4. Explorations and Analyses (II): Twilight Rāgs from North India

In this part of the book, I offer a detailed commentary on the companion album Twilight Rāgs from North India. In section 4.2, the subject under the spotlight is Vijay Rajput’s performance of Rāg Bhairav on the Twilight Rāgs album. One priority in this essay is to provide details of the texts and notations of the bandiśes, in the interests not least of students who want to learn them. A further aim is to consider issues raised by these songs. I first examine the mutable identity of the baṛā khayāl bandiś ‘Balamavā more saīyā̃’, alongside alternative versions sung by doyens of the Kirana gharānā. I then analyse the subtleties of the bandiś ‘Suno to sakhī batiyā’, and the ways in which VR works it into an extended drut khayāl. With this last analysis, I conjecture further about the possibility of an underlying performance grammar, as first raised in section 3.3. In section 4.3, I turn to the question, ‘How do you sing a baṛā khayāl?’ Also known as vilambit [slow] khayāl, a baṛā khayāl is where an artist is able most fully to display not only their technical prowess, but also their ability to explore the deeper reaches of a rāg. In this essay, I focus on the subtle tension between non-metrical and metrical principles (anibaddh and nibaddh) that permeates, and arguably defines, a baṛā khayāl. My case study here is Vijay Rajput’s performance of the baṛā khayāl ‘Kahe sakhī kaise ke karīe’, in Rāg Yaman, the second rāg featured on the album Twilight Rāgs from North India. In this analysis, I seek not only to illustrate what happens and in what order (under the wider principles of baṛhat and laykārī), but also to convey the various ways in which a baṛā khayāl’s ambiguous temporality, and its related interplay between the fixed and the free, permeate the performance ethos and contribute to the experience of musical depth. This also relates to the question of how a baṛā khayāl gets taught; as elsewhere in Rāgs Around the Clock, my account here includes insights gleaned directly from learning with my own guruji, VR.