Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature

His forehead is firm, his eyes calm with the experience of old age. He has felt all the pulses of life. Over the people's sorrows he weeps; over his own joys he may not smile. "Man's life is brief, "he says,"brief its music, its thread and colour."

"Ever since I got a sarangi, I thought it was my bride, "he tells me. As he plays on it, it laughs and cries with him. It becomes almost human, as if it were his own heart, as the Russian folk singer said of his domra, "When I touched the instrument, it seemed to me that it was not domra but my young heart that beat against my fingers," or as someone said of a gypsy fiddler of Hungary, "He plays the fiddle as one breathes: the instrument seems to become a part of his organism: the strings are a natural prolongation of his nervous system. "

Half a century old, his memory is flooded with colors like the autumn grass. His mind retains its glow. Twisting into a bow under his moustaches, his lips ever catch a running smile. Wrinkles on his forehead have followed their own patterns; they all mean experience.

A villager,first, last and always, he is like the blowing wind, fresh and invigourating with his eyes bow down over the strings of the sarangi, he sings as he goes from village to village. Children gather round him. Young girls, shy brides and mothers listen to him with admiration. For his songs he gets a handful of corn or small coin.

"What does it matter if I have no fields and money,"he says, "my songs are my harvest."

A deep sense of friendship, that we must have sucked with his mother's milk, has brightened his outlook. Yet he cannot sign his name.

He walks slowly, his hands stroking his beard. His big, hairy hands, holding his sarangi. His eyes will at once guess your opinion of him.

"What wind has brought you back?" he asks me.

"Your songs ever pull me back, Baba Sundar," I tell him. And he bursts with laughter.

"Your songs will make me mad."

"Then I must sing."

As the rumour goes, he was born in a Jat house, and if a notorious minstrel had not kidnapped him in his childhood days, he would have turned into a full-blooded peasant. He has no money from his mother. "My father was a wandering minstrel,"he says with conviction, "he died when I was fifteen. He gave me his art." He cannot name his birthplace. A full gypsy. Roads are dear to him. Winds are his companions.

The old story of the princess, who went about begging for a husband and won over a wandering minstrel at last, provokes an interesting thought. Was that minstrel of the folk-tale a better artist than this wandering minstrel?

His songs are long memories and essential passions. The joyous, full-flowing love -songs centering round the story of the immortal lovers, Heer and Ranjha. He sings with great warmth. Every girl among his listeners perhaps yearns to become another Heer, and every bride is inspired to recognise her husband as her Ranjha. He sings the ballad of Raja Gopi Chand who left his throne in search of truth. Every mother yearns for her son, going out for employment, as if he had gone away like another Gopi Chand. He sings of Pooran Bhagat, another prince, who walked on God's path. He cries actually as he continues the song story of Pooran Bhagat.

He is a folk singer; I a collector of folk-songs. Sitting by his side and listening to him, I at once visualise Walter Starkie listening to his gypsy blood brother's ancient song and thus making up his mind to travel among the gypsies in their own garb to know their life and lore, the song haunting him in his lecture room and at home.

What care I for goose-feather bed,
With the sheet turned down so bravely, O!
For tonight I shall sleep in a cold open field
Along with the raggle-taggle gypsies, O!

The contrast is obvious. This old, wandering minstrel goes about alone: he never married. I wander with my wife and daughter. Walter Starkie, though married, goes about with a fiddle across Spain, as he writes in his Spanish Raggle Taggle, mentioning his wife, "As day by day she weaves and unweaves Penelope's web awaiting my return, she will pray that long nights and days of toiling over the plateau lands of Castile living on raw ham and garlic will change my squat, uncourtly figure into a bronzed image of the Apollo Belvedere. Sweet illusion of the female mind! What should we do if our wives ever give up the hope of their dreams? So, work away, seamstress! Let out the girth three inches : I'll not feel ashamed. Nay, I'll console myself with the thought that the best minstrels and story-tellers were gifted with a pleasant rotundity of mind and body; they were able to take the rough with the smooth and relish the swift changes of fortune."

He believes the legend, and is sure that after his death Guru Nanak came back on earth to fetch the seeds of the mustard and maize, for he could not live in Heaven without the sarson sag and the maize bread! Now even the gods are fond of this food, he tells me, as if it were the latest news from Heaven.

“Dreams ever give me a new force,” he says, “my life is the milky way.” And does not the milky way look like life’s well trodden track?

I mark him retouching the old words and tunes here and there. He is an artist in his own right. He has specialised. It has always been my memorable experience to hear him singing.

He smiles at once, as I raise my folded hands in reverence. He seems to say in the words of Walt Whitman, “My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil; born here of parents the same and their parents the same.” And his sarangi speaks in almost human voice as he sings.


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