Earlier this year, I experimented with transcription and notation systems to see whether music writing could enhance my practice and/or understanding of the tradition. These writings did not have prescriptive purposes, since I privileged embodied learning, through imitation, body-part counting and audio recording. Rather, they were attempts to represent the music, which became instead tools to look at the relationship between the music, my own assumptions and those implied in the notation systems I used. The composition I worked on is Chanchal Chatur, a bandish in Raag Bhopali rendered in Khyāl. The composer is unknown; such is the case of many pieces which were composed, for instance, by pupils, to be gifted to their teacher.
My first experiment with notation involved the use of a Romanised digital table based on the Bhatkhande notation system. This system was developed by Bhatkhande (1860-1936) as part of a nationalist project which aimed to systematize and democratize musical knowledge for easy access to the middle class, at the expenses of traditions of tawaifs (courtesan singers) and ustads (Bakhle, 1996; Subramanian, 2000).
In the 1933 All-India conference, Bhatkhande stated: “I have tried to redeem our music from the hands of the illiterate artists whose method of teaching is unscientific, inasmuch as unsystematic, and consequently unappealing and unacceptable to the educated student” (Magriel, 2005:123). Yet, the sīna-basīna (‘breast to breast’) oral tradition of the ustads remains popular and highly regarded among students till this day.