The MrĢ„daį¹
g aur TablÄ VÄdanpaddhati
The MrĢ„daį¹
g aur TablÄ VÄdanpaddhati ā an instructional manual or notation-based āmethodā (paddhati) for playing (vÄdan) the mrĢ„daį¹
g (also very widely known as the pakhÄvaj1) and tablÄ drums ā is by any standard an entirely remarkable and unique work. First published in Lahore by the MufÄ«d-e āÄm Press in 1903, it provides 173 drum pieces using a notational system that differentiates between the right and left hand parts, specifies precise fingerings, indicates patterns of stress and even suggests pitch inflections on the bass drum of the tablÄ pair. Additionally, MrĢ„daį¹
g aur TablÄ VÄdanpaddhati (MTVP) provides a good deal of technical information on drum strokes as well as a few references to lay (rhythm, tempo) and tÄl (metre, metric cycles). Such a level of detail for a book of that era clearly marks its author as a man of exceptional vision. He was Dattatreya Vasudev Patwardhan, better known by his alias āGurudevā. A close associate of the vocalist and educational visionary Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Gurudev became vice principal of Paluskarās first public institution for instruction in music, the GÄndharva MahÄvidyÄlaya, established in Lahore on 5 May 1901.
Gurudevās work offers us a window onto the musical past, and we would do well to investigate the clues it presents to a theory and practice that has since changed in many significant ways. Naturally, one cannot presume that the authorās musical knowledge was representative of the general state of drumming knowledge in the early years of the twentieth century: one assumes that there must have been widely divergent repertoires and styles in different regions of the subcontinent, just as there are remnants of those divergences today in what have become known as the gharÄnÄs (stylistic traditions) of pakhÄvaj (Kudau Singh, Nana Panse, Punjab, and so on) and tablÄ (Delhi, Lucknow, Ajrara, Farukhabad, Benares, Punjab, and so on). And yet, in the repertoire Gurudev gives us, we find many compositions that are familiar to twenty-first-century players of the pakhÄvaj and tablÄ, suggesting that the material presented in MTVP is far from being an obscure and idiosyncratic body of knowledge.
Gurudev was no doubt inspired by the published works of his mentor, Paluskar, as both they and many other Maharashtrians2 embarked on an evangelical mission to spread Hindustani music to the Indian bourgeoisie and to set down the intricate properties of its oral traditions in written form. Neither their efforts nor their success should be underestimated, since the twentieth century effectively saw the gradual demise of the mainly Muslim hereditary occupational specialist musician and the rise to prominence of legions of mainly Hindu, non-hereditary, middle class practitioners and patrons. Indeed, Paluskar and his contemporary, Vishnu Narayan Bhatkhande, are even today widely hailed as the āsavioursā of Hindustani music who wrested its knowledge from the clutches of a colonial rule that had allowed a once noble art to become the monopoly of āa small coterie of illiterate professionals who jealously guarded their artā.3 In reality, the transformation of Indiaās music culture was most certainly the result of a much more complex set of sociocultural and historical variables deserving of a far subtler and more detailed interpretation. At the same time, though, we should not lose sight of Gurudevās purely pedagogical motive of teaching to others the music that he had spent his life learning: there is an enthusiasm and a certain ingenuousness about his work that is both compelling and inspiring.
While there are many familiar musical concepts in Gurudevās work, there are also some surprisingly unfamiliar ones. The authorās views on tÄl (metre), explicit and implicit, suggest several differences with the theoretical formulations with which most contemporary scholars and practitioners of Hindustani music are conversant. For example, the flexibility of his concept of beat in the most common of all tÄls (metric cycles), tÄ«ntÄl, helps to explain some of the anomalies of this tÄlās structure and prompts a re-examination of issues of lay (tempo). His annotations on lay itself suggest a conservative approach to tempo in general that has become obsolete, and this forces us to ask why Hindustani musical practice was subsequently pushed to the extreme poles of pace (in particular, the dawdling tempi of most vocal baį¹Ä khayÄls and the rapid blur of instrumental climaxes). Gurudevās choice of titles for the genres of drum composition, too, raises questions about the evolution of the tablÄ drum repertoire in general: why, for instance, should a term now so fundamental to the learning, practice, and performance of the instrument ā qÄida ā be absent in this text? Finally, and thanks to his meticulous notation system, it is clear that Gurudevās expectations for the technical realization of the drum bols (strokes and their spoken syllables) for pakhÄvaj and tablÄ differed in many significant ways from contemporary common practice.
And now comes the caveat: Gurudevās work, if it is available to us at all, is not known through his original 1903 publication of the MrĢ„daį¹
g aur TablÄ VÄdanpaddhati. Produced in a very limited run, it is entirely unclear how many copies are now extant. The work may have run to other editions in other languages, but how many is unclear. It was not until 1938, 21 years after Gurudevās death, that a second edition of his book under the slightly different title MrĢ„daį¹
g-TablÄ VÄdanpaddhati was published by his kinsman, the distinguished disciple of Paluskar and vocalist of the Gwalior tradition, Vinayak Narayan Patwardhan, better known to us as Vinayakrao Patwardhan.4 This second edition was then reprinted in 1982 by the Sangeet Natak Akademi in New Delhi. If Gurudevās work is known to us at all, then it is through this last reprint. However, even that seems to have earned little attention from scholars since there are almost no references in the literature to Gurudevās book in any of its published incarnations.
A mere glance at the second edition reveals substantial differences from the first edition: the work is prefaced by a new introduction spelling out elements of the saį¹
gÄ«t ÅÄstras (ancient Sanskrit treatises on music) as they pertain to rhythm and drumming; additional tÄls are given, including references to archaic or obsolete ones; the order of the repertoire has been changed; some of Gurudevās original pieces are missing, and new ones not included in the first edition are notated. Perhaps most importantly of all, gone is Gurudevās meticulous notation of right- and left-hand parts with precise indications of fingering and phrasing. This last point is crucial because, regardless of the second editionās sections describing pakhÄvaj and tablÄ bols, the music is impossible to interpret with accuracy. It seems clear, m...