GHOSTS of MALKAUNS

Riyaz Latif

Prologue

This essay owes its origin to an episode related to me by the late Professor M. A. Dhaky (1927-2016). While renowned as an art and architectural historian of the highest order whose contributions to the study of premodern Indian sacred structures and their art forms are unparalleled, Dhaky was also a renaissance polymath of  a kind; along with art and architectural history, he made serious forays into ancient Indian thought, Jain studies, Indian classical music and musicology, horticulture, and gemology, producing research papers in all these areas. One  of his pleasant eccentricities was his belief in the existence of astral presences, spirits and ghosts, and the  incident he narrated to me centers on the purportedly paranormal effects of the raga Malkauns. He had heard from  earlier ustads and pandits that one should never sing Malkauns when alone in the night, for it attracts spirits and  jinns into the presence of the singer. He told me how his master was once immersed in Malkauns at midnight on the  banks of the Ganges in Banaras, when he encountered for a moment, a flashing, frightening, radiant, otherworldly presence, and how that unnerving experience resulted in his master’s inadvertent drop from the ghats into the  waters of the Ganges. The odd “lyricism” of this narrative has remained with me since, and now finds a resting place in the disarrayed reflections in this little piece. Trying to masquerade as serious thoughts, these naïve musings are  humbly and affectionately dedicated to Professor Dhaky’s memory.

 

W

hen water draped in mystery gently laps against the windswept stones of the ghats; when darkness masks  darkness, and horizons are obliterated; when the encompassing solitude induces all astral constellations to converge  upon the infinite-density core of a resonant melody; when the trajectory of elements is consummated, and the  primality of structured sound summons the animate and the inanimate to its ethereal realm…there appears, for an  imperceptible moment, a lightning, radiant presence – ephemeral, otherworldly, frighteningly fluid, and blinding in  its luminescence. It flashes past as it appears. Then, in an instant, all is the dark solitude of the primeval…

The presumptuous attempt in the preceding lines is merely to supply a phantasmal visualization of the soul- exposition of Malkauns, that majestic raga of Indian classical music. Rendered to its utmost refinement, it is alleged  to cause a markedly disconcerting experience, brought about by a fractional contact with the otherworldly presence. Our rational minds may hurriedly banish phenomena such as the above to the netherworlds of the absurd.  But let us permit ourselves some indulgence and embrace the  unfettered lyricism of this occurrence at its face value. Let us contingently resonate with the paranormal effects of Malkauns’ aesthetically structured sound – a sound shaped by the exacting strictures of its grammatical permutations, but with potential to transcend itself at each moment of its evolution. It is a sound, which, while keeping the physiognomic conditions of its melody intact,  absorbs within its being the indefinable manifestations lying outside the realities of our space and time. The  exposition of this sound, however, must be infused with consummate intensity, precision, and emotion for it to cast  open – even for a microscopic interval – realms otherwise inaccessible to us. And we must also submit to the  unsurpassable fragility that resides in this auditory concoction: one incongruous breath could wipe away the  luminous incidence of the ghosts of Malkauns.

The melodic makeup of Malkauns, reverberating within the frontiers of its prescribed aural contours, quietly unseals  several firmaments; for an infinitesimal interlude, it sanctions permeability between mutually exclusive planes of  existence. It would almost seem that this articulated sound, molded into the distinctive structure and nature of  Malkauns, acquires an occult authority to link two or more realms of existence seemingly independent of each other.  Sound, shaped and refracted through the prism of a distinctive musical grammar, is of canonical primacy  here, for no melodic structure other than that of Malkauns – rendered with requisite emotion and insight – is known  to have the influence to attract otherworldly liminal presences into our world. Let us articulate it as a fusion:  an amalgam of the somatic as well as the immaterial properties of this structured sound, which act upon the  surrounding spatial configurations, opening up vistas to entice entities from unknown planes. In a flash, spaces unacquainted with each other become promiscuous in the sense that they seamlessly attract and facilitate the  back and forth movement of presences from the hitherto unconnected domains of existence. Spirits and ghosts  converge upon Malkauns, transgressing the traditional codes of movement between realms veiled from each other. As that connoisseur of nothingness, E. M. Cioran, lucidly states: “music defeats matter and a few airy tunes, a melodious breeze blowing from the soul, have the power of a blowtorch, melting all our material shackles in its  intense flames.”¹ Sound as a primal force, thus, harbors within its being an untapped attribute of permeability  between realms, overseeing a transmigration of presences, empowering their appearance in our dimension in a  material form.

Let us stay with our ruminations a bit more: let us imagine Malkauns gathering up all the cosmic frequencies into its soul. In the exposition of its structured soundscape, the raga seamlessly initiates resonances between elements confined to apparently unrelated planes of existence to forge a continuum so that the fluid arrival of the luminous  chimeric entities becomes a possibility on the stately vibrating axis of its being. However, the structured rendition of Malkauns teleporting otherworldly entities into our spatial-temporal field is also a phenomenon marked by slight  visual incoherence. The ghost-spirit, which makes an appearance by the virtue of a distinctive soundscape, is  blinding to such a degree that its contours are profoundly undefined. This chimeric presence revels in a sparkling  momentariness; it chisels its identity out of a nebulous nonstationary disposition. Becoming the expression of its own unconsummated geometry, it projects onto its interlocutor all the visual ambiguity smeared on its being. The visual-corporeal indistinctness of Malkauns’ ghost and its momentariness are of foremost consequence here: the  exercise in permeability, however accomplished in its lyricism, is instantly reversible for all purposes. Even an  unborn thought renders this elemental display futile; spaces retreat into their own selves with their secret barriers  reinstated, and forms revert to their own exclusive planes. The sensitive spirits, the ghosts of Malkauns, do not linger longer than a blink in our dimension!

In a somewhat maverick context, it is tempting to view this play of sound, ghosts, and promiscuous planes of  existence as evocative of Shiva’s cosmic dance of annihilation. According to traditions related to the genesis of  Malkauns, the raga is resolutely bound to Shiva, and surely merits the analogous imagery of aural resonance,  transcendence, and breaking open of spaces with presences moving back and forth between them, as well as an  ultimate dissolution of things into unbound nothingness. The imagery of Malkauns, in the metaphorical shadow of  Shiva’s Tandava, delineates the decisive annihilation of the perceptible universe – cosmos disintegrating into  dimensions beyond the frontiers of the logical, the perceivable, or the conjectural. It is the known resonating with the  occult motions of the unknown; it is sound inaugurating the panorama of ultimate disappearance. The  structured sound of Malkauns and its motions, thus, function as a will to order a communion of myriad dimensions,  to concurrently precipitate the dissimulation of things into the beyond.

Further, it would be worthwhile to pause and reflect on the time prescribed for the exposition of Malkauns.  Customarily, the time-domain for singing Malkauns is in the proximate vicinity of midnight, in the embrace of proverbial unbound darkness. Now pure darkness, in its pervasive encompassing bearing, is a medium which effects  a tabula rasa by virtue of reducing all visual faculties to nothingness. It wipes the horizons clean. Through a skillful  spectacle of absences, it simulates infinitude, and enables the infusion, evolution, and propagation of interminable possibilities in its womb. In possession of such properties, it becomes the most malleable domain to receive and accommodate Malkauns’ ghosts from invisible dimensions; it becomes an apt medium, receptive to the occult effects of structured sound, supremely amenable to the uncharted transgressive modes of transcendence.

The structured resonances of Malkauns enabling the spirits-ghosts to make transmigratory sojourns, and conversely, the raga itself becoming manifest in the cryptic movements of those other-worldly spirits, both as a seamless whole, establish  bridges between seemingly exclusive, independent fields of force. Fractionally emancipated from the spatial-temporal laws of their existential planes, ghosts arrive as ephemeral luminous presences to forge an occult  correspondence with the beckoning primality of Malkauns’ structured sounds. Spaces open up, and the aural  trajectory of Malkauns becomes an arch stringing mutually unknown planes into each other. The sound and ghosts,  in the final reckoning, outline the singular ineffable unity of things.

Notes:
1 E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 53.
Visual courtesy: http://wallpapers.ae/ganges-river-sunset-wallpaper.html/ganges-river-sunset-wallpaper
Riyaz Latif is a Urdu poet and Riyaz Latif  holds a doctoral degree in art history with a primary concentration on premodern Maghrib (North Africa), and the Mediterranean basin. After a postdoctoral fellowship with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the MIT, he taught at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, USA. After his return to India in the summer of 2017. He is currently Associate Professor of Art History at FLAME University, Pune, India.