And its checkered history in India
It would surprise many readers that this musical instrument,
so common to the music scene today, had such a troubled past. Born in France
and further modified to meet Indian requirements at Calcutta, to be mass
produced and sold in in the thousands, this humble hand powered instrument had
a difficult history, to say the least. So many people have tried hard to erase
it off the Indian musical scene, and persons of great repute have been credited
in banning it from the AIR for all of 30 + years. John Fielden, John Foulds,
Anand Coomaraswamy, Jawaharlal Nehru, Keskar, Rabindranath Tagore, etc. have all
been named as the people behind the ban, while the instrument itself not only
gained in popularity in the drama stages and music composing studios, but also
ported instrumental music and accompaniment from the performing stages to many
households.
Not all details of the ‘anti harmonium’ movement have yet come
to light. Though for all practical purposes, the final death knell came through
Fielden based on an article by Foulds, there is a story behind it, and
surprisingly, hidden in plain sight, a very persistent lady, who hated the
instrument. Not only did she influence many of the above-mentioned persons, but
was interestingly a true exponent of Carnatic music, and the first person to
take it to the London music scene. Why did so many Europeans rally against what
was essentially a European music concept? To start with, let us take a quick
look at the development of the instrument itself, how it came to India and why
it became popular.
One may conclude that Alexandre Debain the Frenchman
invented the first of the harmoniums, a smaller version of the great Church
organ, but using air, pumped with foot pedals. Large Victorian homes had space
to accommodate this new contraption. The Harmoni-flute (organ accordion or
flutina polka) was the next development, a cross between the small French
accordion and the larger free reed organ. Two inventors vie for credit, Constant
Busson and Mayer Marix, though it was Busson who presented it first and won an
award in 1855. Marix advertised it as an instrument which could mimic the human
voice. Over time, music enthusiasts as well as European missionaries in India carted
large harmoniums to India and it slowly entered the performing scene as well,
however it was unwieldy, and difficult to maintain in India’s heat and humid environs.
One of the companies trading in European harmoniums was
Harold and Co at Calcutta, where a bright repair technician named Dwaraknath
(Dwaraka) Ghose worked. Dwaraka is credited with the mass manufacture and
supply of an Indian version. As the story goes, Dwaraka left Harold to open
shop as D Ghose & sons in 1875, renaming it as Dwarkin and Sons, in 1878. Many
of the versions available today are still based on a Dwarkin design dating to
1887, with minor modifications. The naming of the company as Dwarkin, sounding
quite European, and so chosen for that very purpose (to get a larger and
quicker acceptance) is credited to his assistant and the music maestro Upendra
Kishore Ray Chowdhury. Chowdhury apparently suggested it by combining the name
of Thomas Dawkins and Dwaraka. The latter is hardly mentioned in the accounts
floating round, but Thomas Dawkins, a musical equipment dealer is listed as the
patent holder of the polychord, (US Patent 243,861 dated July 5, 1881). Perhaps
he had a manufacturing agreement with Ghose. UpendraKishore went on to write a
couple of instruction books on playing it, before becoming an entrepreneur
(printing), writer and painter, himself.
By now it was called the Dwarkin - Gramola harmonium, advertised
as a masterpiece in tone, and unmatched in quality and finish. As is often the
case, competitors such as Ahuja, Pal & sons, Harold & Co, Mundal & Co,
Biswas & sons, National Harmonium Co, Mohkam Singh and Sons, Ghose & Co
etc., rushed to make similar versions. In a few decades, telling on its
popularity, the market was saturated, and prices dipped as low as Rs 28/-. Many
became proficient in the simple instrument and bridged its 12-note deficiency
with skillful playing. The instrument was the mainstay for Hindustani music vocal
accompaniment, though it found an entry into the Southern Carnatic music scene,
comparatively difficult. A scale-changing mechanism was added, and it became
well suited for the seated Indian musician, for it could be played while placed
on the ground, one hand handling the bellows with the other on the keyboard and
suiting both right and left-handed players. Dwarkin meanwhile, branched off into
other ventures such as phonograph records, commercial recording, professional
harmoniums, complex music organs (bulbul, folding) and what not.
The traditional Hindustani music performance was by then
linked to the natch (Anglicized Nautch) dance which had descended from the
Mughal times, an event complete with singing and dance. A nautch girl was also
known as a Naachwali, Tawaaif, a Kothaywali and/or devadasi (south). The
imposition of Victorian morals in the 19th century British India
resulted in the anti-nautch movement. Devadasis and Nautanki’s (dancing girls)
were given a short shrift, and instruments used during their performances, such
as the sarangi and tambura were frowned upon. In the pre-harmonium days, Indian
vocalists would usually be accompanied by musicians playing the sarangi. Though
said to approximate the human voice, the sarangi was quite difficult to master
and had to be tuned for each raga. Some Hindu performers shunned it because it
was historically associated with courtesans and titillating music, and a
mainstay of Muslim Hindustani gharanas. Together with support from Christian
groups and missionaries, these age-old practices were quickly disallowed.
Simultaneously music practice was moving from organized
gharanas to the house, and when there was a shortage of accompaniments or
accompanying artistes on the Tambura or the Sarangi, the emergence of the ‘easy
to learn and use Harmonium’ was a great boon. Moreover, the Harmonium could additionally
provide a drone effect or shruti using the additional stops provided by Dwarkin,
and it gained popularity. But the harmonium had its own limitations as a
western note-based instrument, it could not generate the meend or gamaka (a
glide from one note to another) in the way a veena or a sitar could. Thus, the
harmonium cannot produce alankars which are part and parcel of Indian classical
music, be it North or South Indian. Additionally, the times were tough and
Swadeshi or anti-British feelings were on the rise. The ‘European’ harmonium
was soon going to ‘face the music’.
But before we get to that, let us go to Madras, where a
Ukrainian Émigré, named Helena Blavatsky (together with American Henry Olcott)
had established what we know as the Theosophist movement during 1880, allied to
Dayanad Saraswati’s Arya Samaj, something that quickly gained traction among
the educated, who were impressed with these foreigners championing Indian
religion and heritage. Their monthly magazine ‘The Theosophist’ was well
received, though quite unpopular with the Christian missionaries and the
British colonial administration. By 1883, Blavatsky had departed for Europe,
and in 1893, Annie Besant, an ardent supporter of self-rule in India, travelled
to Adayar, to later become the organization’s head. I will not get into details
on all these, for it will lead us far astray.
What earthly connection would the Theosophist have with the
lowly harmonium? Well, the Theosophists thought of music differently and
connected it to vibratory influences. They also argued that Indian music
performed in the truest way, with Indian instruments, was one way of properly
creating what they called ‘thought forms’. Annie Besant was quite clear that
she believed Eastern music forms were far superior – she said, “A chromatic
scale in the West gives the limits on a western piano; in the East, many notes
are interposed, and the gradations are so fine as to be indistinguishable to a
western ear until it is trained to hear them. Eastern music is a
succession of notes, a melody, while western music consists of notes played
simultaneously, and yielding harmony."
This argument was connected directly to the harmonium by a
brilliant violinist who arrived on the scene, a person hardly known to Indians,
a young lady of Irish extract, named Maud McCarthy. She started out as a child
prodigy, enrolled in the Royal college of Music at London aged just 9 and
performed all over the world to become a violin virtuoso, only to retire from performing
aged 23, due to the onset of neuritis. In 1900, she joined the Theosophical
society and married William Mann, a Theosophist writer. She traveled to India
1907-08, traveling through the north and south of the country – and living at
Banaras and Mussoorie and then Adyar, experiencing the glory of Indian music. MacCarthy
then experimented with what she described as the magical, occult effects of
music on the human mind and body, and practiced what she called ‘phonotherapy’,
a medical procedure consisting of healing through the power of sound vibrations
alone. According to her, Western music had reached its technical limits and
needed to be revitalized by the ecstatic music of India. She returned to London
in the 1910s and started to popularize Indian music in London and it was at
this juncture that she met and started a relationship with the musician John
Foulds.
Let’s now bring back the focus to the Harmonium. Maud
MaCarthy hated the Indian harmonium and perhaps goaded by Annie Besant, started
the initial tirade against it. In April 1911 she wrote - What, then, are the
materials by which we may establish the fact that music is still a living art
in India? Not the conventionalisms, if I may use the term, of the mass of
Indian musicians; not their disputes over the authenticity of this note or that
note of a raga; not the woeful attempts to copy brass bands and missionary
hymns which we hear in most Indian schools and households today; not the modern
Indian music-schools, wherein the pupils are carefully trained out of their
capacities for natural intonation, and their tonal ideas are stifled by
tempered pitch on screeching harmoniums; not even the songs of the old
composers, if they are taken only on the evidence, ipso facto, of the remaining
records.
In 1912 she rallied a call to abolish the instrument with a full-blown
article in the Modern review, and her hatred for keyed instruments was strident
- It is only a make-shift portable instrument which the missionaries brought
to India, no such thing being used in the West, excepting at streetcorner
meetings in the slums of our cities, where no other keyed instrument would be
possible. This, then - a degraded form of a degradation-is what Indians have
elected to use for the accompaniment of their divine ragas and raginis! The public
house corners of the West wedded to the soul of Indian music! Some Indians have
even gone so far as to make what they call a sruti harmonium-to fix the srutis
as one might try to fix the echoes of the ocean! It is in the nature of music
that the srutis should not be fixed: mathematically perfect sounds, as I have
indicated above, being always in a state of change and adaptation, under the
sole guidance of intuition and aesthetic sense-the only infallible standards of
musical tonality. Any attempt therefore to determine the srutis must end in
failure.
It is obvious. There are seventy-two modes, for instance,
in South India. How can any fixed standard of srutis be made to fit all of
these? What is the use of trying to count the drops in the ocean of sound? What
utter fatuity is it that impels Indians to try to make a harmonium to register
those sounds? The quality of harmonium tone, loud and rasping, is ruining the
capacity to hear delicate grades of pitch (srutis). How can murchchhanas
(fainting-notes) be heard or sought after in that din? Noise kills music. All
soft gliding effects are also precluded. The drums-copying the harmonium—grow
louder and louder, and the singer must shriek if he is not to drown. So, with
these things Indians are ruining their splendid vocal heritage…
A.H. Fox Strangways in his 1914 - Music of Hindoostan asked
- if the Mohammedan ‘star’ singer knew that the harmonium with which he
accompanies himself was ruining his chief asset, his musical ear… in India the
harmonium, has a unique power of making an unharmonized melody sound invincibly
commonplace. He then went to Trivandrum and listened to the famous lullaby
- Omana Thingal kidavo and writes - The songstress wanted to accompany
herself on the inevitable harmonium, until I pointed out that it would be much
in her way when she pulled the string of the cradle, and that the sound of it
might prevent the baby from going to sleep... adding - Hence the serious
menace to Indian music of the harmonium, which has penetrated already to the
remotest parts of India… I was present for an hour at a concert in Trivandrum
at which this appalling instrument never ceased.
In 1935 Foulds travelled to India, where he collected folk
music, became Director of European Music for All-India Radio in Delhi, created
an orchestra from scratch, and began to work towards his dream of a musical
synthesis of East and West, composing pieces for ensembles of traditional
Indian instruments. Foulds took the case of the Harmonium to the press, writing
many articles and rebuttals on the topic.
Now we come to Margret Cousins, Tagore, Gandhi, Nehru and
Coomaraswamy. Cousins agreed in 1935 that the instrument, suited only to
Central European beggars, was a bane to Indian music. Gandhi believed that the
music of the spinning wheel was better than the execrable harmonium. Nehru suggested
a ban in his book. Coomaraswamy was more vocal stating- For no man of another
nation will come to learn of India, if her teachers be gramophones and
harmoniums and imitators of European realistic art.
As Bob van der Linden explained, this was also a period when
Hindu musicians more aligned to the western concepts of music, decried the
takeover of Hindustani music by the Muslim Ustads. As the harmonium was used
often by the Muslim stalwarts, Harmonium promoters such as Sourindro Mohun
Tagore now joined the outcry to dismiss Muslim musicians as unwilling and
‘illiterate’ teachers. Tagore’s case is interesting, for he had used several
Harmoniums and promoted the instrument itself for a while, later deciding that
it was not good, and getting rid of all of them from Shanti Niketan. On the
other hand, his brother Jyotirindranath was quite proficient in playing the
harmonium and many a song was composed by the brothers, using it. Was it his
anger against the Ustads, or his anti-European or Swadeshi feelings behind the request
for a ban? Was it due to MacCarthy with whom he collaborated (he thought highly
of her) on occasion and performed together (1914)? Difficult to conclude!
Tagore too wrote to the AIR in Jan 1940 asking them to ban this
tool of British domination as he saw it. I have always been very much
against the prevalent use of the harmonium for purposes of accompaniment in our
music and it has been banished completely from our asrama. You will be doing a
great service to the cause of Indian music if you can get it abandoned from the
studios of All India Radio..
That all of them had correspondence or and knew MacCarthy,
make it even more interesting. Did she during her meetings with them (Nehru, Tagore,
Coomaraswamy and Foulds) bring up the topic? Also strange is the fact that each
of them knew the other and mentioned the problems with the instrument over
approximately 25 years before a ban could be enacted!! Dr Zakir Hussain commented that the instrument was
contemptible, Raza Ali, Gul Mohammed Khan, and Lakshmana Pillai agreed that it
be banned. Earlier, the American writer & composer David Rudhyar, in his ‘The
Rebirth of Hindu Music’, influenced by Coomaraswamy, too had called the
harmonium a ‘cancerous growth’ in the body of Hindu music. The lobby against
the Harmonium was too powerful and the Ustads in the Gharanas were powerless in
the corridors of Delhi.
In June 1938 Foulds, now at the AIR, published an article
called "The Harm-onium" in which he suggested that it be banned
because its tuning was incompatible with Indian classical music stating - Instead of the pervasive tambura, the lovely
sarangi, the lordly vina, the charming sitar and dilruba, the naive bamboo
flute— instead of these new and intriguing tone qualities, what did one hear
upon all sides? One heard a contraption that il would be a compliment to call
harmonium. The thing in question, which imposes itself upon music throughout
the length and breadth of India, is no more a harmonium than a motorcycle is a
Rolls Royce limousine. He added - It is strangling vocalisation,
fettering rhythm, fouling both tala and raga, ousting the subtle and lovely
Indian instruments. debauching the sensitivity of the ear, checking and
stifling improvisation, and, in every way, I can think of, doing incalculable
harm. For effect, Foulds also quoted Nehru’s comment in part, from his
Autobiography. Foulds also noted his delight in seeing a notice in a
broadcasting studio (Bombay as I understood) not long ago, offering an
increased fee to those who sang without the harmonium!
Nehru had written - They (the middle class of the cities)
glory in cheap and horrid prints made in bulk in Germany and Austria, and
sometimes even rise to Ravi Varma’s pictures. The harmonium is their favorite instrument.
(I live in hope that one of the earliest acts of the Swaraj government will be
to ban this awful instrument).
Fielden, just arrived from the BBC to head the AIR
(previously ISBS) in 1935 and knew Nehru personally, was eventually involved in
the formal ban on the harmonium w.e.f. March 1, 1940. Even though the matter
was raised in the Station Directors Conference in 1939 and endorsed by it, the
decision came from Fielden’s initiative and formal approval. A procession of
pall bearers ceremoniously took some harmoniums for a burial (echoing the music
ban by Aurangzeb) and its final rites were conducted. The puritans had ruled.
Down south in Madras, the violin had become the
favored instrument for Carnatic musicians. CS Iyer gave many lectures based
on Maud MacCarthy’s and Fould’s observations on why musicians should stay away
from the harmonium and remarked that it was Tamil genius to take on the Violin,
even exhorting listeners to burn harmoniums. While a few musicians did use the
harmonium (In Kerala and Madras film composing studios, composers like Baburaj
and singers such as Abdul Khader did favor the harmonium) it never took off,
especially in the traditional Madras music circles.
Nevertheless, Harmonium sales continued to rise, and budding
musicians found it an able ally. It was often used as accompaniment in
impromptu bhakti sangeet sessions and small mehfils throughout India, and was
by and far the most popular instrument for everyday musical practice in India.
Keskar by the way, became the I&B minister in 1952 or so,
well after the ban, but kept it going, was also against the gharana concept
dominated by Muslims and took steps to try and ban film music, which he thought
was Urdu based and too erotic. Anyway, all that resulted in the popularity of
Radio Ceylon and the creation of the Vivid Bharati, a subject for another day. The
harmonium came back into unrestricted use at the AIR in 1980 after the ban was
partially lifted in 1971, and top-grade artistes were allowed to use it.
Nevertheless, the instrument remained popular in the film,
drama and performance theaters and many thousands were manufactured and used
since its inception. It remains the favorite teaching accompaniment and tool
for music composers in India, even today. But the instrument faces newfound
challenges, for Sikh factions who always used it in their gurudwaras, are now
thinking of getting rid of the ‘British’ origin instrument. While the harmonium
remains quite popular in India, its use in the West declined, though we come
across some fine compositions by Gurdjieff in the late 1920’s using a top bellow
style harmonium.
Along the way came the 22 tone Shruti harmonium developed in
1911 by Earnest Clements, and Krishnaji Ballal Deval. The Shruti-Harmonium or the
Indian (Hindu) harmonium was ironically, manufactured in London by the ‘Moore and
Moore company’. This proved to be a market failure and faced a lot of
public opposition. Recently another version was developed by Dr Vidhyadhar Oak.
The music scene is changing rapidly, and today cheap and
portable electronic keyboards, synthesizers using tone and sound libraries seem
to be taking over, as older instruments become antiques. As it is, the shruti
box, shruti apps on your phone, rhythm apps etc., rule the roost, entire
orchestras have been replaced by tracks and AI streams, and tone correction
software removes all imperfections, off-line and sometimes even on-line. It is
a world different from the one Maud MacCarthy and other purists saw, but then
again, that is perhaps ‘development’ - Who knows what the future holds?
All I can say is, Be open to it…
The Indian Listener – Various volumes
Theosophist – Various volumes
Pioneering Spirit: Maud MacCarthy, Mysticism, Music, and Modernity
Some Indian Conceptions of Music - Maud Mann (Maud MacCarthy)
Abolish Harmoniums - Maud MacCarthy (Modern Review)
Enchanted Music, Enchanted Modernity: Theosophy, Maud MacCarthy, and John Foulds - Christopher M. Scheer
From “harm-omnium” to harmonia omnium - Neil Sorrell
Composer John Foulds: The lost requiem - Jessica Duchen
Resonances of the Raj – Nalini Ghuman
The life of Music in North India - Daniel M Neuman
Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern – A J Weidman
Music and Empire in Britain & India – Bob van der Linden
Indian Broadcasting – H R Luthra
Tangled Tapes K S Mullick
For those who want an in depth understanding of the theory behind tones, semi tones and such, read this well written, two part article, by Dhanya Subramanian
