Is the guru always right?

Well, to answer the question right off, no, surely not. No-one can be a perfect authority 100% of the time, even on a single subject, much less on the philosophy of life as well. But the thing is, in India teachers do tend to be treated as if they really knew it all, and I'm interested here in exploring a little why that's so - or perhaps equally, why I have a problem with it.

In the music department where I study the staff are in a curious position, caught between two cultural attitudes. The first is that of the modern Western university, which I am used to, where teachers are (in most cases) marked out from their students purely by an excess margin of book-learning which it is their responsibility to transmit during class. The second is the ancient Indian system known as the guru-sisya parampara, the "guru-disciple lineage", which is a far weightier affair (it sometimes seems very apt that guru also means "heavy" in Bengali, not least in view of the physical corpulence of many Bengali gurus). The guru's responsibility is to "enlighten" his disciple - etymologically gu-ru is said to mean "[bringing] light to darkness" - and the disciple must in return commit himself in full to the relationship, which is ideally an exclusive one. In the West we think of the guru as a religious or spiritual figure, but in India the word means "teacher", and is used in many areas outside the spiritual, particularly in music.

Hindustani classical music is often distinguished from its Western counterparts by its rigorous adherence to an "oral tradition", and this continues to be regarded as central even when, as today, much of the material being handed down by the guru is actually written down. Bandishes ("compositions", although in a sense closer to a jazz standard than a Western classical composition) are printed by the dozen in books on Hindustani music, and a modern teacher will often ask the student to take down these, as well as improvised taans (flourishes), in notation. (The type of notation used is actually older than the Western stave: Sanskrit music treatises had been recording exact scale-steps, durations, sharps, flats, and ornaments for centuries when the West was still stuck with an ambiguous system of neumes.) But there are always some things that must be checked and corrected first-hand: ability to keep rhythm and tempo, pronunciation, tone-production, posture, delivery and so on. Mastery of all these, in exact imitation of the guru, qualifies the student as an authentic representative of his teacher's gharana or "school". He will in turn be in a position to take on students and perpetuate the gharana, with all its particular musical traits, values, and attitudes.

Preservation of the gharana is considered so important that many books on Hindustani music fill pages and pages with genealogical-type diagrams, detailing who studied with whom, reaching from contemporary performers and teachers right back into the eighteenth century and (in some cases) beyond. Indian musicians can be as snobbish about the antiquity of their line as the characters in a Proust novel; and for the outsider such attitudes can appear just as odd. Moreover they look increasingly outdated since the institutionalization of Indian music teaching began in the twentieth century. Now most aspiring young musicians, although they may still have a private guru, also go to university or music college to get a degree. And here they are of course taught in a Western framework of classrooms, timetables and deadlines, all of which is quite alien to the spirit of the guru system. On the other hand, even those teaching within a university retain their respect for the values of that system, and this resistance (among other things) affects the "smooth running" of the higher-educational machine which is prioritized in the West.

The most noticeable result for me in everyday terms is that Sangit Bhavan is managed with a level of administrative inefficiency and haphazardness that far surpasses even the other departments in Visva-Bharati University. A couple of weeks ago, now about halfway into my one-year course, I was for the first time presented with a syllabus - in reality no more than a dictated list of fifteen songs that my teacher had selected off the top of his head during his tea-break. At the same juncture, students were first informed if they would have their exam within this academic year or after the summer vacation. Classes are cancelled without notice and for no apparent reason, as teachers decide they have other business or would prefer to extend their tea-break. The point is that students are too much in awe of the teachers here to protest or "insist on their rights" as they would in the UK or the USA. The guru dispenses enlightenment, and if you have to wait an hour and a half for enlightenment to show up then so be it. Respect for the guru is (at least publicly) absolute.

It is also very publicly demonstrated, via a gesture of obeisance which has become routinized among students here: the padnamaskar or "taking the dust of the feet", usually referred to in Bengali simply as pranaam. This can be developed into something of a fetish, as a few amusing posts relating to the Indian religious guru Sai Baba demonstrate. It is a common Indian gesture of respect to parents, elders, and husbands - although here too the fetish side can get the upper hand (read the description of "charanamrita", the practice of drinking the water in which someone's feet have been bathed!). Perhaps because of its roots in Indian family culture, it comes easier to Indians than it does to me: I find the gesture of bending down and touching the feet of the teacher, followed by one's own forehead and chest, to be loaded with a symbolic significance that I cannot physically bring myself to realize. For the other students it has largely lost this weight of meaning, as they queue up at the end of class - or even in the canteen - to touch their teacher's feet. Sometimes they have to be reminded by the teacher that they have already touched his feet once today, and additional obeisances would exceed the bounds of propriety. One teacher has even entirely forbidden his students to do padnamaskar to him, sensing that the gesture is being abused.

Under these circumstances, padnamaskar becomes a symptom of an exaggerated servility - an obvious attempt to "curry favour".Yet without doubt, when performed sincerely, touching feet should be a positive sign of humility, of readiness to bow one's head before wisdom and experience. If we in the West find such prostration impossible, then Indians could be justified in diagnosing a lack of respect and fine manners, and an excess of individual pride in our culture. And so it is with the organization of education too. The Western university is shifting more and more in the direction of an egocentric consumerism, an attitude of "you should get what you pay for" - and if what you pay for doesn't either keep you entertained or give you a leg-up in the job market, then you're being short-changed. With the kind of fees being charged at American universities in particular, it is hardly surprising that students respond by creating consumer-survey-style lecturer rating tables (Rate My Professors being the most notorious), or that everything on a course is quantified into modules, units, objectives and outcomes.

Visva-Bharati was created partly out of Rabindranath's foresight that some alternative would be needed to this utilitarian model of the university. He warned specifically that "universities should never be made into mechanical organisations for collecting and distributing knowledge" (Creative Unity, pp.171-2); which is however arguably just what is happening to Western academia. Tagore saw the dangers of his era in the bureaucratic fixation on exams, acting as a passport to job success rather than developing students' potential for creative learning, and in the constraining insistence on mastery of English. Both faults have by no means disappeared in twenty-first century India, though they are fostered now by American-driven globalisation instead of Raj-era civil government, and Tagore's critique remains as relevant as it ever was. He saw the corrective in the traditional Indian guru system, as he imagined it having been practised in the ashramas and tapovanas (forest hermitages) of ancient India: a system centred on the teacher-pupil relationship rather than on the specific amount of knowledge to be transmitted between the two -

"I have visualised the guru (the preceptor) at the very heart and centre of the tapovana (hermitage). He is a man and no machine. He is actively human because his main concern is to help humanity to realise its goal... The disciple draws inspiration from his immediate contact. This association with a mind perpetually awake is the most valuable element of education in an asrama, and that value does not lie in the subjects of study, in paraphernalia or methods. Because the guru realises himself at every step, he is able to give of himself abundantly." ("Asrama Education")

These are high ideals indeed, and perhaps Visva-Bharati today realizes them comparatively seldom. But it did genuinely begin as an ashram, with only a handful of pupils taught by Tagore himself, and even as it takes on some conventional principles of university organization, it remains oriented in its best moments towards the ideals Tagore outlined. For a start, there is simplicity, absence of the "paraphernalia" one finds in a Western classroom. Music classes here take place in plain rooms, decorated at most with a portrait of Tagore; at the front sits the teacher with his harmonium or tanpura, around him the students, following his lead in chorus singing one of Tagore's melodies, and taking down the words of the song in a desk diary adapted as an exercise book. Scores of Tagore's songs exist, but most students cannot afford more than a few volumes of these expensive notation books, and so the classes proceed orally, repeating and correcting the rendition according to the teacher's prompts. Occasionally the teacher will divagate and begin expounding the philosophical message behind these songs, or their relationship to the Santiniketan festival calendar. And with the amount of respect, and often genuine love that students invest in their teacher, when he rises to the occasion then these discourses will expand into a flight of inspired fancy and Lebensweisheit, mixed with anecdotes, reminiscences of Santiniketan in its golden era, and lines of other songs suddenly thrown out and spontaneously continued by the students, the whole lesson overrunning the allotted time sometimes by an hour or more, having long since dissolved into that shared joy which Tagore wanted both music and education to embody. Many times I have to sit there shame-faced, knowing that my lack of Bengali still bars me access to participating fully in such moments - but anyone could see the inspiration that shines on the students' faces. Here there is space for the "truth [which] not only must inform but inspire", rather than the teacher "who has come to the end of his subject, who has no living traffic with his knowledge...[and] can only load his students' minds [but] cannot quicken them" (Creative Unity, p.179).

So the guru may not always be right, but we have I think to grant him a degree of trust if experiences like this are to flower in his hands. If his and our hands are too full with assessment forms and examination papers, then that blossoming will not happen; if we cannot even imagine him as a figure of wisdom, then how can we receive wisdom from him? Granted, the oral parampara system has its limitations; like other hierarchies, it encourages self-reproduction rather than critique. The latter has of course become the basis of Western scholarly thinking, due to its textual focus: the real induction into Anglo-American academic procedure occurs (usually at the Master's level) when students are given a text and invited to attack it. If one has spent hours learning that text by heart, however, the critical reflex is usually somewhat in abeyance. Tagore, his creations and ideas are seldom criticized here (as I noted in my first blog post from Santiniketan, and it still holds true) just because so much energy is expended in passing down his enormous personal heritage as a living tradition. But the positive energy of that "quickening", when his art and ideas are well taught is, in my view, worth more than many an adept scholarly critique.

An undevoted pilgrim

Prompted by a recent trip to Varanasi and Bodhgaya - respectively the holiest places in the world for Hindus and Buddhists

Touring this part of India, in my case for the second time, the realization is unavoidable: tourism here is to an uncomfortable degree pervaded with religious voyeurism. If one wants to criticize "orientalist" attitudes, ways in which the West caricatures the East, then the reduction of India to a stereotype of excessive religious devotion is a prime case in point. Staring at sadhus is fun for everyone! - the more ash-smeared and wild-eyed the more photogenic... And it's not as if one could easily choose a more secular itinerary: the fact is, touring India is traditionally - even for Indians - a matter of ticking off temples. The problem is in one's gaze - try as one might to concentrate on the aesthetics of architectural detail, one must inevitably feel the force of the human waves lapping round these compact ancient shrines. Here there are rarely places, as in the dark, accomodating space of a cathedral, where one can undisturbedly lose one's thoughts in visual contemplation. Close in around any Hindu or Buddhist shrine one is surrounded, jostled, sometimes physically pestered, and always occupied with questions of propriety ("rite and wrong"...apologies). What if you forget to remove your shoes? Should you accept a flower garland? What then should you do with it? How much money are you supposed to give and to whom? Should you prostrate yourself, or perform a quietly reverent bow and namaste, or can you just swagger in and snap a photo? And is it really possible to maintain any consistent bearing in such a place when one is not fully of its religion?

With my current travelling companion - an atheist philosopher with the full resources of German intellectual irony at his command - I tend to slip into an attitude of discreet, whispered-behind-the-back-of-the-hand mockery (above all when a monk in Bodhgaya started a mobile phone conversation a few yards from the Bodhi tree, overlooked by an official sign directing "complete silence"!). But both of us cannot help being humbled by the seriousness of the faith here, the extent of people's devotion, and often the impressiveness of religious choreography. For in these places it is easy - easier than in all but the most ancient Catholic or Orthodox sites, certainly - for the Westerner to understand why ritual is important to religion.

Whenever a "reformation" occurs then ritual tends to be cut back: as occurred in Europe in the sixteenth century, and with Hinduism in the Bengali reform movements of the nineteenth (principally the Brahmo Samaj, in which the Tagore family was very active). The arguments are always that rituals are external, formal, unnecessary encrustations on the living religious spirit. Expressions of that spirit tend to be cut back to the direct and verbal, sometimes clothed in relatively plain musical form. Much as in a Protestant church, the Wednesday early morning service at Santiniketan's Kaj Mandir consists of a simple alternation of religious readings with hymns (Indian ones, written by Tagore for the Brahmo Samaj). Congregation, singers and readers all wear white kurta pajama. The ceremony is perfectly unpretentious, but can also be lacklustre, especially with sparse attendance or mediocre performances of the music. And why should the Word be considered the primary vehicle for religious expression anyway? Why should not visual images and ritual movement or dance be considered equally appropriate?

What the reformers from Luther to Rammohan Roy justly criticised in earlier practice was the use of ritual and images as replacements for the genuine core of the religion. If one imagines that "merit" is gained, or sins cancelled by the performance of rituals, or that images are real pictures of God, whose worship puts one in privileged contact with the divine, then one is indeed giving way to delusion; if such beliefs are widespread then the religious culture can be branded as corrupt. But the logical response to this state of affairs need not be the abolition of ritual and image. It can also, and perhaps ought to, be a better understanding of their theological status. Karen Armstrong has such an understanding in her recent (misleadingly titled) book The Case for God, surmising that primitive religion treated ritual and imagery as central to the religious experience, with concepts and verbal formulations following after, if at all. She points to shamanic religions, such as those presumably practised in the caves of Lascaux, and the famous Greek Eleusinian Mysteries. Comparisons with ancient Greece occurred to both me and Reinhard, my travelling companion, as we watched the evening Ganga Arthi ceremony at Dasaswamedh Ghat in Varanasi.


This famous and ancient ceremony is today somewhat affected by its status as a tourist attraction: the lighting and tight choreography strike one as being recent, camera-friendly refinements. But the basic materials and movements of the arthi are traditional. Their purpose is neither purely aesthetic - though the costumes, incense and music clearly do appeal to the senses - nor "ritualistic" in the sense of attempting to manipulate or gain favour from the divine (as Hindu animal sacrifices do). It is rather meditative and devotional, trying to bring the worshipper and onlookers into a state which in Hinduism is called bhakti, devotional participation, a concentrated but also communally shared state of love for God. Arthi is often performed alone by the Hindu householder, sometimes in a puja room specially set aside for the purpose. Shopkeepers reopening their business in the afternoon can be seen making characteristic arthi circling gestures with a few sticks of incense in front of a postcard of a deity.

It is no harder, I think, for Westerners to feel sympathy for these quieter, everyday practices than it is for us to practise yoga as it should be done, in the same spirit (- think of the famous sequence of asanas known as the surya namaskar, performed facing the rising sun). The difficulty is in the extreme manifestations of bhakti - the hours of mantras, the endlessly repeated prostrations of Tibetan Buddhist pilgrims that we witnessed in Bodhgaya, even the over-enthusiasm of Vaishnava devotees (familiar to Western urbanites as the "Hare Krishnas", their historical roots are actually in West Bengal; the modern organization for the movement is ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness). One has a sneaking suspicion that much of this is actually "for show", or performed out of the misguided belief in automatic "merit". But if it is, then the healthiest response is surely just to ignore it. There are more genuine types of devotion, and even we sceptics ought to hope for a glimpse into their spirit.

Indian scripts

The variety of the world's scripts has long held a fascination for me, something which is independent of the variety of spoken languages they encode. Perhaps this has something to do with my musician's training, specifically training in Western notation. (In that sense all Western classical musicians could claim to have been using two scripts since an early age.) I think however that artists often have an equal penchant for scripts per se - even in the West, where they are not integrated into the mainstream of 'fine art' in the way they have been in Islamic and Chinese culture. At any rate they are not just, and even not primarily, a supplement to spoken language and thus a subject for linguists. One could begin to summarize Jacques Derrida's famous and intricate arguments on this point - but that would be rather unnecessary so early in the day. Better to observe the striking instances of non-verbal scripts: not only music notation, but dance, computer code, the notation of games (chess, go, bridge), certain kinds of assembly manual (decipherable or not)...

What I want to discuss in this post is however something that occurs particularly with language, and to some extent also with music. It seems to me that a script doesn't merely reproduce a language, which has its own identity already fixed through sound and meaning. It also constitutes part of the language's identity: the specific way in which written letters and the sound of words blend, or what we call spelling (although that word isn't normally used in the case of different scripts). This occurs despite the fact that many unwritten languages, and illiterate speakers of written languages, have existed for which none of this can hold true. What one can say is that, once a script is present to mind for a language and its speakers, it will begin to affect the way words in that language are imagined, and this involvement of the imagination will powerfully affect the identity of words, in the sense of how foreign or familiar they are felt to be.

To illustrate this very briefly first of all with a European example, I will appeal to any regular beer-drinker and ask them, if they are linguistically inclined, if they have ever idly peeled away the back label on a beer bottle, and in doing so noticed the spellings of the word "beer" and its ingredients in the various European languages (excluding those derived from the Latin "cervisia", such as Spanish). In German it becomes "Bier": the same sound more or less, although one somehow imagines it in a German accent, and the word as spelt would have gloomier connotations in English. Pronounce it with your best approximation to an Italian accent, and the Italian spelling "birra", with its extra syllable and rolled "r", immediately seems logical, although someone with no Italian might not recognize the word if it were printed, and out of context. For the most startling transformation however, you need a little bit of Greek. Although the pronunciation is roughly similar to Italian, not only is the script itself different, but it must cope with the odd fact that modern Greek has no single letter expressing the consonant "b" (since the second letter of the alphabet "beta" is actually pronounced "veta"). When forced to include the sound as part of foreign words, it has to improvise by shoving together "mu" and "pi". Beer is thus "mpira": a weird defamiliarization, splitting in two a consonant one had thought was utterly fundamental, atomic - a kind of linguistic equivalent of the first time one discovered that green could be produced by blending blue and yellow.

In the Indian languages this kind of thing goes on all the time with English words, and it is one of the first things you notice when learning their scripts since, of course, transliterations of English on adverts or shop-signs are both ubiquitous and among the first things one can decipher. The best way to present this is as a puzzle. I'll give the Indian spelling ("back-transliterated", of course, using the standard modern system for Brahmi and Devanagari minus the diacritics), and you guess the English word: kariyar; sarkas; kek; daktar; eyarplen; ilekshon; apel; ophis; meshin; pulis; injin. (Answers at the bottom of this post.)

Among the English consonant sounds that are trickiest to deal with are "t" and "d". The languages of north India all have about four letters that could reasonably correspond to each of these, distinguished by whether they are aspirated (pronounced with extra breath) or unaspirated, and whether the letter is taken to belong to the retroflex (tongue curled back against the palate) or the dental group (tongue touching the teeth). The problem is that English "t" and "d" sit in between the Indian categories: you pronounce them with a certain, non-emphatic amount of aspiration, and with the tongue loosely in front of the teeth. Naturally, both the script and the majority of Indian English speakers cannot deal with that, and so they have to make a choice. And this is always in favour of the "hardest" available sound: unaspirated and retroflex - the retroflex consonants paradoxically being the one group that native English speakers cannot produce unless they are physically shown how to pronounce them! The result is an (unnecessarily) inaccurate reflection of normal English pronunciation, and thus the most recognizable feature of an "Indian" accent. Get an Indian-born English speaker to say "dirty" or "today" and you'll hear what I mean.

A similar paradox occurs with "s", "z" and "j" in Bengali. Most native English speakers (with the exception of graffiti taggers) have probably ceased to notice that the plural ending "s" in many cases is actually pronounced as "z" - e.g. "things" is really "thingz". But Bengalis have registered this fact, and try to reproduce it when transcribing English words. Only the problem is, there isn't a letter "z" in the Bengali script. They can pronounce it, but the closest they can to writing it in their alphabet is a "j" - which isn't really the same thing as "z", bears no relation whatever to "s", and produces very humorous-looking spellings, such as "ledij" (ladies) or "chij" (cheese).

But there are other cases when English loan words have apparently been changed on the phonetic level in a way that can't be explained by the differences between the languages' phonemic systems. Why should "biscuit" become "biskut" in Bengali, for instance, and not "biskit"? Why "haspatal" instead of "hospital"? A few words are distorted almost out of recognition: why "ketli" instead of "ketil" (i.e. "kettle")? The word "English" itself is "ingriji", as if the Bengalis were like the Japanese and couldn't tell the difference between "r" and "l". "Geometry" is "jemiti", and yet the "tr" combination is ubiquitous in Bengali. But one can't pin blame on Indians alone for this, for the most numerous cases of such distortion occur the other way, in the adaptation of Indian words into English. Some spellings, such as the nuances of the different types of Indian "t", cannot be represented at all in Roman script without immediate recourse to pre-defined systems of diacritic marks, so the issue of distortion does not even arise. (This is one symptom of Indian scripts' superior phonetic power.) But in other cases some quite interesting linguistic mangling has gone on. Yule and Burnell, the editors of the famous Anglo-Indian dictionary "Hobson-Jobson" chose a radical and strangely symbolic example for the title of their work. "Hobson-Jobson" is a heavily Anglicized representation of the Shia cry during the procession of Mohurram, "Hussain, Hossan". The anguished, guttural invocation of the names of the early Muslim martyrs, screamed out in the midst of extraordinary scenes of collective self-flagellation, is "cleaned up" so far that the grandsons of the Prophet sound like two elderly Edwardian butlers being summoned to fetch more tea.

In the end however, rather than simply ridiculing such examples I think they deserve some degree of celebration too. They contain within them the sensible acknowledgement that the world's languages vary from each other so much on every level that we will never be able to reproduce even the sounds of one language accurately within the framework of another. (In fact, as I stressed earlier, even a language's "own" script doesn't "reproduce" that language in an exact or scientific fashion - something that so bothered George Bernard Shaw that he agitated for English to be written in a more phonetic script, the Shavian alphabet, resembling Pitman shorthand.) In the present academic orthodoxy, when including words from a foreign script in an essay, one tries to be as consistent and complete as possible in transliteration, establishing tables and adding diacritics or special characters until every letter in the original script has its one-to-one counterpart in an adapted Roman alphabet. This exactitude is desirable if you're a professional linguist. But the consequence of such an adaptation is that one has to learn how to read a good proportion of the altered alphabet anew. In the logically extreme case, the International Phonetic Alphabet, designed to be able to represent every language on earth, the result is something often resembling computer code.

The "Hobson-Jobson" solution is more creative: to use the idiomatic features of one's own language as effectively as possible, resulting for the English speaker in lots of doubled letters, endings in "-y" or "-ee" instead of "-i", or "-oo" instead of "u" ("Hindoo"), use of "c" in preference to "k" and so forth. If the result looks more like English than like Hindi, well it was always going to - because the only way to really make Hindi look like Hindi is to write it in Hindi script. Why not, then, have the quaintness of spellings like "chupatty" - which in this case happens to remind one of an English word close in meaning ("patty") - instead of the false conscientiousness of chapātī? (Here the "u" represents the short "a" of Devanagari, just as in another culinary loan, "chutney", which one would "properly" have to write chatnī.) Why not the familiar Calcutta place-name Chowringhee - even though chaurangī would be more precise? As in other cases (such as Indo-Saracenic architecture), the Victorians seem to have already anticipated postmodernism, in this case via the principle that "there is no metalanguage"; that we will never create a perfect symbolic representation of reality (whether human or natural) but will instead forever be embroiled in the imperfect, adaptive and improvisatory task of translation.

Just recently there has been a belated confirmation of the failure of any attempt to establish the Roman alphabet as standard for the globe: the decision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to allow Web addresses in non-Latin scripts, billed as an important move to establish more equal international access to the internet. And quite right too. Indeed there would undoubtedly be some more enthusiastic Hindus here who would say that, if any script ought to be universally imposed, it should be Devanagari, the writing system of classical Sanskrit. With more than double the number of letters in the Roman alphabet, organized systematically according to natural phonetic principles (the consonants are grouped according to how far back in the mouth their point of articulation is), Devanagari's logic and power are a good reminder of how intellectually far advanced ancient Indian civilization was - at a time when the "English", if they could be said to exist, did not even have a writing system of their own.

(Answers: career; circus; cake; doctor; airplane; election; apple; office; machine; police; engine.)