Editor’s Note:
January 2022’s installment of The Vital Anjan initiated a series commemorating twenty-five unbroken years since Bhaī Baldeep Singh began teaching the bi-annual Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensive Retreats in 1997. It featured the first part of an interview in which Bhāī Baldeep Singh reflected on his journey of harnessing and carrying forward intangible assets of the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta paramparā as well as a note by Professor Francesca Cassio on the significance of the retreats. In The Vital Anjan’s final installment of the year, Dr. Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker discusses what the retreats have meant to some participants and aspects of Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s pedagogy.
Part I of ‘The Gurū’s Singing Mule’ is available here (including an explanation of the title of the series), and the interview’s serialization will continue in the new year. As always, submissions are welcome at editor@vitalanjan.com.
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In the 1980s, as GurSikh memory-bearers were quickly fading into obscurity without any seeming import to the present generations, Bhāī Baldeep Singh embarked on a journey to seek out those time-worn faces who carried with them the Gurū-s’ intangible wealth. Through years of research and discovery, he learned from many great masters, collecting and cataloguing their treasures to be shared with coming generations. As a student of the paramparā, he was given precious jewels of GurSikh wisdom, which he vowed to safeguard with the respect it deserved. After a decade of training and research, Bhāī Baldeep Singh began sharing the memory, pedagogy, and practice of the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta paramparā with students in America, Europe, and Asia. He recalls the value of sharing this treasure-trove with his students:
“One thing became clear: unless I had been taught by them [elder memory bearers], I would have had no idea of what kirtan is – I would have been here and sharing, but only some of my own assumptions and estimations.” (Singh 2011, 265. “What is Kirtan?” Sikh Formations)
In the summer of 1996, Bhai Baldeep Singh traveled to the US to share the Gurbāṇi Kīrtana vidiā with a community of mostly non-Punjabi Sikhs at their annual gathering in New Mexico. He performed a solo on the joṛī which was unlike anything those present had previously heard. One of Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s first American students, Harbhajan Kaur, recalls this experience:
“With great gusto and speed, Bhai Baldeep Singh played the jori (two wooden drums that are larger than tablas – with the larger drum sporting a raw chapati instead of the black dot (seyahi) to produce resonance). As the lively performance continued, chapati dough flew off the drum at regular intervals, landing on both Bhai Baldeep Singh and Yogi Bhajan, who was enjoying the spirit and energy of Bhai Baldeep Singh’s playing…
It was his singing of some of the original compositions that made us ask him to come back the next summer to teach kirtan. He sang Guru Gobind Singh shabds in rāga that bore no resemblance to the “pop” kirtan with which most western Sikhs were familiar at that time, compositions that evoked entirely different emotions. His obvious devotion and ‘merger’ with the compositions, along with his mastery of tala (as the khalifa of the Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari baaj), placed him in an entirely different strata than the many traveling ragis I had experienced up to that time.” (Harbhajan Kaur July 2011. anadfoundation.org)
The following summer in 1997 thirty students gathered in New Mexico, USA for a month-long kīrtan course, thus beginning a bi-annual tradition of twelve-day intensive Kīrtana courses held in July and January in America at the homes of students or dedicated rasikā-s. Nirvair Kaur, one of Bhai Baldeep Singh’s first students, attended the first kirtan course and quickly realized Bhai Baldeep Singh was not like other Kīrtana teachers from whom she had studied.
“I had no expectations for the workshop but came to learn about the old ways. From the first day I realized this would be unlike any previous experience and would require an attitude of going back to kindergarten and a willingness to start at the beginning…The process has required much patience on the part of the teacher as well as the students. The voice instruments required a lot of cleaning to scrape off old habits and patterns and polish with the tools of naad yoga.” (Nirvair Kaur July 2011. anadfoundation.org)
It was in 1998 that my mother, Nirvair Kaur, encouraged me to attend the Kīrtana intensive, which I joined for a few days as a college student. Then in 2001, after graduating, I began to regularly attend Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s two-week bi-annual intensives in the United States and India. As students of the paramparā, we had to first find our own sound, forgetting what we knew or thought we knew about how one should sing. The trained singers in our group had the hardest time forgoing their years of previous training in which they were taught to consciously develop a stylized voice. This was an educative process which started with the removal of years of accumulated build-up, of vocal affects, of hopes and desires, insecurities and habits, beliefs, and judgments. We had embarked on a journey into the unknown with only our sound to guide us.
Bhāī Baldeep Singh reflects on his own educative process in the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt paramparā that had been handed down since the time of the Gurū-s through thirteen generations:
“First I had to cleanse my voice. Remove the buildup accumulated over the years of (ego) speaking and thinking and sound play. I had to become a clean palette so that the doer could paint me in his will. This was the first step: become neutral. It was only when I could become free to listen that I was shown the notes. How beautifully each one appeared! Its own shape and color, how many relatives each note had! Each its own shade or hue to give expression to the sound world it encompassed. Only after I could see this world was I allowed to add the Bāṇī, the words of enlightened ones, to this mosaic of sounds. The way the world that each word encompassed was expressed through each and every lilt in sound and note. The rhyming meter of each poetic line brought me into the rhythm of life’s breaths. I could see the rise and fall of the breath of life that encompassed my being and brought me into the flow of the ‘eternal’ breath.” (Bhāī Baldeep Singh July 2009. Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensive Retreat. Millis, Massachusetts)
During the first few Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensive Retreats, Bhāī Baldeep Singh would only focus on the foundations of sound production, rāga scales, and saragama-s. It was not until the years of accumulated sediment were cleared, until the rāga seeds were planted and nurtured through the tāla cycles, that the soil was determined to be fertile enough to allow the Bāṇī to bloom forth through the learning of Sabada rīta-s. The amount of time and care taken to cultivate the voice so that the Bāṇī could be sung stresses the high value that Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s teachers and Bhāī Baldeep Singh himself place on the Sabada and the way in which they were revealed, remembered, handed down, and sung generation after generation. To learn the Gurbāṇī Kīrtana of the ancestors takes work, practice, and dedication to its giāna. Kīrtana is ‘karte dī vidiā,’ a reality illustrated by the following statement from a first-time attendee of the Kīrtana intensive:
“Camp? No that doesn’t seem like the right word. Workshop? Not that either? Let’s call it the slaughter house for suicide. I realize now that is what you have to do to become an amazing musician and to hold onto a dying tradition. You have to give yourself to it fully or die trying… To learn you have to struggle a bit. Knowledge is not freely given and has to be earned.” (Baljinder Singh Bassi January 2012. anadfoundation.org)
Students at the twelve-day intensive Kīrtana retreats wake up in the Aṁrita Velā to begin riyāz on “sā” and gradually work on the aroha (ascending) and avaroho (descending) scales along with saragama-s and ṭīkā-s. The rest of the day may be spent on elaborating a rāga-’s alāp, learning Sabada rīta compositions, memorizing Bāṇī, or working on pronunciation, with the evenings reserved for tāla practice. Nevertheless, the course trajectories are ultimately dictated by the teacher, where entire days may be spent on a single ṭīkā, saragama, or Sabada, with emphasis being placed on the seven fundamentals: sura, rāga, laya, tāla, Sabada, varana, and rasa ātmak rendition. In turn, these can be viewed as encapsulating the four pillars of Kīrtana: raga, tāla, Sabada, and avadhāna. Bhāī Baldeep Singh teaches:
“If it is svara ātamaka—tuneful, very mellifluous, it should be rāga ātamak. If it is rāga ātamaka, it should be svara ātamaka; notes have to be of that particular rāga. Intonation has to be true; incarnations of the note has to be the right one. But if you are using tāla āatmaka, attending to the tāla, it has to be laya ātamaka: it has to be in perfect tempo. It should adhere to the maryāda of the tāla, laya you have chosen to utilize. If it has Sabada in it, then it should be varana ātamaka: it should be descriptive. It should carry the meaning, the import, the essence… If you have the Bāṅī, the meaning should be alive. You should mean what you say; it should be real. The Sabada should be alive; it shouldn’t just be a dead body. It should be alive. And because it is music, it should be rasa ātamaka; it has to have the nectar in it… It should have the soul in it…” (Bhai Baldeep Singh July 2006. Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensive Retreat. Knoxville, Tennessee)
Bhāī Baldeep Singh is a teacher of Gurbāṇī Kīrtana who places great importance on musical and phonetic precision, spiritual intent, historical accuracy, compositional analysis, and memory preservation. He impresses upon his students that it takes each individual’s dedicated effort to revive, preserve, and maintain the tradition’s intangible wealth. He does this by contextualizing the importance of the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta pedagogy within a historical framework, while noting its relevance to contemporary practice, as expressed by Nihal Singh:
“Bhai Baldeep Singh ji’s dedication to detail in conveying the most subtle nuances of Sikh intangible heritage, be they in the voice, on the strings, or in percussion, is truly a testament to the meticulous scholarship of the gurbani sangeet tradition’s protagonists. […] When learning from Bhai Baldeep Singh ji, there is an undeniable sense that one is drinking from the source of the stream—that one is living the same legacy of the Gurus and Gursikhs—that one is taking part in a crucial renaissance.” (Nihal Singh July 2012. anadfoundation.org)
Now after 25 years of Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensives, Bhāī Baldeep Singh has produced a monumental volume, Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta: Prācīna Kīrtī Mālā, which serves as a document of the pedagogical process we have undergone learning from the Gurū-’s singing mule. As expressed in his own words:
“Who is Baldeep Singh? Nothing else: he is just a bearer of Gurū-’s tradition. You must have some pride in that. And if someone has something beautiful, we acknowledge it; we go and learn it. This is our homework: to become bearers of the Gurū-’s court. Our priority is to learn what is the Gurū-’s system.” (Bhai Baldeep Singh July 2009. Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta Intensive Retreat. Millis, Massachusetts)
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Dr. Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa-Baker