An abridged version of this piece was carried in The Hindu dated May 06, 2021

Chaitanya Tamhane makes me jealous. Like his protagonist Sharad, my own induction into the universe of Hindustani music was one of rapture, of an overwhelming sense of awe at the depth and the magnificence of this tradition that I had somehow been included in. But many years had to pass before I was able to identify the surprisingly homogenous - and disillusioningly pedestrian - subcultures it consisted of. Tamhane latches on to one of these - the Marathi Brahman subculture of Khayal music in Mumbai - and in spite of having come to it only very recently, presents an astoundingly faithful representation of its textures, timbres and potent contradictions. I remember participating, years ago, in a competition that was virtually identical to the one depicted in the film. I did not win, and my face at the time bore an expression even more dismal than the one Sharad's does in the film. Ironically enough, unless memory deceives me, the winner of that competition in Nagpur was Aditya Modak, who was as brilliant in his Khayal performance then as he is brilliantly cast now.

After the debacle that was Bandish Bandits, many of us in the musician community had pinned our hopes on the fact that the director of the incredible Court was making a film on our music. Tamhane does not disappoint. From its markedly unostentatious settings to its often stiflingly closeted worldviews, from its endearing music schools to the lovely music itself, Tamhane conjures up a world that is almost too familiar, too comfortable for those of us who are its regulars. In this sense, Tamhane is practically an ethnographer. Like the many ethnomusicologists who have studied this music, Tamhane is less interested in stardom and glory and more in the peculiar shapes the human ecology of this music takes; and in how its incumbents understand its grand traditions.

For a music that embodies the thrill of the present moment perhaps more than many other musics, the culture of Hindustani music, to hazard a generalization, is fixated on its past. And while the texts and tunes of its canon belie a complex history of human endeavour, we - its practitioners and connoisseurs - tend to rely more on imagined histories. What Tamhane's radars for the theatrical seem to have locked on is the mehfil of human drama that is the lovechild of these two histories. The Disciple plays out like a mehfil - a languorous soiree that takes its time as it engulfs you in its web of paradox and irony.

The contradictions the film grapples with are at the heart of the recent history of this music. The Hindustani Khayal was historically practiced in royal courts across northern India by various musician castes, often of ambiguous religious affiliation. But the colonial juggernaut, to meet its need for administrative efficiency, went about dividing the populace into simplistic categories, effectively obliterating the religious diversity and the syncretism of South Asian culture. And in the universe of Hindustani music, it pitted two monolithic religious identities against each other: a 'disruptive' Muslim present against a romanticized Hindu past. Colonial scholars proclaimed that the music they heard around them wasn't India's 'real' music. That music, they contended, was lost and could only be found fossilized in ancient Sanskrit texts. They deemed the living music around them vulgar, corrupted by its falling into the hands of 'illiterates' and 'prostitutes' - a claim even musicians of the time bought often into. This blow to the music's reputation prompted its twentieth-century reformers to take up its cause. They set about systematizing it, and winning social respectability back for it. They famously succeeded - the prestige this music enjoys today, and Tamhane's film itself, are indebted in no small measure to them. But one of the means the reformists used to do this was to infuse the culture of the music with the aura of a monolithic, identifiably Hindu religiosity. And it is from this history that the contradictions Tamhane so consummately captures, emerge.

They are brought into the unsuspecting Sharad's life by his guru - a venerable old gharana master played so commendably by veteran musician Dr. Arun Dravid. But Sharad, exemplifying the retrospection of his tradition, listens obsessively to tapes of his guru's guru: the unseen but always present Maai. The saintly matriarch of Sharad's Alwar gharana, Maai remains an oppressive presence in reference to whose pithy aphorisms Sharad performs the role of the ideal disciple, much like the sparkling sound of the tanpura in reference to which he performs his Khayal. "This is music that saints and ascetics have attained after thousands of years of rigorous spiritual pursuit", she tells him and Sharad dutifully proceeds to take on the Herculean task of bearing the entire weight of this godly tradition on his very mortal shoulders.

There is certainly a romance to Sharad's quest. In scenes eerily reminiscent of our current state of lockdown, Sharad drives around the deserted streets of night-time Mumbai, with Maai's words in his ears, populating his solitude with the mythology of his tradition. His unquestioning belief in this imagined history infuses his music, like that of his guru, with pathos and grandeur - for their audiences participate and believe in it as well. And certainly, beautiful music emerges from this crucible in which myth, reality and genuine strife come together.

Aditya Modak deserves special credit not only for his newfound acting skills, but also for reining in the virtuosity we know him to be capable of, and presenting renditions of Sharad's singing that remain authentic to the character's musical evolution as the plot of the film progresses. Without a doubt, a lot of the credit for making this possible must go to Aneesh Pradhan's musicological direction. Whether it is borrowing from early twentieth-century masters to condense what would typically be hour-long performances into only a few powerful and satisfying minutes, or the riveting depictions of Sharad's laboured attempts at riyaz, Pradhan and the musicians are flawless. Modak, Dr. Arun Dravid, Deepika Bhide-Bhagwat, Pt. Omkar Gulvady, and the many other real-life musicians in the film have all been impeccably cast and play their roles with the same commitment and sincerity they regularly bring to the Hindustani stage. The film's sound design also deserves special mention, especially in its brilliant use of an increasingly dissonant and increasingly oppressive tanpura.

Scenes depicting Sharad's training, practice and performance are evocative and perfectly pitched. The music you hear in the film is precisely what the attempts of a capable, talented, struggling young singer of Sharad's temperament would sound like in real life. Tamhane is perhaps the only filmmaker who has been able to depict the courage it can take to sing even a single note, even when practicing in solitude, for fear of disrupting the rich tapestry of tunefulness and memory a tanpura can create. I have felt and continue to feel this very peculiar fear, just as I have felt the despondency of being unable to inhabit the raag or bandish at hand; and I have also felt the indescribable elation, the inner glow one feels when one manages, in spite of oneself, to sing before an audience something worthy of their appreciation. I have, like Sharad, spent countless hours trying to make sense of a raag, trying to find meaningfulness and cohesion in it and hinging upon my success or failure in doing so my entire conception of my own self-worth. Also, like Sharad, I have romanticized my struggle, naively imagining myself a traveler on a quest no one really understands; as (always) being only a few years of practice away from possessing true music. Perhaps this is the nature of the beast. There was a time when the sound of the tanpura on old recordings, like the ones Sharad incessantly listens to - punctuated by the incessant scratching of the gramophone needle - sounded more authentic to me than the sound of the beautiful instrument that is my everyday companion.

But over the years, my tanpura has come to represent possibility and potential for me. For Sharad, it increasingly represents an unattainable and constantly receding horizon. Unlike Sharad, I have learnt to take myself less seriously and, importantly, to let the wider world - both human and musical - inside my little fortress of gharaanedaari. This Sharad never manages to do, and it is perhaps this failure that The Disciple is a such a brilliant study of. Even in Metropolitan Mumbai we find Sharad, already closeted in a very clearly defined social group, adamantly distancing himself from alternative approaches to music and the daily business of living. From its thaali-houses to its cult-like yoga classes, Sharad can only seek recourse from one end of this silo by entering another. He cannot step outside. In accordance with Maai's diktats, his music must be pure, authentic, spiritual and (perhaps most dangerously), always 'correct' - and he depends for his understanding of all these tropes on members of that same social group. He aims for a music that he cannot create because he cannot conceive of sounds and structures that meet these exalted criteria. His wants to live up to Maai's rhetoric - but that rhetoric deems the simple goal of creating and sharing beauty unworthy. Indeed, the term beauty, saundarya, is conspicuously absent from Maai's lexicon.

The most moving moments in the film for me are the ones where there is glimpsed the tantalizing possibility of Sharad finding an escape hatch and discovering his own music. There are the riyaz sessions, imbued with palpable tension, where the raag eludes Sharad. But does it elude him because he is incompetent, or because his tradition tells him that any twist he might give it is probably an 'incorrect' move? As I watched Sharad struggle, it occurred to me that a number of movements I have been taught as being essential to Shuddha Sarang - the raag Sharad sings - were missing from his version of it, and yet - and this is the beauty of raag-sangeet - Sharad's rendition was unambiguously Shuddha Sarang! But this wonderful plurality that the Khayal has always accommodated becomes a casualty of Sharad's quest for authenticity and propriety.

Then there is the music collector (played to the hilt by Prasad Vanarase) the young Sharad meets who punctures his bubble and destroys his mythos; or the reality show contestant who provides the foil to Sharad's quest and achieves fame and glamour, and is certainly not musically incompetent. But Sharad is incredulous at their transgressions and continues to seek validation only from his guru and the mythology he and Maai represent. Their competence – as teachers, if not as musicians - he cannot bring himself to question. Irreverence is not an option. Alternative histories, other genres, even the potentially fulfilling job of teaching music are never sources of wonder or joy for him. They remain evils and distractions that he must endure.

Where Tamhane really stages a coup though is the sequence towards the end of the film where a distracted Sharad begins a performance of raag Miya Malhar and finds it impossible to weave the threads of the raag into a cohesive whole. He has gotten rid of his Maai tapes and his guru is dead. His tethers to his tradition have been broken and he wanders aimlessly through the by lanes of the raag. For me, it is in the disconnected, disorderly strands of Malhar that Sharad toys with that one gets, for the first and only time in the film, a glimpse of Sharad's own voice, the possibility of him finding his own aesthetic and making the tradition his own. But Sharad is overwhelmed - perhaps by this very possibility that seems sacrilegious to him - and walks off stage. This music belongs to venerable sages! How could it possibly be his own? I cannot praise the conception of this scene enough. It is probably the most dramatic scene in a movie that is spectacular for its lack of overstated drama. The dissonance of the tanpura, the choice of raag, the magnificent pauses that punctuate Sharad's struggle with it - Tamhane, Pradhan and Modak have created something special here.

Sharad, though, survives. He discovers the permanent anxiety of the impending loss of heritage that is always available to practitioners of the 'traditional' arts and, on that pretext, sets about making a living by teaching and disseminating archival material. He starts a family - and discovers therein some of the simple joy his musical life has failed to give him. Was Sharad incompetent? Who is to judge this and how? Therein, I think, lies the nub of the thing. As comedian Stephen Fry says, the thing that most characterizes the British comedian (as opposed to his American counterpart) is the comedy he extracts from his failure to live up to his heritage. Sharad's musical life is a quest to live up to his heritage, instead of coming to terms with the fact that his heritage, inevitably, lives inside him. The Disciple ends with a moving song by a folk singer in a train who sings a Gorakhnath bhajan. His voice is magnetic and grabs Sharad's attention for a minute, before he realizes that, like most other things, he cannot accommodate this melody into his musical world. He does not know what to do with it, and he looks away. The text of the bhajan is poignantly relevant - 'On the edge of the well was planted the seed of a tamarind tree'. Sharad remains on the edges of the well of musicianship. The freedom of the plunge is not for him.