Reading Raga’n Josh
Last week, I listed a few books as candidates for my next read. I’m happy to report that I’ve abandoned all of them and, prodded by a list of books about India I stumbled upon, picked up an entirely different one. I chanced upon it at the 2020 Chennai Book Fair and it looks like its time has finally arrived.
Raga’n Josh by Sheila Dhar is an autobiography of her growing up years, as well as encounters with bureaucrats and an assortment of celebrities, particularly classical musicians. A Hindustani classical singer of the Kirana gharana, Dhar was born in pre-Partition India and grew up in Delhi, eventually going on to study and live in the US for a while. Thirty pages into the book, I’m in the familiar territory of a large family, its sprawling home, and jumble of personalities.
There are the patriarchs with their unbending stances, the pliant women who live to serve their men, the daughter of the house who insists on tormenting her sister-in-law, and the cousins who live on the periphery and are singled out for their eccentricities. Then, as the children grow into adolescence, girls go to convents, and ideas mix and bubble, the inevitable inter-generational clash occurs.
Interestingly, this is the third Delhi autobiography I’m reading in as many years. I first read Ved Mehta’s book, The Ledge between the Streams, followed by Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees. Both talked of large families, relationships, trips, food, and the horrors of Partition. While a key theme in Mehta’s book was how he dealt with his blindness on his way to a successful writing career, Jaffrey spoke of the influence of food on her upbringing. In the first few chapters of Raga’n Josh, Dhar talks of her family’s associations with the Mughal courts and the adoption of related traditions, especially in their leanings towards poetry and music. Simultaneously, as British loyalists, they sought to bring in Western traditions, which reflected in their food and choice of schools. There is a strong emphasis on the Mathur Kayastha identity through all of this, and I’m curious to know why. Was the entire clan so disposed? Jaffrey belongs to the same community and in this sample size of two, I do see a pattern.
There is a good amount of name-dropping on the blurb on the jacket. Bhimsen Joshi, Kesarbai Kerkar, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, and Indira Gandhi are all to make an appearance. Thanks to her marriage to PN Dhar, economist and Principal Secretary to Gandhi during the Emergency, Sheila Dhar was part of the inner circle of power. I can’t wait to see what is coming up in the chapters ahead, but I’m also in no hurry to finish the book. The writing is neat and evocative, and of course, there is comfort in familiarity on some days, no matter how difficult the truths narrated might be, and even if you disagree with the writer. I like knowing that I have it to look forward to.
