An Ode to Music and the Power of Art
Artwork: Vardal Caniş
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Seasonal depression paves its way even through the narrow intricacies of my bustling yet tired teenage life. It is a come and go as you please situation, bin bulaye mehmaan; like the PTCL WiFi that disconnects at the onset of something interesting that is being discussed in an online class.
I went to the terrace, the October chill had set in the air around Lahore and so had the smog. The moon was like a dirty smudge, with the foul smell of something burning in the air. I tried thinking of the smell of petrol and how I’ve always loved it. When I first learned about the biochemical reasoning behind depression in psychology class, I imagined those chemicals as petrol. A viscous liquid inside the brain. When it decreases in quantity, the person stops functioning, like a car without petrol. As weird as the analogy sounds, this is what depression is to me in a nutshell.
Autumn to me means waking up on a Sunday morning and not wanting to scream in rage when my crusty eyes witness the red dot on the AC indicating that it’s turned off. There are no sweat-drenched clothes, itching and burning up your feet to ruin your morning. Mashrou Leila’s Inni Mnih in Hamed Sino’s intense voice was still on a loop in my head when the first thing I did on waking up was to search for a cover of the
Song. The strategy to avoid worrying about all deadlines and assignments by sleeping for fourteen hours could not be applied again but lying in bed for another hour seemed a fruitful decision at that moment. The inability to carry out the simplest of things had begun to hover over me already. I found the perfect cover on the first search. It felt ethereal for a moment, their voice was beautiful in an unexplainable way. I finally jumped out of the bed and scrolled vigorously for more covers. For a moment the debilitating aspect that occupied me was overpowered by a force stronger than what was dominant.
“They passed away the very next day they recorded this cover,” the comments read. There was again an overpowering feeling clawing my entire existence but this time it wasn’t just sadness caused by some chemical imbalance in my brain, it was grief. But why did I care? Why was my chest suddenly so heavy? This was an absurd and unwelcome addition to my emotions. I don’t know what was about the song in
the first place, sung in a foreign language that I only associate with reciting Quranic verses.
I wanted to change the world, I don't know how the world changed me
I wanted to carry the sky on my shoulders. Now I have trouble carrying myself.
Let’s just say that I am okay
Let’s just say that I am okay
I chuckled, the lyrics resonated with the state I found myself in on my worst days. Like a younger sibling who insists on getting the same toy as the older, my sadness and grief were looking for ways to come out as something whole and complete. But I had to contain that force. Yes, my grief and pain weren’t necessarily tragic per se. “Disenfranchised grief” was the closest term in the English language for my complicated sentiments. As minor as it seemed when the world was falling apart in a global pandemic, my
sadness was still valid and required healing. I returned to that one-minute video clip every night for two weeks because I couldn’t get anything else done. It was a cathartic experience. Interestingly one of my favourite ghazals to listen to, one I keep returning back to is Kuch toh Duniya Ki immortalized by Begum
Akhtar written by Sudarshan Fakir. The poetry is strikingly similar to the lyrics of Inni Mnih, I chuckled again.
Kuch toh duniya ki inaayat ne dil tod diya
Aur kuch talkh-i-halaat ne dil tod diya
This world's benefaction broke my heart to some extentAnd then by bitter circumstance partly my heart was rent
Why was it that songs, poetry and couplets about pain and sadness breathed life into me and served as a relief for my pain? Ideally, anyone in a deep and intense sadness like mine would require something drastically cheerful and uplifting, rainbows and unicorns. As the first few days passed and I continued to listen to that cover, my sentiments toward it transformed. It no longer brought me pain, grief and
sadness. The Big Three seemed to be held back. A quick google search will list various reasons for why we tend to grieve for people we don’t know: “They grieve for how the relationship could have been, should have been, or would have been had things have been different.”
I don’t know what or why plunged me into this grief. Whenever my mother pulls out dusty tattered albums a nostalgic smell from the black and white photographs as the residue of times and tales long gone by wafts up to my nostrils. This cover was like one of those dusty albums but for what could and can be. The comforting voice was the smell of photographs accompanied by layers of imagination and joyous thoughts. I discovered more of Mashrou Leila’s albums and delved even deeper into Arabic music, and learned about recent Lebanese history. Within the next few days, I was beginning to draw parallels between South
Asian literature and music with that of the Middle East. I was obsessed with a completely new thing altogether. There was something to look forward to now. All of this very strongly made me ponder over the connection between music and our emotions. Music has the ability to stay with us and it associates itself with a particular time period in our memories. Listening to that piece of music means reliving that moment again. Your body is etched in the present but your mental state is constantly travelling.
It is after all scientifically proven through multiple studies that listening to music fuels up different parts of our brains and we experience a plethora of emotions ranging from one end of the spectrum to the other. Mathur et al. in their study on Hindustani classical music went a step further and were able to show that while listening to even one Raag, the participants were able to experience distinct and opposite emotions between the ‘alap’ and ‘gat’ period of the Raag. Ragas in Hindustani and Carnatic classical music are melodic frameworks upon which the musician can improvise and therefore the Sanskrit word ‘Raga’ literally means ‘coloring’ or ‘dyeing’. The Raag then serves as a building block or a foundation stone for the musician to improvise and build upon and create an aura among their listeners.
In Hindustani classical music (North Indian classical music) different ragas are associated with different times of the day to create or induce a specific mood. Others are associated with different seasons. Raag Bhairav and Bilawal for example are associated with the morning, to calm the nerves and bring out
devotion and focus at the start of the day. Raag Bahar, as the name suggests, is to be rendered preferably in the spring season, while Raag Megh Malhar is performed as an invitation to rains. It was created by Miyan Tansen, a 16th-century Indian musician who lived during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar and performed in his court. The legend goes, Emperor Akbar once requested Tansen to perform the Raga
Deepak, the Raag of light/fire. The word ‘Deepak’ comes from Sanskrit and means ‘source of light’ and today in Hindi it means ‘lamp’. Tansen’s emotive singing created a hot, flustered environment engulfing the court in flames. To counter that, Tansen’s daughter (or wife, this is not clear) rendered the Raga Megh Malhaar as taught by her father and brought down rains, saving her father and the Emperor’s court.
This legend has reached me in present-day Lahore through Mughal era Fatehpur Sikri; dodging the hurdles of colonial rule and the tragedy of partition and migration. The fact that it is still widely known today is a testament to Tansen’s rendition of the ragas that was so full of emotion and in touch with nature that his
audience was able to connect and feel the physical presence of fire and rain. We do not know much about Tansen’s life. I wonder if he ever listened to songs in other languages and swayed to the music.
The late Kishori Amonkar, a famous Hindustani classical vocalist of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, very aptly elaborated on the purpose of art in an interview:
“Whatever forms of art exist, i.e. music, dance, literature and drama, these are all art forms and the main purpose of art is to manifest these feelings. The emotions and sentiments hidden within us, to embody them, this is art. And the texts of any art form, its purpose is also to help manifest these emotions. It is for this reason that we as artists learn the texts and lyrics of art forms in order to manifest the expression or the hidden emotion within us which cannot be seen externally. So to see that hidden emotion within us, there is another way, by the means of art.”
What that hidden emotion(s) in me brought out by the cover artist probably was that I was able to feel their loss without ever knowing them and grieving them. Toni Morrison in her novel The Bluest Eye described anger like this: “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.” It wasn’t anger for me. It was a plethora of emotions that I simply cannot neatly categorize given their contrasting nature; I do know however that I felt a “reality and presence.” A gloomy outlook was therefore reconstructed and my depressive episode no longer pulled me down. It’s always the little things, I wonder; a foreign language partly alien, a stranger on the internet, an indie pop song, an acoustic guitar.
The smog with its charred smell still enveloped the city stronger than ever before. There's always a price to pay, I thought. I didn’t complain.
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