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| Adrian McNeil playing his sarod |
Around two decades back, the Australian sarodiya-musicologist
Adrian McNeil wrote a fascinating article called ‘Why Hindustani Musicians are Good Cooks’. In this extremely imaginative
piece, McNeil shows how the process of exploration of a raag by a
Hindustani classical musician is very similar to the process of cooking. Not
only this, he manages to explain, mainly for an audience who is unfamiliar with
this genre of music, the nature of performance of a raag in culinary
terms. He says that just as in cooking, one needs three kinds of ingredients –
primary (like chicken, potatoes etc.), secondary (like onions, ginger, garlic,
oil etc.) and tertiary (like spices, salt etc.), so in the performance of a raag
we need three such kinds of constituent parts – the basic scale/mod as the
primary component, vadi, samvadi, chalan, pakad etc.
as the secondary elements and gamak, shruti etc. as the tertiary
ones. Just like cooking, the performance of a raag hinges on the right
mix of all these components. McNeil closes with the perceptive comment:
‘I have observed
during my association with many practicing Indian musicians over the last
decade or so, that on the whole their ability to prepare tasty food is by no
means confined to one or two individuals from amongst this profession. This
situation could be due to the parallels that exist in the cognitive processes
involved in preparing a tasty dish of Indian food and interpreting a rag, as
has been described above. It is for this reason that I assert that Hindustani
musicians are good cooks.’
