REMEMBERING GURUJI
By Terry Riley

I first met Pandit Pran Nath, or Fakir Pran Nath, or Guruji (as he was called by his students) in 1970 at the International Airport in Los Angeles. He was coming in on a flight with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela to do some concerts in L.A. and later to come to San Francisco to stay with me and perform at Mills College. He was about the first person off the plane, which I was meeting. I greeted him, and we stood together waiting for La Monte and Marian to disembark. I remember standing there for a long time and him being very silent. We went to the Grinstein's house in Los Angeles where we were staying. Years later, when Pran Nath would tell this story of our first meeting to other people, he would always say he came off the plane, but I didn't recognize him. That used to puzzle me, and I would always say, "Oh, no, you know I came up and greeted you and we stood together." Later I came to understand that what he probably really meant was he recognized me as his student -- possibly even from a former lifetime he recognized me. I think that was his meaning.

I went to India in September of 1970 to begin studies with Pandit Pran Nath, Fakir Pran Nath. I had taken initiation with him -- formal initiation, which means becoming a disciple -- the previous May in San Francisco, and decided to really pursue my studies in Indian classical music at this time. I arrived in Delhi during the monsoon. It was pouring rain. His little house in Kailash Colony had an alley in front which was under about two feet of water, because of the heavy rains that had been falling. So I rolled up my pants and carried my suitcases through the water to get to his house. I waited there all day. He was out teaching and his family greeted me. Of course, I didn't speak Hindi and they didn't speak much English. I waited around for him to come. He finally came that evening quite late and, with hardly a greeting, walked into the house. I was standing out in the front. He was never one for too many formalities, especially when he was younger. Things would just begin with him -- sometimes with a very important point of business without any kind of introduction.

His room was a very simple one-room bedroom with a small single bed on one side, two pictures on the wall (one of Sarwaswati, the Goddess of Music; another one of Sri Rama Krishna, the great Bengali saint, to whom he was very devoted), a small shrine in his closet that would have ordinarily been kept for clothes (he kept his clothes in his suitcase and hung his kurtapajama, or his Indian-style clothing, on the back of the front door). Very spartan: a deck of cards, a couple of books of holy texts, and that was about it. Very, very few possessions. He would always say to us, "Many things, many troubles."

Pran Nath always rose very early, between four and five in the morning, to begin his practice. He was around 51 years old when I met him, but he still practiced for 4 or 5 hours every morning, always the same ragas. Just like someone who was polishing their pots, he went over and over again the details of these fine ragas. As a student, I would sit with him and observe his practice -- how he approached the ragas and how he took care of his voice. He always said, "I take care of my voice like a mother takes care of her baby." He would only eat certain foods that he felt were good for his voice, good for his sound. He wasn't a vegetarian. He liked to eat meat. He felt that meat was needed for the strength of singing. The first hour or two of the early morning, while it was still dark, was passed with what is called "kurage practice," or practicing in the very lowest notes of the scale. These were notes that I didn't even have in my voice at that time. But he would practice on these very low tones: C, two octaves below middle C, was usually the note that he rested on. He did all kinds of mantras and wasefas (sacred sounds) in the morning. These slokas -- or holy sayings -- he used to develop his voice.

Later in the morning, he would start teaching me, giving me a lesson -- something to work on. At this time, I was an absolute beginner. He was very patient going over phrases again and again, so that they would be imprinted on my memory. Then he brought in a tabla player who would come in to accompany my lesson. Right away a student started learning to sing with the rhythmic structure. And that would go on. I would practice with the tabla player, the lesson that he taught me. He would lay down with the newspaper, and after that have a little breakfast. He would usually be gone during the day; he would walk -- many, many miles, or take smoky buses through Delhi -- to go to the homes of various other students that he had in New Delhi. He taught at Delhi University at this time also, which was very far from his home, and he had to get there by bus.

He would often end up walking ten miles a day, just to make all of his lessons. He wouldn't return until late at evening. He would call to Mataji, his wife, and she would bring chapatis and dahl and subzi -- typical food of North India -- to his room. He would eat either alone or with me or with other students.

At night he liked to listen to concerts on All-India Radio. He'd lie on his bed with his radio on his stomach. He especially liked to get the broadcasts from Lahore, which was the city of his birth. At the time he was born, Lahore was in India, and, after 1947 and the partition, it became Pakistan. It was more difficult for him to go there, and he used to feel very, very sad that this land which he'd grown up in was no longer what it was when he was young. He said it was like a paradise in those days.

There were two communities with which he associated -- the musical community and the wrestlers. Often they would be the same community; many of the musicians liked to wrestle also. He said every musician would have their own particular spot of practice -- like under some particular tree in town, or the outskirts of town. One of his favorite places was the wall of one of the big mosques, and he would sing there at midnight. He would sing Malkauns, the raga that's sung at midnight. He said he would throw his voice up against the wall and hear it resound back to him.

He spent a lot of his life practicing out of doors. He really liked to sing standing in the middle of a river. He said the river was often infested with crocodiles (the Ravi River). He said he would practice maybe three hours standing there, because it would develop his abdomen, having the pressure of the water against it. He had many austere practices. When he practiced at night, he would tie his hair up against the rafters, so that, if he started to fall asleep, his head would fall down and jerk against the rope and wake him up.

When he was studying with his guru -- Ustad Abdul Wahid Khansahib from Kirana, who was one of the most venerated masters of his day -- he wasn't allowed to sing in front of his teacher. So he would go into the jungle at night after serving his teacher, and do his practice, and then return in the morning to prepare his teacher's tea and practice. He said many, many years of serving his teacher like this, he learned to live without sleep. It was characteristic of his whole life that he very seldom slept much at night. Just an hour or two here and there, like little naps.

It was well known that he was born into a rich family in Lahore. They had a four-story house, they had servants, they had many animals. The grandfather, who was a very strong personality, actually had an office where he had many English people working under him, which was unusual at that time, because, when he was born, India was being ruled by England.

When he was six years old, he said he liked to put big shades -- big heavy blankets -- over his window, so that he could practice in the dark during the day, so that the light wouldn't disturb his concentration on the notes. His grandfather brought in a music teacher for him, and he began very serious raga study at this age. He always knew that this was going to be his life. From the earliest age he was totally immersed in sound. His mother wanted him to go to school in England and to pursue a law career, but he decided that he was going to be a musician. They had an argument, and he was asked to leave home immediately. He left without any possessions, and started wandering around India looking for a music teacher.

Pran Nath wandered many years until he found Ustad Abdul Wahid Khansahib at a music conference. He heard him singing and knew that this was the man to be his teacher. We asked him how he knew. He said, at that time he could copy every musician he had heard, every singer he had heard, but when he heard Abdul Wahid Khansahib, he couldn't copy this music and he had to learn how to do it.

Fakir Pran Nath possessed one of the most phenomenal memories of any musician -- or person -- that I have ever encountered. He had literally volumes and volumes of poetry memorized -- committed to memory -- in addition to volumes of compositions and ragas that he knew. He also knew the lineages of all the different musicians in the different garanas, or different styles of music in India. He could trace their histories back many generations, and knew all the uncles and cousins and brothers and nephews of these people. If he heard a composition once, he remembered it. He was much sought after in India from musicians wanting to learn these compositions. Many great Indian musicians would come to him to try to increase their repertoire. He not only knew a lot of compositions, but he seemed to be a collector of the rarest ones with the most interesting and beautiful shapes. I think many of these he had greatly improved by his own phenomenal compositional skills. He would make a very simple tune into something that was quite majestic in the way the notes were connected.

He wandered around India a lot as a young man -- wandered on foot visiting sacred shrines, listening to all of the great masters that were alive at that time. Up until about 1950, there were many, many very great singers in India. After that period, the real old masters died out and the music changed, because the system of learning music was gradually changing. The old style of the guru teaching the disciple -- or teaching members of his family and giving them complete attention -- started dying out, and students started learning music in schools, and in universities, and getting less of the kind of attention that this music needs to be learned, since it's an oral tradition. You have to be in constant association with a master to really get anywhere at all.

As he wandered around India, he collected compositions from many different masters. He was living in Bombay in the house of Baba Gyani, who was a great film composer -- but a film composer who composed very serious, very beautiful and deep music. He had exquisite taste, and loved very much to have Pran Nath living there because of his purity of style.

Pran Nath also was a student of Pandit Delip Chandra Vedi of Delhi, who was a great master, and he learned many of Vedi's compositions. His music was really a mixture of many kinds of styles, but mainly rooted in the Kirana tradition, which was a style that began 600 years ago with the great South Indian musician Gopal Nayak, who moved to Kirana and developed this style of music. The tradition continued for 600 years. Pran Nath is the last of the great masters of Kirana.

Pran Nath used to say that his work was about conserving the pitches of the raga, to make it absolutely pure, so that the effect was always deep and consistent. And yet, within this purity, his imagination was vast and endless.

He would sing pitches that didn't seem to exist anywhere, and yet they were totally convincing and he knew that they were part of the raga, but they were impossible to copy or to know how to create them. He was also able to create spaces in time which seemed to go against the laws of time's passing, in that he would get many, many more notes into a phrase than should be allowed to happen in the amount of time allotted to them.

His approach to improvisation was one of total intuition. He didn't approve of practicing things mechanically, like practicing all the mechanical rhythmic structures that are very common to Indian classical music, such as tahais. He would, instead, use them in his music, but use them spontaneously and always be adjusting the time according to how he felt it should go. So that there was always a beautiful, natural unfolding of his music, always seeming to be free of any kind of system, yet behind it all was an incredibly worked-out, methodical approach.

He used to say there was such a thing as "uppage." "Uppage" is when you surpass all of your practices and you're singing freely and with great imagination without any restrictions. It's like flying -- like a bird flying. This was the ultimate point to reach.

I can recall the first time sitting with him in Los Angeles in 1970 and being so amazed that someone could create such a vast amount of colors and emotions with his voice. It was so powerful to sit right next to him, and have all these frequencies absorbed into your own body. I had been interested before that in electronic music -- the different kinds of sounds that could be done acoustically, and the varieties of timbres that could be created. When I heard his voice, it seemed like he had been able to put all of this spectrum of sound his voice. It was like a great actor who can play any kind of role. Essentially that's what you have with raga. Ragas are filled with sets of emotions which run the gamut of human experience. A person has to be a consummate actor to be convincing and to actually put into place these emotions in such a way that everyone feels them very deeply. When he would sing, the raga would manifest in the walls. So that even after he left the room, you would still be hearing the raga.

When he wasn't singing, he was often silent for vast periods of time. He would often chide us for talking too much. All of his vocal energies seemed to be devoted to making music. But when he would get into an expansive mood, and start telling stories of the old days in India, he could captivate everyone with his wit and charm. He loved a good joke, knew many of them himself, and often would come up with just the most incredibly humorous insight into what was going on around him.

When he was younger, he had a complete three-octave, probably three-octave-plus, range -- very powerful throughout the whole vocal range. As he got older, and in his last days, his voice was often reduced to an octave or less, yet he could still create this same incredible magic with just a few notes. Sometimes there was a gesture in the voice which was impossible to analyze, and yet it pointed to everything that should be there. In the last days of his life, when we would take lessons from him, we had to be very acutely aware of these gestures, and what he was trying to point towards. He was the same if he wanted something. Sometimes just by raising his eyebrows, you had to know what it was that he wanted you to bring him. A big gesture for him would be to point at something.

He strongly believed that music should be an offering to God. In that sense it should have its purest intentions, always have the musician's deepest concentration, and that the musician should make this offering as beautiful and pure as he can. And in this way, he never thought of himself as singing for people. He used to say many times that, if a musician is saying to himself as he's singing, "I am singing for other people," then this would be a second-rate kind of music. But if it's an offering for God, then it's done with the deepest emotional, mental, spiritual, and physical perfection.

Pran Nath had a similar respect for his instrument -- the tambura -- and all musical instruments, and felt that they should be treated as sacred objects, so that they were always able to give their most pure and divine voice.

He often told me when we were touring together in Europe, "First we must go pay our respects to God." So we would go to a cathedral, if there was one in the town, before we performed. In India it would be the temple, or the mosque. But always going to get blessings before you performed was very important to him.

In 1937, at the age of 19, Pran Nath became a recording artist for All-India radio and began regular monthly broadcasts from New Delhi. He would come down from Tapkeshwar (the cave where he was practicing), make his broadcasts, and then go back. By this time he had completed his apprenticeship with Ustad Abdul Wahid Khansahib, and was performing at various music festivals throughout India, becoming recognized for his unique and deep raga invocations.

Sri Mahent Narayana Giri, a swami from Dehra Dun, came to one of his concerts and told him that, if he was ever in Dehra Dun, he should come and visit him at his temple. But he didn't give him the address. One day when Pran Nath later on was walking through Paltan Bazaar in Dehra Dun, he happened to see a temple, and something drew him upstairs. He walked up and there was the swami who had invited him to visit. Thus began a long friendship which lasted until Sri Mahent Narayana Giri's death many years later.

In 1970, my first trip to India, Pran Nath invited me to go with him to Dehra Dun, to spend several weeks living in the temple and practicing. Swami Narayana Giri gave him a room, which was on the very top of the temple. Dehra Dun is right at the foothills of the Shivalya range, which are the first big mountains that rise out of the upper plains of India. You can see these mountains from the roof of the temple. The city of Mussoorie, which is quite a famous city in India, is situated 7,000 feet above this temple. From there you can see the lights of Mussoorie at night. We practiced in this room for many hours each day. I was given lessons there. During the day when Pran Nath was gone, I would stay and practice on the roof, with this fantastic view of Mussoorie and the surrounding mountains. Swami Narayana Giri would prepare meals for us with his own hands. And there was a great feeling of love in the temple, between Swami Narayana Giri and the young children that would come to do the Arati ceremony at night. He was like a father for them all.

Several times while I was there, as it was the end of the monsoon season, there were great storms that would rise up. The little room that we had on the top of the temple didn't have any windows, so the rain would come crashing in, and we'd have to try to protect the tambura and our bedding. As it was, I caught a cold when we were on this trip, and Pran Nath went out and brought back a little piece of charas (hashish) and said, "This is good for the cold. You take this." I also think he thought it was good for the concentration of the music we were studying. To get deeper into the notes.

When we went to Hardawar (the holy city in the north of India on the Ganges), along the bathing ghats, there were people making bhang. We would sometimes drink bhang and then go sit and sing by the side of the river, the holy Ganges.

Nearby Dehra Dun are the Caves of Tapkeshwar, where Pran Nath was a naked saint in his youth when he was around 19 or 20. He became a naga, just clothing his body with ashes and singing with a community of other sadhus, or young renunciates. The cave is a beautiful old Shiva cave, which is reputed to be around 5,000 years old. And each year at Shivaratri (which is the night of Shiva, the full moon in February), devotees would come from all over India, and Nepal, and the surrounding foothills to have darshan, in other words receiving the higher physical presence of someone, and to see this wonderful cave. There's a natural Shiva lingham in this cave, which is caused by the dripping of water onto a stone. Lingham is the holy worshipping icon for the Hindus of Lord Shiva. The cave is quite dark. It has to be lit by candlelight. Sometimes now they have dim electric light. In the rainy season it floods because the river rises up and comes through the cracks, and they have to abandon it during high water and monsoons.

Pran Nath was always in association with the swamis that lived in this cave. Throughout his entire life he'd go back -- make a pilgrimage to the cave and surrounding areas. It played a very important part in his music practice. I think he developed a lot of his ideas at this place. Much of his practice and development of his art was done here.

During the first fifteen years or so that I was a student and disciple of Pran Nath's, he led a very solitary life and liked to have a simple routine each day. He saw very few people. People would come to visit, but for very brief visits. He was mainly involved with his own practice and his composition. He was a splendid composer and composed many, many very beautiful compositions, which he shared with us. He spent long hours trying to create these compositions -- trying to perfect their shapes.

As he became older and his health deteriorated, he started gathering around him more and more students. The last ten years of his life, there were many people around him day and night, and a deep bond of love developed between him and his students.

When he was admitted to the hospital as he frequently was during the last years of his life, there were always between ten and twenty students in his room. Many of them would spend the night, to the bewilderment of the hospital staff who would usually put up with it. He would be teaching -- giving classes in his hospital room. Even when he was extremely ill, he would still try to continue teaching.

At the very end of his life, he was surrounded by these students, and friends who flew in from India. When he died he was brought home to his room on California Street. He was laid out on the floor and anointed with sandalwood oils, dressed in a fresh kurta, and laid out with many, many flowers. We kept vigils during the night. Many people would come during the day to sit and chant. Children would come and dance around him on the flowers. It was one of the most amazing gatherings I've ever been to, because people were both sad and joyous. There was a radiant luster that emanated from his body and his face, the kind of thing that I had only read about in books. But here was a living example of it. People felt that he was still with them. Until the moment of his cremation, his face became more and more ecstatic, and at the very end his smile became quite radiant, happy, and childlike.

Pran Nath was a devotee of Shirdi Sai Baba, who was a great saint of North India who died three weeks before the birth of Pran Nath. I often wondered if Pran Nath was an incarnation of Sai Baba. He seemed to resemble him so much, and his ideals were exactly the same as Baba's. He was neither Hindu nor Muslim. Sai Baba had turned up mysteriously in the village of Shirdi as a youth, and started meditating on a garbage heap, attracting the attention of the villagers because of his serene and peaceful nature. He later set up in an old abandoned mosque in Shirdi and kept a constant fire as a vigil. His deeds and teachings became legendary. He was a Christ-like figure for the Indians. Pran Nath took us to Shirdi on two occasions, where we would practice in the village and go to the Hindu ceremonies of fire known as aratis in the morning and the evening. To the end of his life, Pran Nath was extremely devoted to Sai Baba. He had claimed that when he had his severe heart attack in 1977, he fell into the arms of Sai Baba who had held him until he was revived after being dead for 13 minutes.

He often said to us that this music was impossible to do without the blessing of saints. It seemed that to my mind all music was like this. It was sheer blessing. Music didn't originate with us. It was a gift. From the saints, from the Divine. Living with Pran Nath, this was made very apparent in the way inspiration would come to both him and his students. He made this a living art that always had to be cherished and protected -- that nothing was taken for granted, that each day you began seriously anew to devote yourself to this work and to ask for blessings to try to create something.

While we were in Shirdi I tried to make a recording of the arati. I took in a professional cassette recorder and a good microphone, and stood in the middle of the arati while people were singing and playing drums and cymbals. There was a great fervor and emotional moment during the arati when people would wave torches of fire in front of the statue of Sai Baba. I came back to the little hut where we were staying near the temple in Shirdi, and started playing the tape back of the arati, only there was nothing on the tape. Pandit Pran Nath said, "Only if Baba wants the arati to be on the tape, it will appear." I was ready to go back the next night and try to record the arati again, and just before going I put the tape in again to play. This time there was the arati on the tape. Apparently Sai Baba had wanted it to be on the tape after all.

The ride to and from Shirdi from Bombay was really harrowing. We went in a taxi -- it was La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Pandit Pran Nath, and I. We saw numerous trucks turned over on the road from accidents, and also on the way back. When we got back to Bombay, everybody was praising Sai Baba for delivering us safely. Just at that moment we were rammed from behind very hard by another car. We all laughed at the irony and got out of the cab -- hailed another one.

We had made several trips to India after 1970, but they were aperiodic. Beginning six years ago we began a yearly tour to India every February, and we would take a class of American and European students there and make this fantastic connection with the older students of Pran Nath who were Indian and lived in Delhi. These classes were, I think, a way for Pran Nath to tie his previous life in India together with the life he lived in America for almost 25 years. We would sit, Indian and American students, together in his classes -- established masters with very young beginners, all learning together. This was a very powerful way, I think, for him to set up the continuation of his work, knowing that, in order for it to be a strong experience and lasting, it would have to have the help and co-operation of both the Indian and American students. I think we all learned from each other.

Pran Nath always said, "The first lesson is the last lesson." He always began with his "sa," or first note of the scale, and from there related every other note. All of his lessons began that way. It was true that even people who had a mastery over this music had to rekindle that love of the very first note they sang. And this was the way to do it -- to start each day with this. In his classes in India, many people would come, like Ustad Hafizullah Khansahib -- the great sarangi master. When he would sit and listen to Guruji, it appeared he realized that there was something there for him to learn -- even from the most basic lessons that would be taught to beginners.

It's like saying that, within this primary note, there's a potential for all the most intricate and elaborate phrases that can be wrought from the music. Once the primary note is mastered, and really listened to deeply, everything can be revealed. Even though Pran Nath was probably the greatest living singer of his era, he didn't feel himself above sitting down with absolute beginners and working with the very first lesson, over and over again. And in that way he would awaken himself the great mastery and renew it daily.

Pran Nath's life was extremely difficult; he had to work extremely hard to achieve what he did. Many musicians were born into families of other musicians and so for them it was much easier for them to accept the lineage and the teachings and be on course right away because of the encouragement from the family. But since he was discouraged by his family from doing music, he had to seek out his own teacher without any help, without any support. Even when he found his teacher, his teacher didn't accept him for the first six years that he was asking to become a student, because his teacher was a very stern man. He said, "What do I need to teach you for? You have no money; you have nothing to offer me." But his persistence won him the place in the heart of his teacher, and eventually he was taught by him. But even after that, his life was one of difficulties. The great depth of his purity and devotion of his music sometimes put him into conflict with other musicians who took their music a little more lightly. I think there was resentment coming from them. So, in a certain sense, he wasn't given encouragement in the music community, and he also wasn't one to flatter other musicians just to get a job or to get a concert. He only did his work under the most strict conditions that he imposed upon himself -- that the work always had to remain absolutely pure, and his devotion to the swaras (or minute tones of each raga) had to be there for him at all times. He'd never compromise that.

He always said, "My music is a sad music." I think it expressed the difficulty. But, through that sadness, he gave the listeners great joy, because he had suffered for it. He could express sorrow in a way that made it be consumed by the fire of his own work. The listener did not have to suffer; he could only enjoy the great depth that was being expressed.

There were occasionally rare moments when he was very playful with his music, too, and could show the amazing facility he had of making games out of musical elements. His rare smile seemed to light up the whole universe, because it didn't come very often. The same smile that might happen in his music was only expressed occasionally in a rare mood. But he had it, and some of us had the rare occasion to enjoy it.

Around 1984, maybe earlier in '83, he bought a house in Berkeley. He became a more or less permanent resident of Berkeley, California. Around this time many other students, many new students started to come and study. A real community of music lovers developed around him. It seemed that he knew that it would take a large community of musicians to sustain the work that he was doing. He wanted to see it go on in America, beyond his own life. He even took an American citizenship in the years just before he died. I think he felt that in America there was a chance for something great to happen with the kind of musical idea that he cherished. He felt Americans were hard workers and serious about the music. He realized that in India possibly the people were too close to the music to really appreciate it. I observed this, too, in concerts in India that sometimes the Indians are a bit nonchalant in their listening to the music. It is true that here he found an audience whose souls were starving for the experience of this music. An experience that he brought to America was one of ancient India -- that experience of the Vedas, the ancient texts that were developed by the Richis who lived in the Himalayas many thousand years ago. That kind of sound was in his voice. The kind of sound didn't exist anywhere else. He was the sole repository. This rareness was, I think, picked up immediately by Americans, especially by La Monte Young, whom we have to thank for having first recognized it and inviting him to America in 1970.

Pran Nath always encouraged me to do my own composition and experiments with Western classical music, along with the pure study of Indian classical music. I think he also felt that something of this depth could also be assimilated in America and would be uniquely our own, since it's been transplanted here. And I think he expected us to look for the synthesis, or the keys, to bringing this kind of experience together in our own work.

I think this can only happen through our continued practice, though, of the music as it was taught to us by him. The synthesis will be made very naturally through a deeper understanding of what his music really meant. It has to be brought about through practice, through contemplation and reflection. There are examples of this in the work of some of his American disciples now. It should grow as the years following his lifetime go on.

The above article is also
published in hard-copy form by 
20TH-CENTURY MUSIC
in the September, 1996 issue.

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