defending the musical sanctuary

…This instant anger was rooted in two things.  One was his intense devotion to music. Anything that lowered it from the high pedestal to which he had raised it, would arouse the savage in him. He would resurrect the forgotten passions of his tantric ancestor, hemmed in by cannibals and savages.  In those distant days Deb Sharma must have jealously guarded his shrine as would a trapped tigress her cubs.  Something of that erupted in Baba if anything intruded the musical sanctuary in his heart.   

Once, in Lucknow,  Baba asked Ravi Shankar to play on sitar in the presence of veteran musicians of the day. Some haughty Ustad objected saying: “It has been a baz [style] of sarod, how can you make him play it on his sitar?” referring to the then unwritten convention that the special type of music for sarod could not be played on sitar, or vice versa.  It was regarded almost like serving western dishes on a plantain leaf. 

Baba all his life had worn himself thin to pull down these artificial barriers. He had derived the essence of each baz, each pattern, and blended them into a musical rainbow.  He had suffered untold hardships and humiliations to combine the separate playing patterns into a common lore for all instruments. Thus had evolved the combined sequence of alap, jod, jhala, gat, etc. The other Ustad was questioning the very basis of Baba’s life-work, i.e.,  codification of instrumental styles…

p84, Chapter 12, Intimate Facets