CAT 2000 Question Paper

The story begins as the European pioneers crossed the Alleghenies and started to settle in the Midwest. The land they found was covered with forests. With incredible efforts they felled the trees, pulled the stumps and planted their crops in the rich, loamy soil. When they finally reached the western edge of the place we now call Indiana, the forest stopped and ahead lay a thousand miles of the great grass prairie. The Europeans were puzzled by this new environment. Some even called it the “Great Desert”. It seemed untillable. The earth was often very wet and it was covered with centuries of tangled and matted grasses. With their cast iron plows, the settlers found that the prairie sod could not be cut and the wet earth stuck to their plowshares. Even a team of the best oxen bogged down after a few years of tugging. The iron plow was a useless tool to farm the prairie soil. The pioneers were stymied for nearly two decades. Their western march was hefted and they filled in the eastern regions of the Midwest.

In 1837, a blacksmith in the town of Grand Detour, Illinois, invented a new tool. His name was John Deere and the tool was a plow made of steel. It was sharp enough to cut through matted grasses and smooth enough to cast off the mud. It was a simple too, the “sod buster” that opened the great prairies to agricultural development.

Sauk Country, Wisconsin is the part of that prairie where I have a home. It is named after the Sauk Indians. In 1673 Father Marquette was the first European to lay his eyes upon their land. He found a village laid out in regular patterns on a plain beside the Wisconsin River. He called the place Prairie du Sac) The village was surrounded by fields that had provided maize, beans and squash for the Sauk people for generations reaching back into the unrecorded time.

When the European settlers arrived at the Sauk prairie in 1837, the government forced the native Sank people west of the Mississippi River. The settlers came with John Deere’s new invention and used the tool to open the area to a new kind of agriculture. They ignored the traditional ways of the Sank Indians and used their sod-busting tool for planting wheat. Initially, the soil was generous and the nurturing thrived. However each year the soil lost more of its nurturing power. It was only thirty years after the Europeans arrived with their new technology that the land was depleted, Wheat farming became uneconomic and tens of thousands of farmers left Wisconsin seeking new land with sod to bust.

It took the Europeans and their new technology just one generation to make their homeland into a desert. The Sank Indians who knew how to sustain themselves on the Sauk prairie land were banished to another kind of desert called a reservation. And they even forgot about the techniques and tools that had sustained them on the prairie for generations unrecorded. And that is how it was that three deserts were created — Wisconsin, the reservation and the memories of a people. A century later, the land of the Sauks is now populated by the children of a second wave of European tanners who learned to replenish the soil through the regenerative powers of dairying, ground cover crops and animal manures. These third and fourth generation farmers and townspeople do not realise, however, that a new settler is coming soon with an invention as powerful as John Deere’s plow.

The new technology is called ‘bereavement counselling’. It is a tool forged at the great state university, an innovative technique to meet the needs of those experiencing the death of a loved one, tool that an “process” the grief of the people who now live on the Prairie of the Sauk. As one can imagine the final days of the village of the Sauk Indians before the arrival of the settlers with John Deere’s plow, one can also imagine these final days before the arrival of the first bereavement counsellor at Prairie du Sac) In these final days, the farmers arid the townspeople mourn at the death of a mother, brother, son or friend. The bereaved is joined by neighbours and kin. They meet grief together in lamentation, prayer and song. They call upon the words of the clergy and surround themselves in community.

It is in these ways that they grieve and then go on with life. Through their mourning they are assured of the bonds between them and renewed in the knowledge that this death is a part of the Prairie of the Sauk. Their grief is common property, an anguish from which the community draws strength and gives the bereaved the courage to move ahead.

It is into this prairie community that the bereavement counsellor arrives with the new grief technology. The counsellor calls the invention a service and assures the prairie folk of its effectiveness and superiority by invoking the name of the great university while displaying a diploma and certificate. At first, we can imagine that the local people will be puzzled by the bereavement counsellor’s claim, However, the counsellor will tell a few of them that the new technique is merely o assist the bereaved’s community at the time of death. To some other prairie folk who are isolated or forgotten, the counsellor will approach the Country Board and advocate the right to treatment for these unfortunate souls. This right will be guaranteed by the Board’s decision to reimburse those too poor tc pay for counselling services. There will be others, schooled to believe in the innovative new tools certified by universities and medical centres, who will seek out the bereavement counsellor by force of habit. And one of these people will tell a bereaved neighbour who is unschooled that unless his grief is processed by a counsellor, he will probably have major psychological problems in later life. Several people will begin to use the bereavement counsellor because, since the Country Board now taxes them to insure access to the technology, they will feel that to fail to be counselled is to waste their money, and to be denied a benefit, or even a right.

Finally, one day, the aged father of a Sauk woman will die. And the next door neighbour will not drop by because he doesn’t want to interrupt the bereavement counsellor. The woman’s kin will stay home because they will have learned that only the bereavement counsellor knows how to process grief the proper way. The local clergy will seek technical assistance from the bereavement counsellor to learn the connect form of service to deal with guilt and grief. And the grieving daughter will know that it is the bereavement counsellor who really cares for her because only the bereavement counsellor comes when death visits this family on the Prairie of the Sauk.

It will be only one generation between the bereavement counsellor arrives and the community of mourners disappears. The counsellor’s new tool will cut through the social fabric, throwing aside kinship, care, neighbourly obligations and communality ways cc coming together and going on. Like John Deere’s plow, the tools of bereavement counselling will create a desert we a community once flourished, And finally, even the bereavement counsellor will see the impossibility of restoring hope in clients once they are genuinely alone with nothing but a service for consolation. In the inevitable failure of the service, the bereavement counsellor will find the deserts even in herself.

The teaching and transmission of North Indian classical music is, and long has been, achieved by largely oral means. The raga and its structure, the often breathtaking intricacies of talc, or rhythm, and the incarnation of raga and tala as bandish or composition, are passed thus, between guru and shishya by word of mouth and direct demonstration, with no printed sheet of notated music, as it were, acting as a go-between. Saussure’s conception of language as a communication between addresser and addressee is given, in this model, a further instance, and a new, exotic complexity and glamour.

These days, especially with the middle class having entered the domain of classical music and playing not a small part ensuring the continuation of this ancient tradition, the tape recorder serves as a handy technological slave and preserves, from oblivion, the vanishing, elusive moment of oral transmission. Hoary gurus, too, have seen the advantage of this device, and increasingly use it as an aid to instructing their pupils; in place of the shawls and other traditional objects that used to pass from shishya to guru in the past, as a token of the regard of the former for the latter, it is not unusual, today, to see cassettes changing hands.

Part of my education in North Indian classical music was conducted via this rather ugly but beneficial rectangle of plastic, which I carried with me to England when I was a undergraduate. Once cassette had stored in it various talas played upon the tabla, at various tempos, by my music teacher’s brother-in law, Hazarilalii, who was a teacher of Kathak dance, as well as a singer and a tabla player. This was a work of great patience and prescience, a one-and-a-half hour performance without my immediate point or purpose, but intended for some delayed future moment who I’d practise the talas solitarily.

This repeated playing our of the rhythmic cycles on the tabla was inflected by the noises-an hate auto driver blowing a horn; the sound bf overbearing pigeons that were such a nuisance on the banister; even the cry of a kulfi seller in summer —entering from the balcony of the third foot flat we occupied in those days, in a lane in a Bombay suburb, before we left the city for good. These sounds, in turn, would invade, hesitantly, the ebb and flow of silence inside the artificially heated room, in a borough of West London, in which I used to live as an undergraduate. There, in the trapped dust, silence and heat, the theka of the tabla, qualified by the imminent but intermittent presence of the Bombay subrub, would come to life again. A few years later, the tabla and, in the background, the pigeons and the itinerant kulfi seller, would inhabit a small graduate room in Oxford.

cThe tape recorder, though, remains an extension of the oral transmission of music, rather than a replacement of it. And the oral transmission of North Indian classical music remains, almost uniquely, testament to the fact that the human brain can absorb, remember and reproduces structures of great complexity and sophistication without the help of the hieroglyph or written mark or a system of notation. I remember my surprise on discovering the Hazarilalji- who had mastered Kathak dance, tala and North Indian classical music, and who used to narrate to me, occasionally, compositions meant for dance that were grant and intricate in their verbal prosody, architecture and rhythmic complexity- was near illustrate and had barely learnt to write his name in large and clumsy letters.

Of course, attempts have been made, throughout the 20th century, to formally codify and even notate this music, and institutions set up and degrees created, specifically to educate students in this “scientific” and codified manner. Paradoxically, however, this style of teaching has produced no noteworthy student or performer; the most creative musicians still emerge from the guru-shishya relationship, their understanding of music developed by oral communication.

The fact that North Indian classical music emanates from, and has evolved through, oral culture, means that this music has a significantly different aesthetic, aw that this aesthetic has a different politics, from that of Western classical music) A piece of music in the Western tradition, at least in its most characteristic and popular conception, originates in its composer, and the connection between the two, between composer and the piece of music, is relatively unambiguous precisely because the composer writes down, in notation, his composition, as a poet might write down and publish his poem. However far the printed sheet of notated music might travel thus from the composer, it still remains his property; and the notion of property remains at the heart of the Western conception of “genius”, which derives from the Latin gignere or ‘to beget’.

The genius in Western classical music is, then, the originator, begetter and owner of his work the printed, notated sheet testifying to his authority over his product and his power, not only of expression or imagination, but of origination. The conductor is a custodian and guardian of this property. IS it an accident that Mandelstam, in his notebooks, compares — celebratorily—the conductor’s baton to a policeman’s, saying all the music of the orchestra lies mute within it, waiting for its first movement to release it into the auditorium?

The raga — transmitted through oral means — is, in a sense, no one’s property; it is not easy to pin down its source, or to know exactly where its provenance or origin lies. Unlike the Western classical tradition, where the composer begets his piece, notates it and stamps it with his ownership and remains, in effect, larger than, or the father of, his work, in the North India classical tradition, the raga — unconfined to a single incarnation, composer or performer — remains necessarily greater than the artiste who invokes it.

This leads to a very different politics of interpretation and valuation, to an aesthetic that privileges the evanescent moment of performance and invocation over the controlling authority of genius and the permanent record. It is a tradition, thus, that would appear to value the performer, as medium, more highly than the composer who presumes to originate what, effectively, cannot be originated in a single person — because the raga is the inheritance of a culture.