Through Kolkata’s Chaos: A Faded Memory of Jazz and Anarchy

I. Prologue: Discord in the Dust

Forty-three years ago, I navigated Kolkata’s wounded heart—a city gasping under metro excavation, its arteries choked with dust and dissent. Amid this urban disarray, I arrived at the 1982 Jazz Yatra—a festival no less tumultuous in sound and spirit. The night would come to haunt me in glimmers: L. Shankar’s double-neck electric violin keening through ragas and riffs, Zakir Hussain’s tabla bridging gharana precision with syncopated rebellion. The music, though magnificent, collided with the crowd’s frenzy—liquor bottles clinking, voices rising in chaotic applause.

To my younger self, a music lover shaped by the solemn austerity of Hindustani sangeet and the devotional cadence of Bihar’s folk traditions, this was not liberation. It was an affront. Jazz, in all its improvisational swagger, seemed like the very anarchy reflected in Kolkata’s torn streets. Back then, I turned away—wounded by what I could not yet understand.

II. A City in Flux, A Mind in Conflict

Kolkata in 1982 was a city suspended in time—its colonial bones exposed by progress, its future being tunneled beneath cracked pavements and honking rickshaws. I held a season pass to the Yatra, likely at Rabindra Sadan, though the venue now dissolves into haze. What remains is the atmosphere—electric, disordered, tinged with the scent of rebellion.

Shankar’s electric violin sliced through the night like a blade of sound—sliding from the hues of Raga Charukeshi into jazz’s uncharted domains. Beside him, Zakir’s tabla thundered with the virtuosic command of the Punjab Gharana, yet now intertwined with alien meters and polyrhythms. This was no sabha. This was spectacle.

The audience—elegantly disheveled Kolkatans, expatriates in loose linen, young women in Indo-Western silks—sipped from flasks, shouted mid-phrases, treating the performance not as a rite, but as a release. The sanctity of silence, that reverent hush between taans in a classical mehfil, was shattered. And I recoiled.

III. Inheritance of Discipline: Gharana and the Cage

My unease was not merely sensory—it was philosophical. Raised on AIR broadcasts and temple bhajans, my musical compass was drawn to form: to the talas of tradition, to the soul-mapping architecture of raga. My allegiance lay with the gharanas—custodians of legacy, keepers of kalā.

Years later, while interviewing the great Ustad Allah Rakha for Navbharat Times, I witnessed this fidelity firsthand. When I gently invoked Kumar Gandharva’s critique—that “kuligiri” (blind gharana loyalty) could ossify creativity—the Ustad stiffened. His tabla, he insisted, was not bound, but anchored. Legacy was not a leash but a lineage.

In 1982, I agreed. Zakir’s daring departures and Shankar’s synthesized surges felt like treason. I mistook their transgressions for shallowness, not yet understanding that mastery often expresses itself through rebellion.

IV. Gandharva’s Ghost: Freedom as Devotion

Yet it was Kumar Gandharva, the heretic of Hindustani music, who would haunt my judgment. Trained in the Gwalior tradition, he had dismantled gharana orthodoxy to embrace the raw, aching purity of Nirguni Bhajans—songs of the formless, of the free. His music was minimalist yet profound, steeped in the belief that paramarth (spiritual essence) required a shedding of inherited skin.

In hindsight, the Jazz Yatra was not a desecration, but an invocation of that very ethos. Zakir, despite his gharana pedigree, used its rhythmic genome to speak in tongues with jazz drummers. Shankar, steeped in Carnatic discipline, turned his instrument into a global conduit—translating raga into a shared improvisational grammar.

In 1982, I lacked the ears—and perhaps the humility—to hear this.

V. The Crowd: Where Cultures Collide

And then, there was the crowd. They were not mine. Their body language, their vocal exuberance, their alcohol-fueled abandon—all felt jarring, almost profane. These were not rasikas, who close their eyes and inhale a taan like a benediction. These were cultural voyeurs, I thought, flaunting cosmopolitanism while missing the music.

Looking back, I realize this was a clash not just of aesthetics, but of class, geography, and identity. They embodied a globalized Kolkata I didn’t yet understand—rooted in the East, reaching for the West. Their revelry mirrored jazz’s rejection of deference. But I, born of Bihar’s devotional soil, needed my silences, my structures.

VI. In Retrospect: A Musician Learns to Listen

Forty-three years have passed. The Kolkata Metro now glides beneath the city it once shattered. The memories remain fragmentary—a luminous violin, a tabla’s thunder, a chaos I fled from.

But age, like time, mellows prejudice. As a composer weaving Bihar’s folk idioms with contemporary forms, I now recognize that tension is not treason. It is truth. Zakir and Shankar were not anarchists—they were architects of a new soundscape. They did not break tradition; they bent it toward evolution.

Zakir, heir to Allah Rakha’s legacy, has taken the Punjab Gharana global without diluting its essence. Shankar’s violin, once alien to my ears, now seems prophetic—a prototype of Indo-Western confluence. Kumar Gandharva was right: great music does break bonds. But Allah Rakha, too, was right: it is in knowing the bonds that one can transcend them.

VII. Epilogue: The Music Between Memory and Meaning

That night in 1982, as I walked through Kolkata’s debris-strewn streets, I felt estranged—from the music, the city, perhaps even myself. Today, I see it differently. That chaos, both sonic and civic, was not destruction. It was creation. A necessary tumult before transformation.

What I mistook for anarchy was, in fact, the birth of a new idiom—rooted in India, reaching outward. What I feared as dilution was fusion. And what I dismissed as performance was, perhaps, prayer in another form.

I still revere the silence between the notes, the rigor of raga, the purity of tala. But I also cherish the glissando that defies scale, the jazz riff that ruptures time, the cultural hybridity that remakes memory.

In those faded glimpses—Shankar’s electric cry, Zakir’s playful defiance, the clamor of a crowd too alive to sit still—I now find not discord, but dialogue. A jazz of thought, an anarchy of becoming.

And so, I ask you, dear reader: what musical memory once confounded you? And what might it teach you, if you dared to listen again?

By Binod Narayan Singh