thought provoking. Just this morning I see the announcement of a new theatre production based on an adaptation of the character of Shikhandi and that tells it all. That there was a Shikhandi then, or an Arjuna in the guise of Brihannala, in an age so far removed from us, and that resonates with issues with which we are battling today, makes the epics, the scriptures, the songs, the poems of yore more meaningful in the current context. It is an assertion of modernity in the ancient. Retelling, reinterpreting imaginatively is one dimension. Cherishing it as it is would be the other dimension. Both co-exist as we repeatedly witness and both trends contribute to the constant tilling of the soil, the task of carrying forth. As long as this happens, wanderers like me take joy in sliding in and out of centuries, between past, present and future.

Dr. Vasumathi Badrinathan is an eminent Carnatic vocalist based in Mumbai. vasu@vasumathi.net