'Phool ka Chand' is a carefully choreographed, feature-length hand-drawn animated film on the life and music of noted classical vocalist, Kumar Gandharva. While The Journey of a Note has been written as a companion piece to the film, it is not imagined as a ‘response’ or a ‘review’
One of the country라이브 바카라 most compelling contemporary auteurs, Amit Dutta, has pushed formal boundaries with films that use extensive research to create sensory narratives. His latest full feature-length hand-drawn animated film “Phool ka Chand” (Rhythm of a Flower) on the life and music of noted classical vocalist, Kumar Gandharva, claimed the prestigious Golden Gateway Award at MAMI 2024. The animation in the film is by Allen Shaw.
Dutta라이브 바카라 films have always carved a path into the process of the creative act—using time as a parameter to choreograph careful studies of place, presence, and identity. Gandharva was struck by tuberculosis, and Dutta라이브 바카라 film “…takes this single moment of him lying on his sick bed and expands it, where his life of music and contemplation moves like a dream. When he rises after six years in bed, with only one lung spared, he writes, sings, and teaches again, giving voice to the six long years of silence and bridging the old and new with visionary insights.” (From the Director라이브 바카라 Note)
The Journey of a Note has been written as a companion piece to the film, while retaining the identity of an individual poetry cycle featuring the musician Kumar Gandharva. While it is not imagined as a ‘response’ or a ‘review’, the form asks the question: “What does it mean to write into?” There were moments in the film, where I was aware of being part of a conversation. The music and the sound led me, and I started to follow the ‘note’. A taught intuition that is inherent in the slow vistaar of the musical note, as sensation and emotion, arrived unbidden unto my fingers, and I began to write, untethered, the raw feeling that the sensitive listener is enveloped in. This state of witnessing is the reverie of making friends with sound—of riyaaz. I felt as one who is privy to meends and taans that ring with the punctuation of diverse cultures and histories of aesthetics.
Like in Dutta라이브 바카라 “Nainsukh”, I felt the stirrings of a new form of connection. This one was different, because I knew music in a way that I did not know visual art. Some moments took me back to my own taleem. I reflected on my experiences with my gurus—Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar and Ustad Bahauddin Dagar.
I felt that the only way—other than song—that those stories could be told was through poetry.
***
“Aaj main nahi mere tanpure gayenge”
(Kumar Ghandarva, in Phool Ka Chand)
for Amit Dutta
A child tells his music teacher
“Last night, ustad, I heard the tanpura sing”
The unheard note lies beaten
crumpled on the side of the room
It gathers the darkness and becomes a-light
a blinking eye on the prowl
Ustad bends his head close to my ears and says:
“now you don’t need to sing anymore, eh?”
The note becomes a bird whose beating river
of stone has been flung into the sky
And the note—whose name meant softness
whose place was in a melody that danced
as a deer would—
and the note
that teaches a line to swim
scissors cloud into a stream
of bronze temple bells
and ideas have children
whose voices curl into shape
and the note becomes a poem
a landscape a dream
the note ceases to be
the absence of sound
but wait the note
whose time has not come yet
where did it go
***
Animation
or the act of verbing the noun
Memory is laughter turned inside out
And from the fragments a light
Fingers that caress dead wood
that tease a rainbow out o’ the strings
Vibrating hairs that know the breadth
of a note are blind to the touch
of the shishya라이브 바카라 hands
We can only know sound
the way ekant knows its quarry
as a shard of dancing dust
we feel sound askance
the ear must strain to listen
to the banter of a night that has forgotten
to close the petals of the evening
it is always the cricket outside the window
laminated to the glass who reminds you
of your place in the world
it is always that shrill percussion
of eros that punctuates the room tone
of a mind at home, a heart alone
a Rimpoche once told me
that enlightenment isn’t turning down
the volume it is switching off
the tape recorder
to understand the birth of a bandish
I listen to the meend that takes a six-year long angdai
I watch a man waking up from sleep
the difference between cinema and dream
is that we cannot see language in a dream
but music shapes this absence
***
A Light
In the silence handcuffed two-to-a-light
the notes claw the earth set the dawn alight
In you everything moves the sun grows old
bamboo cries, grief splinters, the raag, a light
Paisley wind, engine라이브 바카라 reverie, camel라이브 바카라
lilt, and crow라이브 바카라 screech—All, in your song, alight
The bird라이브 바카라 tail is a dog without a bone
is a child who라이브 바카라 found the sound of a light
The sickle라이브 바카라 blade bites grass The river snakes
under-breath in the heart라이브 바카라 dark room, a light
It must be soft as waves’ lips on the shore
as a palm that holds the reins of a light
It must be old enough to be a tent
torn, with edges burnt, to let in the light
Ask the city for birdsong tell forest
your name Give song, give voice, give love, her light
***
Ouroboros
“When the tanpura is finely tuned, it feels like the notes are stuck to my fingers”
—Kumar Gandharva
After an hour of lovemaking
he plucks stars from her hair
don’t colour me red don’t
fingers open to reveal a ripening sun
the weariness of sheep
the gramophone라이브 바카라 conch-shelled ear
the hills separate in a whiff of smoke
the song rains on the belly of the earth
it is faagun maas and the air is thick
with pollen and longing
falling flowers and falling leaves
Fog carries the morning
in her cart—under a shroud
stitched from slumbering city lights
and the vapour of drying pajamas
on parched verandahs
The cart is a taan that doubles in on itself
with laughter and creaking wood
The morning arpeggios
into a sky of kites
***
Postscript
“Then felt I like some watcher of the skies”
—On First Looking into Chapman라이브 바카라 Homer, John Keats
By the riverside
I will wait for you
In your song alone
this body will fly
(Views expressed are personal)
Aranya is a poet, currently based in Delhi, a place to which he doesn’t belong. He is the editor of the newsletter poetly, and is currently pursuing a PHD in Social Anthropology