What Shifted For The Shehnai On 22 January 2024

The interaction between Sanatana history and music is profound. The effects of this interaction are visible when its agents are on the right side of history.

On 22 January 2024, purohits, pujaris, and devotee-dignitaries present at the garbha griha of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya were on the right side of history, just as were musicians from across India who were invited to offer raag seva to Ramlalla during the Pran Pratishtha rituals.

On this day, shehnai, the wind musical instrument, registered its civilisational transition in a symbolic journey from ‘Benaras’ to Kashi, and in a physical journey between Kashi and Ayodhya.

In this journey of the shehnai, Ramlalla would become its primordial destination and Goswami Tulsidas the spiritual and creative stimulus.

During the Pran Pratishtha rituals, when the iconic and signature ascent — mandra nishad-rishabh (re)-gandhar (ga), in the melodic depiction of the words “Shri Ram” in Goswami Tulsidas’s eternal work of devotion, Shri Rama Chandra Kripalu Bhajaman — left the shehnai, ‘catharsis’ would announce its presence.

While the veena led the true depiction of Ram’s Ayodhya on the day of Pran Pratishtha, the shehnai 'humanised’ the ‘voice’ and depth of the devotee’s surrender to the deity.

Pandit Durga Prasad Prasanna, who played the shehnai in raag seva that day, told this writer: “Yeh sangeet bhagwaan ka hee sangeet hai (this music belongs to and is a manifestation of the supreme himself). I chose to play Shri Ramachandra Kripalu

Bhajamana because it is one of the truest depictions of Bhagwan Ram in literature and music. The form in sahitya and the form of the deity found their most natural response.”

Keertan ignited the movement for the reclamation of Ram Janmabhoomi in independent India for the first time in 1949 and continued to bind devotees coming to Ayodhya for centuries. Raag seva, however, eminently celebrated in temple music elsewhere in Bharat, was conspicuously absent in the context of Ram Janmabhoomi.

With the raag seva on 22 January 2024, music rediscovered itself as a devotional offering in Sanatani history.

This might prompt people not inclined to Sanatana Dharma and Sanatana continuity to build an argument on the ‘origins’ of the shehnai, implying that it is “foreign.” They may do well to remind themselves that Krishna, a swaroop of Vishnu himself, plays the flute, the wind instrument derived from nature, and the shehnai, comfortably falling under the classification of “sushir vadya” — wind instrument — based on structure and, hence, use, is as Indic as her mother, the flute.

The Sound of Civilisational Persistence

On 22 January last year, the shehnai found the one moment of its musical glory and spiritual purpose that was way greater in stature than its presence and part playing out during the “tryst of destiny” moment on 15 August 1947.

I say this because an auspicious emotional closure to a civilisation’s persistence in devotion is of greater consequence than a civilisational-state’s pursuit of chequered political destiny.

It is hard not to look at the sleight of irony in the shehnai’s destiny and role during the two fundamentally different watershed events. While the shehnai has been known and celebrated for marking the day of India’s Independence, it found the prime moment of spiritual significance exactly 75 years from the “tryst with destiny” moment.

What Shehnai Gained That Day

During the five centuries that Hindus struggled and sacrificed to secure a mandir for their deity, Ramlalla, the preservation of shehnai vaadan as a temporal art was in process and progress in Benaras under the custodial mantle of raag seva centring on the Kashi Vishwanath Mandir.

During the decades of independent India, the shehnai seems to have been reduced to a symbol of India’s ‘syncretism,’ even as the popular narrative on this musical instrument successfully kept the Pandits practising the shehnai scrunched to the backroom of glory.

In this historical and cultural context, here is what the shehnai gained in its devotional offering on 22 January 2024.

It got demystified in the raag seva offered to Ramlalla. Pandit Durga Prasad Prasanna’s musical offering asserted the role of the shehnai as an instrument of profoundly personal expression and equally as a significant component of Sanatani devotion and devotional spaces.

Next. In the wafting of the Shri Ramachandra Kripalu Bhajaman, it showed that some rare events need expression where emotion and emotional articulation come before performance and performative.

Next. The shehnai became the voice of millions of Hindus, singularly, on its breath and wind of expression. 

Next. Truth and beauty took form over the seven-beat cycle, bringing the realisation that “Raghunand,” “Anandkand,” “Kosala-chanda,” “Dashrathanandana” himself was manifesting precisely the way Goswami Tulsidas had delineated his gentle and luminous attributes.

Next: That day, right after the shehnai depicted the words “Kandarp Aganit…” in musicality, it took a pause. Maybe for catching a breath. Or maybe for taking a moment from its tubular throats becoming overwhelmed by the rare meeting of three aspects — the meaning in the moment, the luminous discontinuance of grief, and remnants of the grief led by elation.

More. Something extraordinary happened during that pause in the shehnai. The sitar picked from where the shehnai left and led, and the veena, in measured and magnificent composure, created an improvisation in retrospection.

The shehnai collected its breath to express emotion not in tears but in the fulfilling, flourishing fervency of an aalaap, exploring its own exceptional brilliance in vocalising devotion.

Pandit Durga Prasanna adds: “The emotion involved in performing on that day cannot be described or recalled. The shehnai is a difficult instrument when it comes to carrying the weight of the emotion of the Pran Pratishtha at Ram Mandir after such a long wait.”

Pandit Durga Prasanna managed to usher in a shift in the long-celebrated verdict of the shehnai's eminence as a musical instrument celebrating mere ‘auspices,’ as he offered the musical rendition of Shri Ram Chandra Kripalu Bhajaman.

This musical rendition, embraced in the sound of the veenas, sitar, and flute, represented the final surge that releases emotion from the precipice of patience and piety.

In independent India, the shehnai has remained grandly distant from the sacred — and the idea of sacred — unlike the nadaswaram, the flute, the magnificently 'western' saxophone, even.

Previous decades could have seen the systematic encouraging of duets in raag seva — featuring the Pandits of Benaras practising the shehnai with the numerous stalwarts propagating the nadaswaram, Vidwan N Gopalakrishna Iyer (saxophone), and Kadri Gopalnath (saxophone). It did not happen. Opportunities passed, just as the maestros passed.

Adding to the scarcity of the shehnai’s own presence in the temple ecosystem is the absence of any attempt at exploring the shehnai’s role in the Hindu vivaha for an ambitious launch into the temple ecosystem across Uttar Pradesh.

The ambitious musical ensemble on 22 January 2024 caused a shift for the musical instrument synonymous with Kashi — the abode of Shiva — to the abode of Ram.

Ayodhya must now become its second home.