Chaitanya Tamhane (2020)
Sharad Nerulkar, a young Mumbai man, is dedicated to performing and preserving the tradition of khyal classical singing despite its declining popularity and lack of commercial potential. The Disciple, which received its British premiere as a one-off online screening on the opening night of this year’s London Film Festival, covers around twenty years of Sharad’s largely unavailing mission. His dogged determination chimes with writer-director (and editor) Chaitanya Tamhane’s uncompromising storytelling. Tamhane’s debut feature Court (2014) sometimes demanded a good deal of concentration from the audience. This, his second feature, demands more of the same – perhaps even stoicism.
Viewers ignorant of Indian music generally (let alone this esoteric form of it, which dates from the eighteenth century) are made aware from the start of the cultural challenge they’re in for, and of how this might be mitigated. Tamhane starts with a khyal recital by an elderly man (Arun Dravid) – the protagonist’s guru, referred to throughout as Guruji. Three younger performers accompany him on musical instruments and, like Guruji, sit cross-legged on a shallow platform facing the audience. They include Sharad (Aditya Modak). Although Guruji’s song, known as a bandish, has lyrics, these aren’t translated into English subtitles. Fair enough: it’s soon clear the singing is more a matter of improvisation and abstract music values than lyrical interpretation. An uneducated ear struggles to appreciate these values but the introduction is followed immediately by Sharad’s taking part in a singing competition. Even though I could only guess that he alone was performing khyal in it, a screen contest of almost any kind is basically comprehensible – the nervous preparations of the competitor we’re interested in, her or his performance, the suspenseful announcement of results in reverse order, reactions to these. This contest is no exception, and helps give us our bearings. Sharad finishes outside the top three.
Tamhane uses two elements repeatedly to convey important aspects of Sharad’s training – the relationship between him and Guruji, and the words of Guruji’s own (late) guru, Maai. The former goes some way beyond master and pupil, thanks, at least in part, to Guruji’s gradually declining health. Sharad makes his tea and gives him massage, takes his teacher to doctor’s appointments and pays for them (presumably with his earnings from transferring rare classical music LPs and cassettes to CDs for a man who sells them). Riding on his motorcycle to and from his own home (he lives with his grandmother[1]), Sharad listens to recordings of the voice of Maai – the performing name of Maestra Sindhubai Jadhav. She didn’t record her performances for posterity but left instructions on the state of mind, rather than the technique, needed to deliver them rightly. Technique, according to Maai, is merely a medium for expressing one’s inner life. A singer sings not for the audience or for patrons but only for their guru. The process of understanding the melodic framework for improvisation (raag) amounts to a lifelong, ascetic quest for Truth. Sharad listens to the elderly Maai’s pronouncements as he travels down largely deserted roads. On one occasion, he gets off his motorbike and takes out his earphones. The resulting noise of traffic – the sound of the real world – isn’t loud but, in these sequences, so unusual that it’s striking.
The Disciple (with mostly Marathi dialogue) begins in 2006, when Sharad is twenty-four. Around halfway through, the action jumps forward to the present (of when the film was being made). A short coda moves several years into the future. This progression through time is punctuated by a few flashbacks to Sharad’s childhood, in which the dominant figure is his father[2]. The latter instructs Sharad in khyal, despite his wife’s urging him to let the boy go outside and play with other kids. When father and son travel overnight to attend a recital, the father’s conversation on the train, with two other aficionados, is all about the music. Sharad briefly wakes up to join in: he’s asked to name four different raags with chocolate as a reward.
Sharad inherits the Maai recordings from his late father, and more. The father – who writes about khyal but, despite his learning, never mastered the art of performing it – has an air of defeat about him that persists in his son. If it’s really the case (as his IMDb entry indicates) that Aditya Modak hasn’t acted on screen before then his performance is remarkable. Apart from the childhood scenes, Modak plays Sharad throughout – in his mid-twenties, late thirties and at some unspecified point in his forties (but well on into them). The most striking feature of Modak’s Sharad as a young man is his large, liquid, melancholy eyes. By the time, he’s thirty-seven, they don’t have the same light, although Sharad’s life is largely unchanged and he remains true to his vocation – teaching as well as performing and attending to Guruji. Always stocky, Sharad gets heavier as he grows older. This isn’t weight gain in the Raging Bull class but the extra poundage is expressive of how Sharad feels. Dejection seems to settle on him – to weigh him down.
Sharad not only shows the growing strain of commitment to a moribund art form. He also continues to lack self-confidence, a problem Guruji does little to alleviate. He’s a harsh critic of his pupil, on one occasion even during a public performance. Sharad’s singing, his master says, is sometimes superficial, sometimes constricted – ‘Sing with an open throat,’ Guruji tells him. Even for those of us with no experience of hearing khyal, it’s true that Sharad’s voice, compared with Guruji’s and other voices heard in the course of the film, often sounds tense. As an instructor, Sharad lacks the authoritative presence of his mentor but shares Guruji’s proud inflexibility. Karan, one of his students, is respectful enough to ask Sharad’s blessing to join a ‘fusion’ band at university, though his mother thinks he should go straight ahead and do so. Sharad tells Karan he’s free to join the band but, in that case, must cease to be his pupil: to continue would be a waste of time for them both. The boy and his mother depart, in distress and high dudgeon respectively. Scrolling down the few, unappreciative comments on YouTube videos of his recitals, Sharad pauses on a ‘boring’. He then embarks on a detailed reply, explaining how the person who made the comment doesn’t understand khyal.
The hero remains a sympathetic figure largely because he’s so often on the receiving end. He decides to donate his father’s recordings of Maai’s lectures to a music library: an unfriendly archivist agrees, with a mixture of irritation and indifference, to take them off his hands. It doesn’t lift the viewer’s mood that Sharad in his personal life is such a solitary figure. Near the start of The Disciple, Guruji says that he and his contemporaries, until they were forty, devoted all their energies to their musical apprenticeship. This is picked up in a much later scene when Sharad, out of breath from jogging, has a phone conversation with his mother. He tersely reminds that he’s only thirty-seven – that talk of his getting himself a wife is still three years away. In a startling juxtaposition of early sequences, Sharad and a fellow musician sit and talk together in his room. When he touches her arm, she gets up to go: the moment she’s left, he texts her a ‘sorry’. Tamhane then cuts to Sharad masturbating as he watches porn on his computer. He’s doing the same thirteen years later.
The recurring similar situations and the consistency of Aditya Modak’s portrait make for a substantial and credible central character. Even so – and even allowing that Tamhane clearly regards reiteration as an important means of conveying Sharad’s disheartening predicament – you can’t help thinking he’s making the same points more often than necessary. It’s some relief when another contest enters the film. Sharad (the thirty-seven-year-old version) and his grandmother are having supper, as she watches a TV talent show called ‘Fame India’, at the audition stage. Sharad’s attention is caught by a plump, plain young woman whose singing is distinctive. Plenty of X Factor/BGT tropes are in evidence here. ‘That wasn’t good’, one of the judges tells the contestant, whose face falls, ‘You were great!!!’ She’s rewarded with a Golden Ticket to the next round of the contest. We also see evidence of her progress, if that’s the word, through later rounds. Her appearance, needless to say, has been transformed into something conventional; ditto the garishly staged numbers she performs. This summary of the homogenising tyranny of shows like ‘Fame India’ is hardly less depressing than the rest of the story but is refreshing because it’s simply and sharply satirical, and Tamhane doesn’t dwell on the subject.
The Disciple would benefit from more tonal departures like these bits – and a scene in which the younger Sharad meets with a big noise in the Indian music industry. This complacent knowall succeeds, rapidly and blithely, in rubbishing the performing careers of Sharad’s idols, including Maai, whose music he dismisses as ‘elitist crap’. When he also declares that Guruji stuck to khyal recitals because he couldn’t handle the pressure of performing in front of large audiences, Sharad throws a glass of water in the man’s face. The encounter is then revealed as a flashback in the protagonist’s mind: Tamhane cuts to a different discharge of water as the older Sharad bathes the infirm Guruji. The counterpoint, although obvious, is instantly effective in a way that few other moments in the film are. It’s admirable in principle that Tamhane strenuously resists the facile but you wish he’d cut himself a bit more slack.
Perhaps the most dispiriting scene of all comes at the end of the present-day part of the story. There are more empty chairs than before in the small auditorium for Sharad’s recital. He suddenly decides he’s had enough and abandons the performance. Even Chaitanya Tamhane seems to feel he needs a somewhat consoling postscript to this. In the next scene, Sharad, a bit heavier still, is travelling on a train with a woman who’s clearly his wife and a young girl who’s clearly their daughter. We then see him interviewed at the publicity launch of a company he’s set up ‘to promote North Indian classical music to wider audiences’. This hint of commercial compromise is quickly eclipsed by the return train journey that ends the film. A busker moves through the carriage where Sharad and his family are seated. Sharad’s face is impassive but we may infer that the busker, singing a song about a ‘seeker’, is a kindred spirit – another voice in the wilderness.
Michal Sobocinski’s supple lighting gives the images a wonderful depth of clarity throughout. Like Court, the film is produced by Vivek Gomber (with Alfonso Cuarón one of the executive producers). The sense that you’ve been watching a major undertaking is reinforced by the vast list of names on the closing credits. The title character isn’t the only one who needs discipline to keep going with The Disciple but there’s reward, as well as exasperation, to be had from staying the course.
7 October 2020
[1] An elderly female relative, at any rate: I wasn’t sure if this was Sharad’s grandmother or an aunt but am assuming the former.
[2] I can’t credit this excellent actor or most of the others in the film. The IMDB cast list doesn’t include the names of characters, except for Aditya Modak’s. The same goes for the Wikipedia cast section, with the addition of Arun Dravid’s character.
