Ahmedabad: Kirwani patted everybody’s shoulders, using the full-bodied charisma of a celebrity who offers the same courtesy to the purists and the curious. It was Tuesday, Day 13, and the finale of Saptak.On stage were violin diva Kala Ramnath, Saraswati veena doyenne Jayanthi Kumaresh, tabla ustad Fazal Qureshi, and mridangam vidhwan Patri Satish Kumar. Together the musicians ran the golden highlighter of elation on Kirwani’s refrain.Thunderous polysyllabic phrases were followed by incrementally shorter phrases, until the violin, the veena, the tabla, and the mridangam traced the golden highlighter through sudden silence.
That was not a valedictory moment but a preview of the beauty rasikas could enjoy till Saptak 2027.On stage, in the brief no-sound euphony, the musicians smiled at one another, as though recalling the years of saadhana that produced the pause that could speak. “We have been playing together for a long time,” Kumaresh told TOI, referring to her group Triveni, which was envisioned by the tabla deity Zakir Hussain. Kumaresh said, “Synchronization is a must in our recitals. After Zakir bhai brought us together years ago, we have been developing compositions and rehearsing together. We do a lot of homework before we perform.” Aspiring rasikas are deterred by classical homework. But Kumaresh offered a luminous precis.“Raga means colour, denoting an emotion,” she said. “But colour can range from the lightest to darkest blue.” She implied that it would be unproductive, therefore, to put the raga colour in one box.
“For example, Kirwani comes out to you in bluish-green form,” Kumaresh said. “But the colour evolves. As the artist goes through the journey, (the raga) becomes like a painting. The notes of a raga form the colour palette.
The instrument is like a brush.”A raga, Kumaresh said, is like creating a painting and though the notes are the same, the painting that emerges on a particular day depends on the mood, the sound, and the physical form of the artist. On Tuesday, the artists presented a painting of Mona Lisa so happy that she dropped all her enigma and smiled as if to indulge an Instagram-residing fan.
