Excerpt: Sumana Ramanan's 'The Secret Master' Peeks Into A Hidden Maestro's Life

On a winter evening in 2016, Sumana Ramanan walked into a small music gathering in South Mumbai and was stunned by the khayal singing of a quiet man in his seventies, Arun Kashalkar. Although she had studied the form, followed concerts, and written about Hindustani classical music for years, she had never heard him before. That surprise pushed her to investigate how such a remarkable artist could remain largely unknown within a city that has long been central to the tradition.

Ramanan's book,The Secret Master: Arun Kashalkar and a Journey to the Edge of Music, follows her search for Kashalkar’s story and the world around him: an informal, often overlooked community of musicians who keep khayal alive in its most inventive form.

As Ramanan studies with him, she confronts the intricacy of his style and the broader questions it raises about mainstream visibility, musical lineage, and the quiet persistence of an underground culture.

Book Excerpt: The Secret Master

12: Carnival

As the monsoon receded, excitement about another annual ritual started building up, relieving the oppressive stillness of October. It was time to go to Aundh for the annual music festival. I had heard many students talk about their trips there. ‘That year in Aundh ...,’ they reminisced, narrating anecdotes, describing the ambience and going into raptures about certain performances. Since arriving in Mumbai in the mid-1960s, Guruji had gone there almost every year.

Successive generations of Antubuwa’s family had steered the festival with the help of their student communities and other well-wishers. Since 2012, when Guruji became secretary of the trust running the festival, each year he and a group of students had travelled to Aundh a few days before the event to help with the arrangements. In 2015, the festival’s seventy-fifth anniversary, a particularly large contingent, of about thirty students, had gone. From the photos, I could tell that the visit had been very special. Guruji had sung Darbari, followed by Agre gharane ka Chandrakauns, whose recordings I later heard on YouTube. But Yogesh told me that one of Guruji’s best Darbaris had emerged on the festival’s sidelines, engineered by his wily students. ‘We were all relaxing in the temple,’ Yogesh recalled. ‘Guruji was lying down, but was only half asleep. A bunch of us began singing Darbari, deliberately introducing errors in the phrasing. It worked. Guruji could not take it.

He got up and joined us. Soon, he was the only one singing. What a Darbari that was!’

Yogesh had recorded it, but when he got back home, he could not get the audio file to open. For the rest of us who were not there, that rendition acquired a mythical status, one that was, because of its elusiveness, even higher than a much-praised Pancham that Guruji had sung at the main festival in 1990, of which there was a high-quality online recording. For many students, these impromptu sessions before the festival were as much of an attraction as the official line-up.

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That year, I was slated to travel to Aundh in Yogesh’s car, along with Guruji. It was a roughly seven-hour journey. I did not then know that a spot in a car carrying Guruji was, like the Guru Purnima time slots, a precious commodity, in this case, an actual bit of real estate. Only much later did Yogesh tell me that each year students  had scrambled to travel in the vehicle ferrying Guruji. Kaku usually followed a few days later, just in time for the festival. Freed from the domestic straitjacket on these rides, Guruji apparently turned mildly boisterous, cracking even more jokes than usual, of which some, when the troupe was all male, bordered on the risqué. The double entendres were usually in Marathi, but, depending on the trigger, occasionally in English, the principle being that no opportunity for a repartee should be wasted. One year, after the long car ride from Mumbai to Aundh, the table player Praveen Karkare asked Guruji if he wanted a mild massage, to which he answered, ‘What I really want is a wild massage.’ Yogesh told me about a student who was initially given a spot in Guruji’s car but eventually had to be shifted to another vehicle. ‘He dropped out altogether, saying that half the fun had vanished,’ Yogesh told me. ‘Guruji can be great company.’

The enthusiasm for Aundh was, however, a niche phenomenon. Far from the din and dazzle of the metropolitan centres, the festival was unknown to the vast majority of listeners. In this respect it was similar to the Sawai Gandharva festival in Kundgol village in Karnataka’s Dharwad district, another region with a rich musical heritage. That festival, too, was an all-night affair in a rural setting, very different from the high-profile festival with the same name held in Pune.

For many musicians, performing in Aundh held huge sentimental value. Before leaving for the festival, I spoke to several artists who had performed there. Rajshekhar Mansur, a Jaipur gharana vocalist and son of Mallikarjun Mansur, sang there for the first time in the early 1990s. He was to take the stage at 4 a.m., so he reconciled himself to singing for a handful of sleepy listeners. But when he walked on to the stage, he was surprised to see rows and rows of white-capped, dhoti-clad villagers sitting on the floor, wide awake. ‘I sang Lacchasakh and Shivmat Bhairav,’ Rajashekhar Anna told me from Bangalore, referring to two offbeat raags. ‘But they were listening attentively at that unearthly hour. It was an audience that wanted genuine music, of the older kind, not a tamasha. If Indian music is going to live, it is probably going to do so in these little- known centres.’

Excerpted with permission from The Secret Master: Arun Kashalkar and a Journey to the Edge of Music by Sumana Ramanan, published by Westland Books.