An unknown virtuoso: Dr. Vijay Shankar Choubey in Mughalsarai. An account of subjective anthropology.
Sometimes real art is not highlighted by fame, glory, stupour of the masses. Often real art is not found in academies, universities, centres of power and resonance. Most of the times real art is not subject of grandeur, pomp, reverie of admired connosseurs which, through riding rampant horses, aggrandize their own prestige and personality and careers. Contrarily to the aficionados of art for novelty of art’s sake, to the promoters of mainstream celebration of supposed to be artists who are nothing but, sadly, good entertainers of the masses very clever to follow suit the established tastes of the times and the masses, those people who are good to advertise themselves through the channels already well paved by money and self-love. Sometimes, again, real art is far away from self declarations of value, the now-taken-for-granted must-to-do search and praise of fame, arrogance, all these self aggrandisements that projects one’s own often meagre achievements in the arts, just to obfuscate the relative and precarious condition of those achievements against the panorama of millennia of human slow accumulation of merit, slow search for personal or social expressivity by means of the senses, however limited they are comparing to the other animals and plants, which exist on this planet and possibly on others since a time so immemorial that human beings, in comparison, seems nihile.
Sometimes the splendour and immense reverberation in the emptiness of the world, the sudden spark of light in the dark, through which real art, which is traditional art, manifests itself, is absolutely calm, unpretentious, unwilling to manifest itself, silent, devoid of unnecessary adornments (if adornments doesn’t contribute to the artistic meaning themselves), ignorant and averse of vogues, trends, fashions, modes of propaganda.
This art does not appear, is all bound towards the search for a pristine sound, for the progressive perfection of this sound and technique, only inclined towards her own, her restricted circle of beloved, she doesn not care about appearence because she believes in the honest pursuit of substance and meaning, and, if time would declare that this Way have reaped good fruits, it will come this time unintrusively and silently and innocently from the main door of the humble abode of the art.
Probably a very few people know about the unknown craftsman who dedicate all his life and himself to produce beautiful, honest, objects according to a tradition that is the main line that connects him with the past and all the sum of criterias, values and worldviews that we define under the name of culture. This person is submerged under the flow of our times, times dominated by other feelings, tastes, trends and stereotypes. Times in which almost every single human activity and product, including art, became a commodity, something that is produced and sold and bought and processed in the market. These times are the glorious times of machines, mass produced items of all sorts, increasing fastness in life’s rhytms, the times of relativism and postmodernism, in which the boundaries that should define the merit of an art are already erased. Is merit and beauty in an art merely an interpretation, a personal judgement, a subjective evaluation? I believe that each artist’s life story and the culturally bound criterias (for each culture has a set of own criterias and symbols, ideas, techniques that define beauty) that we can use to analyse her art are a necessary starting point in order to approach a more comprehensive, more stable, more reliable and objective, although provisional, criteria of artistic merit. I am also speaking, by consequence, of the similarities between some values that we can find among many societies and cultures, the shared assumptions and expectations, habits that we encounter whenever we are invited in someone’s house, etc. But let us not digress so much.
I am talking here of a fulgid example of an artist whose life, music, earnestness, should be an example for the many artists whose achievements are only noise for the ears and mud for the eyes: that is, redundant, repetitive, palpable mediocrity.
Vijay Shankar Choubey lives with his family in the suburb of Mughalsarai, in the outskirts of Varanasi, the Holy City, in Northern India. I met him during a journey four years ago. His lovely family, a younger wife, two children, share a very humble life in very narrow spaces, namely two rooms in a building with no doors, but only drapes to enclosure them. Dr. Choubey’s family is happy despite these obvious limitations and keep on their honest lives. The two rooms are very simple, with only a very few objects and implements. They all live out of father’s earnings as a local musician and music teacher. Vijay earned a doctorate in music at the University of Varanasi and he is a master of violin. His music is sublime. Almost of such a speechless sublimity that cannot cope, come to terms with the world around it, and it remains, therefore, unnoticed. In fact, Vijay’s accomplishments, virtuosism, flawless technique in playing the fiddle, that seems natural and spontaneous like breathing itself, are largely cast in the oblivion of his contemporaries: society, people refined, snob or volken, bourgeoisie or proletariat the like. His personality is as humble and gentle as his art is magnificent. He plays with such naturalness, and often for his own amusement, for his acquaintances’ pleasure, as the flowing water of the mighty Ganga over which banks he has spent many a season in respectful homage. His humble existence is fulfilled not by material possessions, the pursuit of career, prizes, positions and so forth, but is contented with simple things as the company of his beloved ones, a quiet dinner (very spicy as is usual in those latitudes) prepared by the admirable, refined, exquisite manners of his young wife, a woman of silent, measured gestures, unintrusive speech, calibrated words, always giving the precedence to males, and always wearing simple, colourful, beautiful sarees on her slender body. And again, Vijay has in love and music his vast, unending fulfilment, such a grand pleasure and merriment that is able to expand the narrow walls of his flat in an infinite plain of joy. I said joy for sake of brevity but I should say in fact compassion and contemplation over the vanishing nature of life. Suffering, loneliness, the impossibility to fulfil completely our desires, the floating turmoil in constant redefinition in which human beings are entrapped continuously are inevitable conditions of life. And these characteristics are of course, not only human. But nonetheless humans ought to cope with these struggles, adhere to the ephemeral situations in which they are cast, or find themselves embedded in, and simply try to make their way into the world. The Master’s music speaks of this aspiration, an innocent want yes, but also being the constant source of inspiration of the poet.
After dinner, he embraces the violin, an almost sacred instrument at the same time very ordinary. His brother, himself an accomplished tabla player, sits besides Vijay. The beginning is slow, iridescent, calm, a slow waiting for the progression to come. The rhitm is ta — ta ta ta — tatata — ta, and so on. The musicians find for the union between their tune, tabla being the background and accompaniment of the violin’s approach, searching for the current with which to traverse the river. Progress is graduale, with the tabla marking the time but the violin filling it with waves that go up and down and transparent. A great sorrow but plenitude fills the small room where we are sitting on a carpet and covered by a blanket in the thick moisty cold air of winter night. Vijay masters the instrument like a beast completely tamed. He is the master of time. He is not deciding the flow, but it seems like the melody, raga Jod is called, if I remember well, chooses itself the moment to grow and condense the space and surround the corpses around. Corpses, not bodies, became unnecessary parts of the scape without much sense but to be slaves of this godly message, of this extrapolation and explanation of the meaning of void. but words are not enough to describe it. This is like essence of the heartbeat, the sudden dissipation of mist at dawn just before sun apparition. Or like the last frame of the disk when it disappears beyond the mountains like the one I saw in Nagarkot that time some years before. It’s like possessing, grasping time and releasing it slowly with the humility of a man of attainment. Vijay’s face is immersed in sweat, passion, speechless suffering, sadness, compassion for existence itself. This kind of feeling can be fulfilling, nurturing in the most desolate of spaces, the barest of circumstances. It’s like life and death’s fornication and sacred reunion, life’s whole phenomenas transcended. Moments of progressive, furious innuendo give time to moment of sudden lowening of the tempo, bridging the opposite states of mind.
And suddenly the progression vanishes, leaving an inescapable emptiness behind it.
Tradition is epitomized by those men and women of faith that are conscious of their own role in their art. They are conscious of their time, they are conscious of the value that that art attains, and they don’t aspire to imitate it pedissequely, they don’t reverie at that supreme triumph with astonishment and rapture, not they try to break it just for sake of iconoclasty. No superior esteem, nor grand aspirations, nor arrogance derived from an abuse of self-love, not these things are recognized in order to honestly be called a traditional artist. Being aware of one’s own limitations, inescapable weaknesses, limited role in the great fresco of time natural and cultural that surrounds the ego, an inner feeling made of humble disposition, being aware of these elements make a person near to the conditions that are proper to be admitted to the right path, the path of mastery. Is this an innate gift? Not necessarily. This condition, that is at once both of skills and of soul, is nurtured by constant faith in what is aspired as an immortal and pure art that, amidst all the suffering and turmoil of the world in which the infinite souls are enmeshed, deserves to survive and be revered. This condition of honest pursuit of an art it cannot fail to be both physical and idealistic, both material and imagined. That is to say, there should not be a discrepancy between what some thinkers of the past have fantasized to be the two sides of which a human being is composed, because in reality all human beings, being animals, are a formless whole composition without boundaries that somehow occupies the space, a phenomena that is not divisible in parts. This is beautifully rendered by the essence and performance of music itself, of these profound ragas that explore every single side of the human being: emotions, desires, sorrows, alternated states of being, all ultimately coming back to the one, to ashes, to rebirth, to some form in which we are all converging but that yet we cannot fathom. Yes, this is the effect of a performance by a master such as Vijay in Mughalsaraj, the caravanserai of the Mughals.
Tradition is nurtured through the time in a complete abandonment, a total immersion in that faith that communicates with the origins of humans. It is a slow progression of rhytm, a slow bildung of an awareness, experience, but most of all, skills that are patiently acquired through painstaking study. Continuous repetition and habitude does the rest.
He once played at a Varanasi elderly hospice, one of those barren structures in the holy heart of the city in which every sound reverberates through the empty walls making it seem even more a dolorous place than what it is. In a barren room, there was a very old woman who was dying. Her son, a Delhi’s citizen, had accepted to invite Vijay through the intermediation of my friend Rajat, who knows Vijay pretty well. Rajat was trying to make an ethnographic film about the event of dying in Varanasi from a remarkably close perspective. The grandmother did not eat for a long time, was in a coma for a long time, her skin the colour of dust, the dull color of someone who is leaving this world. Her son, who brought her here to Varanasi to ease her soul’s journey into next reincarnation, hoped that, after a long period of oblivion, the music of Vijay could finally help her to cease suffering. He embraced his violin, and performed one of the deepest, immense, compassionate melodies I have ever felt in my life. Words are not a sufficient means to describe that moment. Everyone, told Rajat to me, started silently weeping with a natural act, a spontaneous flow of emotion that could not be expressed in other ways.
The woman cried, a tear flowed from her eyes. She died in a short time after. Her soul, we are convinced, now roams freely in the realm where suffering is extinct.
Vijay, the master of violin, lives with his family in a tiny shelter, immersed in the womb of a bustling indian city, pursuing his humble, benevolent existence. An existence as close, as much loyal to tradition and its soul, as it is not, thankfully, revealed to the tremendous system of fame, success and commercial honour that would seriously menace its own value and survival.
