Nidhu Babu

Ramnidhi Gupta ( Bengali : রামনিধি গুপ্ত Rāmnidhi Gupta ; * 1741 in Kumartuli, Calcutta ; † 1839 in Calcutta), short form Nidhu Gupta , known as Nidhu Babu , was an Indian composer , poet and an influential figure in the musical life of Calcutta. The Bengali version of Tappa , a classical style of North Indian music , goes back to him . His best-known work is the guitaratna poetry collection .

Life

Nidhu Babu was born as Ramnidhi Gupta into a family of doctors ( kaviraj ) of the Vaidya caste (also Baidya), an upper class that is counted among the Brahmins . His father was called Hari Narayan. He grew up in the then aristocratic district of Kumartuli in the north of the city center, named after a "pottery district", which is known to this day for the production of pottery and clay figurines. In addition to his native Bengali language, he learned Persian and some English from a Christian employee. A few kilometers north, the Battle of Plassey took place in 1757 , in which the armed forces of the East India Company defeated the last independent Nawab of Bengal and the British secured political supremacy over this part of the country. The uprising of Mir Qasim , a Nawab from Bengal appointed by the British, was one of the other external events of the early years of life . British troops ended the uprising in 1764 at the Battle of Buxar . Buxar is located in the west of today's state of Bihar , not far from the city of Chhapra , where Nidhu Babu was the second director in 1776 and later head of the tax collection authority in the service of the East India Company until 1794.

Presumably Nidhu Babu received classical music lessons in Calcutta in his youth . As an employee in Chhapra, he had employed a Muslim teacher ( Ustād ) who taught him Muslim songs. When Nidhu Babu realized that the Ustad was not ready to acquaint him with the secrets of his Gharana (musical tradition), he no longer wanted to sing yavana songs ( Sanskrit yavana and Pali yona , from Persian yauna denoted an " Ionian " in ancient India “, Ie Greeks, generally foreigners and here a Muslim immigrant). Instead, he took up Hindi songs, which he translated into Bengali and provided with the melodies of classical ragas .

Around 1794 he quit his job in Chhapra and returned to Calcutta. He had amassed a lot of money - presumably not through bribery - which he was probably investing in an agency house in Calcutta . The income from such an enterprise would explain his financially independent and befitting life, in which he was not dependent on the support of a zamindar . It was part of his character peculiarities never to perform a song on request. His nickname is made up of a short form of the first name Ramnidhi and the honorary title Babu , which in Bengal was usually given to a cultured man of high society who led a luxurious lifestyle with the family heritage in the background.

Nidhu Babu had a close relationship with a lady named Shrimati who lived in Calcutta. She was the concubine of Mahananda Roy, the head ( diwan ) of the tax authority of the Murshidabad district . He must have been her music teacher, she appears in many of his love poems with allusions. Contemporaries mention that Nidhu Babu wrote his best poems while under the influence of alcohol without losing control of himself. The consumption of wine was common and accepted in the society of that time.

Nidhu Babu introduced his own form of the Bengali singing style akhrai . In 1805/06 he gathered musicians with whom he performed this style and soon became by far the leading akhrai singer. In 1808 he founded the Kalabat Baithaki Ganer Majlish Music School. In the anthology Guitaratna of 1837, Nidhu Babu published 554 of his own songs, including details of the ragas and talas in which they were to be performed.

Cultural environment

In Bengal, with the establishment of the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 , the British administration created the regulation of their tax revenues, consolidated the land rights of the large landowners (Zamindare) and at the same time increased the tax burden on the farmers. The class of rich landowners and townspeople who made money by trading with the British administration increased around this time. In 1817 the Hindu College (now Presidency University ) was founded in Calcutta to offer Western education and English lessons for students from mostly liberal Hindu families. Nidhu Babu's cultural environment was a Bengali upper class from Babus , who were largely indifferent or hostile to Western influences. It consisted of the traditional educated elite, landowners and nouveau riche business people. In 1839, the year Nidhu Babu died, around 60 families determined the city's cultural life.

The musical taste of the nouveau riche included both simple, often coarse folk music and refined classical styles. For the general entertainment there were the song genres jhumur, kavi, panchali and tarja , which were shaped by Vishnuism and especially the cult of Radha and Krishna . The audience was particularly enthusiastic about the erotic, vulgar kheur songs. Among the three classical styles, kirtana was used to worship Vishnu. In the oldest classical style of mangalakavya , the virtues of popular gods were sung in various ways. Members of the Bishnupur Gharana cultivated the strict Dhrupad style

The majority of the Babus were supporters of a conservative Brahmanic worldview, against which the Hindu reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), one of the founders of the Hindu College , had a difficult time. The cultural connections between Hindus and Muslims in the 18th century were extremely good and expressed themselves in a common classical (Hindustan) music. Contemporary Persian culture was also considered modern in Bengal, and Nidhu Babu is said to have been heavily influenced by the poetry of the Persian poet Hafiz (1320-1389).

The lifestyle of the upper class was comfortable, it ran smoothly and sometimes experienced strange excesses in its addiction to pleasure. At the end of the 18th century there were some people from this class in Calcutta who came together to form a “bird club” ( pakshir dal ). Its director was called Sivachandra Thakur, he is referred to as the buffo of the businessman and art patron Nabakrishna Deb (also Raja Nubkissen, 1733–1797). The “birds” met in their place under a banyan tree to smoke hashish together . Each of them had the name of a bird and had to speak in a "bird language" or at least utter bird-like sounds. One day they were crouched in cages. Nidhu Babu taught them music, for which they worshiped him as their "master". Two bird men later gained a certain fame as singers of baithaki songs (music to “sit down”, classical chamber music), one of whom also performed bumpy verses that he had composed himself. Some of the “bird songs” preserved in poetry collections represent appealing compositions set in classical ragas and could indicate that Nidhu Babu's participation in the meetings of the “birds” was not only due to intoxication.

effect

Nidhu Babu first became known in the Bengali music world for his refinement of the akhrai songs. The word comes from ākhrā and describes a club in which classical music is practiced and played. The origin of the akhrai is likely to be found in Shantipur in the Nadia district at the beginning of the 18th century . The akhrai style of Shantipur was made more easily consumable with the addition of kheur songs and, in the course of the 18th century, after formal improvements, it reached Calcutta in this popular form. In Calcutta, before Nidhu Babu, the professional musician Ramjoy Sen (he was a Ustad) and another musician took another step towards a classical style. In Calcutta, Maharaja Nubkissen Bahadur from the northern district of Shobhabazar emerged as a sponsor of akhrai . His resident musician Kuluichandra Sen was related to Nidhu Babu. Both began what was termed the "reforming" of the akhrai by adding more complex and classical melody forms to the rhythmic structures (talas). They developed talas like pirebandi for the opening, dolan (lively), sabdaur (fast) and mor for the final climax. The akhrai became a baithaki gan , a high quality chamber music style. Nidhu Babu released the style from its linguistic and musical banality.

Around 1805 he organized two akhrai amateur groups, which appeared in the higher social circles and soon became so popular that the singers of the original style disappeared from the scene. More akhrai groups sprang up in various parts of the city, with Nidhu Babu himself leading the group from Baghbazar, which was the most successful. The vocal accompaniment was the barrel drum dholak , the long-necked lute sitar and the violin . It is possible that this was the first time that a European violin was used in North Indian music. Nidhu Babu left the erotic themes of the kheur songs, but his verse poetry never sounded vulgar in this genre. As ragamelodies he used bhairavi, behag, kalangra, kamod, khat, khambaj lalit, lalit-bhairav, paraj and surat .

After Nidhu Babu's makeover , Akhrai had become a highly complex style that could only be appreciated by a knowledgeable audience. The style soon lost its popularity and by 1828 it had disappeared from Calcutta. In addition, the refined and coarse parts of the kheur songs had lost their attraction, so that around 1831 Mohanchand Basu, a student of Nidhu Babu, generated the “half” akhrai style from akhrai by mixing akhrai with kavi songs . Kavi is one of many popular forms of song performed by two groups as a kavigan folk song competition . Nidhu Babu is said to have shown himself quite angry about this development, regardless of this, "half" - akhrai remained popular among the lower classes until the beginning of the 20th century.

Nidhu Babu's arrangements of the tappa , which he considered more suitable as a musical form for his passionate love songs, were much more lasting than the strict dhrupad style ( dhruvapada ), which was popular in Bengal at the time , with which religious songs were sung. He took over the lively vibration of the voice around a note ( gitkari ) from the Hindustan tappa, and expressed the vocalises and melodic decorations ( tanas ) in long undulations in accordance with the atmosphere of his songs. Overall, his Bangla Tappa style differed significantly from the Northwest Indian Tappa in some points. The Vishnuit singers in Bengal often used combinations of two ragas, which obviously influenced Nidhu Babu. In Guitaratna he lists 46 combined ragas. To his talas belonged in the first place jalad tetala , further ada-cautal, dhime tetala, dhamar tala, ekatala, hari tala and kaoyali . A list of a total of 108 ragas and a list of talas are also included along with the song lyrics.

Four of these songs, all of which can also be read as poems, are religious devotional songs, one has a patriotic content and praises its mother tongue, the great majority are about wistful love and loneliness. At the center of the poems written in Bengali is almost always the abandoned woman who longs for her lover. Nidhu Babu's lady of the heart differs from the spiritual beings that are sung about in the Vishnuitic kirtanas; in the way she expresses her feelings, she rather corresponds to the real courtesans of urban society.

While students of Nidhu Babu and other serious composers continued to cultivate the Bengali tappa as a classical art form, there were some imitators who gradually degenerated tappa into a cheap entertainment of personalities. Even though Guitaratna published further editions in 1856 and 1868 , the Bengali literary scene turned away from its own tradition in the course of the 19th century and came under the influence of Western culture. Nidhu Babu has the merit of having created a poetry in the transition period called the Bengal Renaissance , which was introduced by the beginning of colonial rule , which offered certain stimuli to later poet-philosophers.

Fonts

• Guitaratna. (1837), contains 554 songs
• Durgadash Lahiri (Ed.): Bangalir Gan. (1905), contains 459 songs

literature

• Ramakanta Chakrabarty: Nidhu Babu and his Tappā. In: Jayasri Banerjee (Ed.): The Music of Bengal. Essays in Contemporary Perspective. Indian Musicological Society, Bombay / Baroda 1988, pp. 31-47

Web links

• Nidhu Gupta. Banglapedia

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On the other hand: "1148-1235" BS ( Bangla San , converted 1741-1828 / 29) after Ashok Damodar Ranade: Music Contexts: A Concise Dictionary of Hindustani Music. Promilla & Co Publishers, New Delhi 2006, p. 132, ISBN 978-8185002637
2. ^ Agency House. Banglapedia
3. ↑ Sitansu Ray: Classical Musical Literature in Bengal. A letter survey. In: Banerjee (Ed.), P. 49. According to Banglapedia, there are 96 Tappa songs in Guitaratna . In the course of his life he composed “over 500 Tappa songs” (Chakrabarty Mohit: Rabindra Sangeet Vichitra. Concept Publishing, New Delhi 2006, p. 264). Guitaratna from Sanskrit gita , "classical song" and ratna , "gift".
4. ↑ Tóth Szabi: Vishnupur Gharana.
5. ↑ Chakrabarty, p. 41f
6. ↑ Chakrabarty, pp. 33f
7. ↑ Sukanta Chaudhuri: Calcutta, the Living City. Vol. 1. The Past. Oxford University Press, New York 1990, p. 182
8. ↑ Kavigan. Banglapedia
9. ↑ Chakrabarty, pp. 37-41