I was invited to a jugalbandi performance called as a dialogue between a sitar and a violin accompanied by the table recently. The players were young, energetic and talented. They played Malkauns and Maru Behaag, both endearing for the ears and apt for instrumental rendition. The performance started off as soothing and absorbing but soon became loud and cacophonic as the players took up what was supposed to be a collaboration into a competition and one upmanship. In the end, one sensed aggression and even anger at times, the promise of dialogical engagement belied.

A jugalbandi is typically a union, not unlike a sexual union, where each tries to arouse and hence fulfill the other. The goal is to enhance the raga, to discover its many hidden crevices, touching which should intensify pleasure. Only those who are good at sex would know how to play a jugal bandi; those who miss the metaphor of eroticism miss the principle of jugalbandi altogether.

The question we ask about the above-mentioned performance is why did the performers miss the point? Why did they, instead of collaborating towards the same purpose start to compete and eventually outdo each other? We may answer this question in Bishambhar’s words from Jalsaghar, and which is that it is social class.

Social class is difficult to define but broadly we may say that an upper class has more resources at her disposal when exercising a choice while the lower classes are somewhat more constrained while doing do. The lower the social class is the more they compete with one another for the access of resources; they guard those resources more jealously and even zealously and thus jeopardize more easily the common good. The pursuit of public goods such as literature or art is better done by the upper classes than by the lower classes because only the former is capable of a higher level of collaboration.

Arts have two aspects – one, the technicality of the medium. This is easy to achieve especially if the education of arts is organized and institutionalized into easily learnable and repeatable modules. The other aspect of art is its language, the unity of syntaxes, the synthesis of phrases and these are more difficult because these need a command of artistic language. What would be the artistic language? Artistic language is the combination of the signifier and the sign into the signified; since the upper classes have more resources at their disposal, they have higher levels of signifiers and hence the higher level of command over language.

S.M. Krishna’s attempt at the democratization of the Madras Music Academy is not unjustifiably opposed by the upper castes; music is a matter of social class; its development is indeed Brahmanic.