By any informed reckoning, Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh ‘Taraṅgaṛ’ (1900-1995) must rank among the most extraordinary percussionists, exegetes, and GurSikh memory-bearers of the past century. His was an era when musical duels were still unavoidable among the learned in Punjab, each vying to test his knowledge and prowess against other masters. Not only did this spectacular exponent of Srī Darbār Sāhib’s joṛī sustain the undefeated legacy of the Amritsarī-Bāj while touring the royal courts of undivided South Asia, he was acclaimed ‘Taraṅgaṛ’ for the phenomenal ‘waves’ his percussive virtuosity created. The fact that this legendary vidvān is not more widely remembered and celebrated today is bitter proof of Punjab’s cultural tribulations following the terrible watershed of Partition.
“There arrived a stage in my practice,” the nonagenarian ustād once reflected to Bhāī Baldeep Singh, “when every Sabad of Gurū Graṅth Sāhib had become a paran for me.” This remarkable utterance of my maestro’s1 maestro rewards careful analysis—even (especially!) for those already initiated into the subtle art of north Indian classical rhythm—for beyond denoting a state of perceptual and technical wizardry, I believe it furnishes a priceless insight into the nature of GurSikh mystical praxis. In particular, the opportunity for exegetical insight takes the form of an analogy, where the light from a less-commonly-encountered-but-more-commonly-plumbed term, paran, may illuminate a more-commonly-encountered-but-less-commonly-plumbed term, Sabad. Let us then elucidate the fundamental elements of Indic rhythm building up to an understanding of the paran. Happily, the subject of Hindustānī classical percussion is worthy of sustained consideration, not only for its contribution to our understanding of Sabad—the revealed songs of GurSikh scripture—but also on account of its intrinsic beauty and the sublime joy it gifts attentive listeners.
The most ancient of North India’s classical drums is known as the mridaṅg or pakhāvaj. Both names may be found in Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib2 and refer to a horizontal, wooden drum with heads of unequal sizes played with the hands while seated on the ground. Etymologically, mridaṅg denotes its earlier construction with an ‘earthen body,’ while pakhāvaj evocatively characterizes it as ‘played with the wings,’ directing attention to the percussionist’s arms, which must remain suspended in the air on either side of the drum. The smaller of the heads is played with the dominant hand. It can produce a rich variety of curt and ringing sounds, the latter tones made possible through concentric layers of an ingenious3 black ink, the siyāhī. By means of this unique loading mechanism, the membrane is rendered harmonic and finely tunable to a desired frequency. The larger head takes a non-permanent application of wheat flour dough, which helps produce the hum of warm, resonant bass tones.
Pakhāvaj is the drum of choice for accompanying the medieval dhurpad genre of sacred art music, and the odes of Bhāī Gurdas (1551-1636) record4 an era when the households of Gurū Nanak’s Sikhs were identifiable by kīrtan sung along with the mridaṅg and dhurpadī rabāb. The double-headed pakhāvaj was split in two in the darbār of Gurū Arjan, forming the vertically-oriented joṛī, literally a ‘pair.’ Like the mridaṅg, the early modern joṛī retains the siyāhī on its pūṛā or treble drum and requires fresh dough to be affixed to the bass dhammā whenever it is played. It is identical to the pakhāvaj in timbre and technique, save for its heads being closer together and facing up rather than out. In the tablā—the youngest of North India’s classical drums and complement to the khayāl genre—the pūṛā is smaller. More significantly, a rounder, metallic ḍuggī with a permanent siyāhī replaces the tradition of a dough-laden bass drum. While the ḍuggī’s siyāhī allows for considerable modulation of the bass tones, its relative fragility and longer sustain limit its acoustic volume. Flying dough adds to the spectacle of mridaṅg and joṛī performance.
Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ maintained that the joṛī is the complete percussion instrument, for it alone comfortably accommodates all three playing styles of Indian classical drumming. Sāth, the oldest, is the full-handed playing that originated on the mridaṅg. It is fluently executable without modification on the similarly-sized but vertical joṛī. As both take dough, there is no fear this robust playing style will damage the drums, as would be the case were there siyāhī as on the tablā’s ḍuggī. As the name sāth would suggest, the repertoire of this elaborate style ‘goes alongside’ the melodic and textual content as an equal partner in performance.
In the intermediate jat—playable on mridaṅg and joṛī—the bass technique remains full-handed, but the treble hand relies more on individual fingers, resting on the drum where possible. When playing gat, both the treble and bass strokes are rendered by the finger tips, the hands have greater opportunity to rest on the horizontal surfaces of the joṛī and tablā, and wrist pressure may contribute significantly to producing and modulating different bass tones and attacks. Technical and historical reasons having to do with gat’s evolution parallel to the development of khayāl incline its repertoire towards subtle, improvisation-heavy compositional forms. In all three playing styles, the streamlined form and graceful flow of the hands at all tempos is essential for percussive fluency, contributing a mesmerizing visual dimension to the aesthetics and athleticism of Hindustānī rhythm.
The classical drums of north India share a rich percussive language. Every stroke the hands play on the mridaṅg, joṛī, and tablā corresponds to a bol, literally something ‘spoken.’ These articulate mnemonic syllables phonetically imitate the percussive sounds they represent, so the sound of the resonant treble bol “Tā” is astonishingly like the sound of the stroke “Tā.” Similarly, the resonant bass bol “Ghe” sounds like its corresponding stroke, and the bol “Dhā” encodes the simultaneous execution of these strokes by the right and left hands. The mental-muscular association between bols and strokes is so powerful that adept students of the mridaṅg, joṛī, and tablā will automatically hear strokes as their names and have a decent sense of how they are played—or may at will hear recited strokes played in the mind’s ear.
The vocal recitation of bols is called paṛhantt, whereas nikās refers to their production—literally how they are ‘taken out’—on the drums. Clarity must never be sacrificed for the sake of volume or speed. Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ held that the quality of one’s playing is directly proportional to the quality of one’s recitation, which is particularly insightful as inflectional nuances encode manual subtleties. Some ambiguity between paṛhantt and nikās is introduced by the variety of ways a single bol may be executed, or conversely, by the less common phenomenon of calling a stroke by one name, but playing a stroke more commonly associated with another bol. Thus seeing a bol played and hearing it named removes all ambiguity concerning its parhantt and nikās. Bols comprise phrases, whose syntactical correctness mirrors the beauty and fluency of their execution. Arrangements of such phrases make up the numerous compositional forms—including the paran—into which the repertoire of solo and accompanimental bols may be classified. As seen in this latter usage, the term bol may stand in as synecdoche for entire compositions made up of individual of bols.
It is now possible and necessary to introduce tāla, a bounded expanse of boundless possibility. Tāla is the counterpart to the melodic system of rāgas and among the most abstract organizational principles in Hindustānī rhythm. All north Indian percussive repertoire exists within one of a variety of tālas. Each tāla is a rhythmic cycle possessing a distinctive character arising from the interplay of its constituent elements. Mātrē or ‘beats’ are the equidistant temporal units into which a tāla is divisible. Lāya can refer to a variety of relationships between mātrē including tempo, multiples, and particular metrical grooves. Some tālas exist only within particular ranges of lāya, while others retain their character across tempos.
The sam, or first mātrā, is of prime aesthetic significance, for it is at once a point of anticipation and release, completing one āvartan or ‘cycle’ and beginning the next. The sam is so palpable a locus of musical culmination that a whole system of visam or ‘off-the-sam’ anāghāt and atīt compositions heighten one’s experience of cyclicality by ending either a fraction-of-a-beat before or after the sam. The mātrē comprising a tāla are divided into vibhāgs or segments, which are delineated by each tālī or khālī. A tālī, or a ‘clap,’ is a point of emphasis within the rhythmic cycle, and may be marked with a clap during recitation. Khālī, literally ‘empty,’ is a point of highlighted absence—as when the bass goes silent—and may be indicated with a horizontal swipe of the hand or an upwards facing palm. Reciting bols while keeping tāla—or ‘keeping time’ with such claps and swipes—is essential for parsing the relationship between compositions and the underlying rhythmic structure of the tāla. It additionally serves an important pedagogical function in this primarily oral-aural tradition passed on directly from the memory of the master to the disciple.
The finest vocalists and even knowledgeable members of the audience will keep tāla, producing remarkably precise temporal-perceptual synchronization between musicians, as well as with the listeners. A highly resonant plucked string drone called the tānpurā enables analogously precise harmonic accord by furnishing an invariant tonic throughout the performance. The embodied patterns of tālī and khālī render counting unnecessary. Particularly within the khayāl genre of vocal and instrumental music, a standardized pattern of bols canonically representing the structure of the tāla known as the ṭhēkā is looped during accompaniment with embellishments kept to a minimum. As mentioned earlier, sāth repertoire played on the mridaṅg and joṛī was traditionally accorded equal musical and social position vis-à-vis the melodic and textual content of a performance, to the point where in some periods ṭhēkā playing was altogether eschewed in performance by masters of the Amritsarī Bāj. What is more, they looked askance on the repetition of a single bol over the course of a performance5—except in cases where aesthetically called for—deeming it an admission that a percussionist had exhausted his material. Still, they always remembered that a percussionist’s responsibility is to support the overall musical atmosphere—which in Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt must in turn help convey the Sabad—substantively occupying and receding from attention as the music requires.
The tīā, known outside Punjab as the tihāī, is one of the most ubiquitous and versatile devices within Indic percussion. It is essentially a tripartite ending consisting of a single phrase played three times—with evenly-spaced gaps in-between or no gaps at all, at least relative to the lāya—so as to culminate on a desired mātrā, typically the sam. For connoisseur listeners, the point in the tāla where a phrase concludes may indicate the fact that were the same phrase repeated twice more, it would arrive on the first beat of the rhythmic cycle. If it is indeed repeated once more, one’s hypothesis the drummer is playing a tīā becomes a near-certainty, thereby sparking an intense yearning for it to be played yet again, which cannot but land not a moment sooner or later than it must—unless, of course, the sam is to be visam! Coming in threes, the tīā is thus logically the shortest possible means of introducing a phrase (the first instance), establishing meta-awareness a pattern may exist (the second instance), and confirming its existence on the focal point of the rhythmic cycle (the third instance). Since the form’s conventionality makes the immediate future alike pellucid to the instrumentalist or vocalist, they may likewise approach the sam with a tīā (or visam feint!) of their own.
Finally, the stage is set for us to consider the paran. A fixed rather than improvised compositional form, parans draw upon the rich language and bold sāth playing technique of the pakhāwaj. They have since formed an integral component of the tablā repertory, where their nikās is adapted for gat playing. Longer compositions, parans generally span multiple āvartans or cycles. The paran begins with a fikrā, a rhythmically and syllabically pregnant arrangement of bols establishing the composition’s personality. This opening salvo is often elaborated, seamlessly incorporating adjacent ideas, before it is dramatically juxtaposed with a counter-assertion, whose elaboration morphs into a possible reconciliation with the opening impulse. An often explosive tīā shatters this uncertain truce, forging an adamantine synthesis between the preceding elements, and thereby pulling the paran ineluctably to a decisive conclusion on the sam. As noted by the aesthetician S.K. Saxena, a close associate of Ustād Habibbudin Khan and Ustād Ahmed Jan ‘Thirakwā,’ the poetics of the Amritsarī Bāj display unique “…rhythms of orientation and abandon or willed waywardness and resilience.”6
The fixed compositional form par excellence, the paran is highly versatile, admitting of a wide variety of bols in novel combinations, lāya pairings, and sustained dialogue—as well as of multiform structural formats. The famous antāksharī parans of Punjab feature phrases that take off from the concluding bol of the preceding phrase, as in the Indian parlor game of the same name, where players must sing a song beginning with the first letter of the final word of the song before them. Parans may exist in chakradār form, where the entire composition is repeated thrice so as to land on the sam, or even as arithmetically sophisticated chakradār variants like the farmāīshī or kamāllī. As dhurpadās codify melodic passages through rāgas, parans display the literary genius of percussive poetics. The same parans may exist in different tālas, like a single soul reincarnated. A profound intertextuality of recurrence, quotation, and rejoinder is visible in the joṛās to parans, where a joṛā is a further paran with a deep family resemblance to the preceding composition, but with a vitality of its own.
While parans must possess a distinctive character, a dramatic sense of journey, and a unified aesthetic completeness, individual phrases and fikrē taken from parans serve as launchpads for other compositional forms. The tukṛā, literally a ‘piece’ or ‘morsel,’ consists of a fikrā and tīā. Shorter than parans, these fixed tablā bols are rarely longer than an āvartan and may contain non-sāth phrases. Parans are the wholes of which tukṛās are pieces. Rēlās—elaborative bol patterns designed for high speed fluency—similarly draw upon the vocabulary of parans, isolating and looping particular ornaments to train the hands and display their preparedness or tiārī. Thus, parans reveal the galaxies implicit in the most elementary bols; like perennial mathematical structures for a Platonist—or the śrutī of the rishīs—they await discovery by those with the stillness to hear them. My maestro revealed to me how the chauṇkṛīs of the Amritsarī Bāj—sequences composed of four interrelated but individual bols—traverse the ages, granting being perfect immanence now, thereby transcending the finitude of mortal time.
Here the literal signification of Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ’s remark comes into view: there arrived a stage in his riāz or practice when every Sabad or hymn of GurSikh scripture had become percussively renderable as a paran. Indic percussion may be divided between sārthik, ‘semantic,’ and nirārthik, ‘non-semantic’ playing. The vast majority of Indic repertoire is nirārthik, where the abstract language of bols does not correspond to referents beyond the strokes executable on the drums. However in sārthik playing, the phonemes and cadences of human speech are reproduced on the drums with remarkable fidelity. Every Sabad had become sārthik for Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ. For instance, “chakr chihn aru baran jāti aru pāti nahin jih,” the opening line of Gurū Gobind Singh’s Jāp Sāhib, was sonically transliterated into percussive bols as “K—TR KaeNN TR DhRN Dha—Ṭ TR Ta—Ṭ TNN TiṬ.”
While accompanying Gurbāṇī Kīrtan, master percussionists would occasionally switch from nirārthik into sārthik playing, astonishing the listeners with the capacity of the drums to ‘utter’ the Gurbāṇī being sung. This was particularly stunning in the erection of a makān, literally a ‘home’ or ‘dwelling,’ where the rhythmic placement of a word or phrase against the underlying tālic metre was percussively highlighted. Celebrated examples from the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt Paramparā include the sārthik “GhiṬ Du—ṅGē TṬTā” for “guri dukhu kāṭiā” in Rāga Bilāval and “TiṬKiṬ DhaDīṅ” for “chaṭpaṭ rānī” in a scintillating Rāga Sāraṅg Sūlfāk Tāl rendition from Dasam Bāṇī. As the paran offers unparalleled scope for extended and variegated poetic intricacy in literary sāth playing, and because improvising tīās is second nature for trained percussionists, it is natural that Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ invoked the paran to denote his synoptic apprehension of GurSikh poetics and percussion.
So what of the paran as metaphor? Beyond the literal feat of knowing one’s instrument so well one can sārthically articulate the Gurū’s Sabad on the drums, I perceive a pointer as to the problem of Sabad for seekers on the GurSikh path. Given the sempiternal capacity of the Sabad to illuminate, and given the spiritual darkness of today’s GurSikh collectivity, is it not obvious that our attendance of Sabad Gurū is inadequate? As rāgā names preceding Sabads denote extraordinary worlds of melody evoking different rasas, literally ‘flavors’ or ‘nectars’ of inner experience, I believe words like simaran, giān, and ānand record no less precious, specific, or experienceable entities than the bols Dhā, Thūṅ, and KRā—N.
For the percussionist, a new paran inescapably presents itself as a problem. It is a challenge to one’s present abilities. The more it has to teach, the less graspable it will initially be. Familiar bols—perhaps the tīā—will immediately crystallize in the memory. Yet to comprehend the paran qua paran, it must be grasped as a whole. It is not the individual bols, but rather the transformation of consciousness as one flows through them that is of lasting consequence. For the one who first receives a given paran, it discloses itself as an insight just beyond the reach of conscious design—sufficiently unexpected to exhilarate, but familiar enough to remember. In committing a paran of another’s discovery to one’s memory and practice, by analyzing and polishing it, we ourselves assimilate the virtues of its recipient. And since parans studied decades before retain the capacity to surprise one with fresh possibilities, they grant more than is immediately apparent. The Sabad, like the paran, is the expressive fruit of a grand being’s inner cultivation, and is the chief vehicle in GurSikh praxis for the disciple to taste of the most exalted states of being.
As with the subtle visual differences between the Gurmukhī script’s ਥ, ਖ, ਧ, and ਪ that encode four unlike consonants, Sabads and parans alike demand, cultivate, and reward quality attention. They leave no room for the mind to wander, because fine distinctions mark the gulf between liberation and bondage, the sublime and the absurd. Parans and Sabads—particularly the original Sabad Rīts7—teach us how to become jewelers, sensitive to the vastness and value of every bol, character, and attribute of what exists. In the same manner that the percussive literature of the paran reveals marvelous pathways through the multiverse of possible bols—showing us sequences that ‘work’ manually, aesthetically, and mathematically,—the Gurūs’ Sabads reveal mental patterns and ornaments of the soul that free our consciousness where it is stuck, purifying it for wondrous rest in our Creator.
It should then come as no surprise that the expressive system and musical paraphernalia Gurū Nanak and his successors employed to say the unsayable should reflect and hone precisely those virtues the Sabad cultivates. There must be something remarkable in the mridaṅg for Gurū Tegh Bahadur—the ninth Nanak, who understood the value of each breath, and whose fourth centenary we are celebrating this year—to indulge in percussion, which he studied8 in his youth under the legendary Bhāī Babak. It should also come as no surprise that within the most exacting pedagogy of the Gurbāṇī Saṅgīt Paramparā, those who aspired to play strings or sing first had to gain proficiency in percussion, and only after learning stringed instruments were taught to sing with the voice, the instrument fashioned by the Lord. There comes a point when all metaphors fall short—when perfect identity alone is adequate—but for the percussionist on the Sabad’s mystical path, surely no pointer is so evocative as the paran. Salutations, Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ!
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1. I am profoundly indebted to my maestro, Ustād Bhāī Baldeep Singh, who is responsible for reviving the joṛī-pakhāvaj through his crucial encounter with the nonagenarian Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ. The anecdotes, distinctions, and repertoire I am sharing here are from the teachings of Ustād Bhāī Arjan Singh Taraṅgaṛ as transmitted by Bhāī Baldeep Singh to me since July 2008. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to all my tablā teachers, particularly to Ustād Zakir Hussain and Paṅḍit Swapan Chaudhuri, for all the knowledge they have shared with me since 2011 and 2012 respectively.
2. Srī Gurū Graṅth Sāhib, angs 1271 and 350 for mentions of mridaṅg and pakhāvaj respectively.
3. Raman, C. V. “The Indian Musical Drums.” Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences – Section A 1, no. 3 (September 1934): p. 179. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03035705.
4. Vārāṅ, Bhāī Gurdas, pannā 24, IV.
5. Siṅgh, Bhāī Baldeep. “Memory and Pedagogy of Gurbāṇī Saṅgīta: An Autoethnographic Udāsī.” Sikh Formations 15, no. 1–2 (2019): p. 49. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2019.1624937.
6. Saxena, Sushil Kumar. The Winged Form: Aesthetical Essays on Hindustani Rhythm. New Delhi: Published by Sangeet Natak Akademi and D.K. Printworld, 2012, p. 8.
7. Singh, Bhai Baldeep. “WHAT IS KĪRTAN ?: Observations, Interventions and Personal Reflections.” Sikh Formations 7, no. 3 (2011): p. 263. https://doi.org/10.1080/17448727.2011.637382.
8. Singh, Bhai Baldeep. JORI. Vol. 1. World Music Heritage Series Percussion Instruments. New Delhi: Anad Records, 2004: CD booklet p. 21.
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Nihal Singh