Dhaka 1

Lecture-demo the morning of January 15^th for an organization called Chhayanaut in Dhaka. They have an amazing story - promoting performance first of Rabindra Sangeet, the music composed by Rabindranath Tagore, starting back in 1962. This was and is a political statement of ecumenical secularism here in Islamic Bangladesh. Now they have built up a school with hundreds of students, classical vocal as well as Bengali music, a magnificent new building that apparently took many years to arrange and fund. But they have no instrumental music program. After playing I was asked what might be done to promote more interest in instrumental music. I talked about the connection of East Bengal with the instrumental music gharanas, that so many maestros like Ali Akbar Khan and Allaudin Khan were born here, that the patronage given by the rich landowners in the late 19^th/early 20^th centuries was critical to all the sarode and sitar gharanas that came out of Kolkata later. I tried to suggest that if they can construct an integrated view of the history of the past century, not an easy thing to do in light of all the upheavals, then perhaps the younger generation would see that there is a heritage worth investing themselves in.