Classic crusader Durga is taking Pandit Jasraj Cultural Foundation places

The Pandit Jasraj Cultural Foundation is a big step towards creating a sustainable ecosystem for traditional music in India, Jasraj tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

How to make classical music cool? That is what has driven Durga Jasraj, 55, for long. The Pandit Jasraj Cultural Foundation, named after her late father, is arguably the biggest step in her efforts over two decades to “build the soft and hard infrastructure needed to sustain classical music,” as she puts it.
 
From singing the chorus, playing the tanpura at her father’s concerts, modelling, TV (Antakshari, Chandrakanta, Mahabharat), running a classical music company (Art and Artistes, AAA), Jasraj has struggled for long to give shape to her contribution to a world she grew up loving. As the daughter of music maestro, Pandit Jasraj, and maternal granddaughter of filmmaker V Shantaram, a deep understanding of music and cinema is genetically coded into her. But the ecosystem that supports traditional music is fragile.

 
The Pandit Jasraj Cultural Foundation, inaugurated earlier this year by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is about a lot of things: marketing, distribution and even medical help for talent, support for makers of musical instruments, connecting people wanting to learn classical music to teachers and so on. Jasraj is incandescent with its possibilities as we walk into Sampan, the Chinese restaurant at Novotel in Mumbai, at 8 pm one balmy evening.
 

Sampan is Jasraj’s choice; she knows the place. She suggests chicken pot rice with mushrooms. We decide to split that with a Shanghai chicken before going back in time to Shivaji Park, in the heart of (then) Bombay where she spent her formative years.

 
“My childhood had the richest atmosphere possible. Bapuji (Pandit Jasraj) was becoming bigger and bigger. There would be surprise guests: Zakir Hussain, C Ramchandra, Lata di (Lata Mangeshkar), Birju Maharaj. And at any given time, we had 10 students staying with us,” she reminisces. Till the end of his days, Pandit Jasraj didn’t charge a rupee for teaching. He believed that this was vidyadaan (a giving of knowledge).
 
Childhood was spent in hours of playing, cycling, riyaaz and even cutting films at Anna’s (V Shantaram’s) studio (Rajkamal). Going about their chores while playing games like raag pehchaano (guess the raag) was common. “There were so many things in the environment that I didn’t realise,” she muses. Jasraj recorded her first song for Shantaram’s Chandanachi Choli (1975) at the age of 8. She continued to sing and play the child artiste in many of his films. It all came to a rude end in 1983 with an early marriage to a naval officer. She went to Russia and was back in 1987 to get a divorce. It is not a chapter of her life she is comfortable discussing, so we move on.

 
Much to the horror of friends and family, she began singing in chorus to make ends meet. She started travelling with Pandit Jasraj for his concerts. She would play the tanpura, sing along for vocal support and cook his food. Two years, 80 flights, five countries and 25 concerts later, she realised: “This is Pandit Jasraj’s life, not mine.” She told him she wouldn’t be going with him to London. When he pointed out that her name was printed on the cards, she said, “Nobody will ask why I haven’t come. Main Durga ko dhoondhna chahti hoon (I need to find Durga).”

 
The chicken pot rice is outstanding; the Shanghai chicken is all right. We have eaten a large portion and there is a feeling of quiet satisfaction when Jasraj talks about the time in 1989 when she was still trying to figure things out. Photographer Gautam Rajadhyaksha, who had dropped by home, liked her face and asked her to come to his office. Thus began her interlude with modelling and the small screen.
 
But something was nagging her.
 
Her travels with her father had exposed her to world-class concerts. The way non-film music was showcased in India was, to quote her father, “enough to put people off classical music”.

 
“It was always the same marigold flowers, the same music. There was a need to amalgamate other things with it,” Jasraj had said in an earlier interview with me. She thinks Doordarshan did a lot of damage to how people perceive classical music. In the 1980s and ’90s when it was doing some great programming, “for Mahabharat you sign up with BR Chopra, for Buniyaad with Ramesh Sippy, but retain control of classical music. Why not take on experts to produce a classical music show as well? As a result, it had poor production and curation compared to rest of the (very good) programming. The impression people formed, of it being slow or boring, was therefore the impression of poor production not of the music or talent,” she says.

 
Back then, she didn’t know what to do about it. Meanwhile, she dabbled in everything around classical music: designed a calendar for (the erstwhile) ANZ Bank on the lives of music maestros, produced live music for Femina Miss India and co-hosted Antakshari, a successful music-based game show on Zee TV. When she got tired of Antakshari, she figured she was famous enough to give her “vague dream” a shot.
 
The honey noodles arrive. We get busy with this sticky and delicious dessert before jumping into Jasraj’s first attempt at a well-conceptualised classical music show called Utsav, for Star, in 1998-99. It had heavyweights such as Zakir Hussain, Pandit Jasraj, Shiv Kumar Sharma and Hari Prasad Chaurasia taking you through the music associated with, say, Diwali or Janmashtami or explaining afternoon raagas and so on. Just when Utsav was completed, Star’s management changed and it never got aired in India.

 
This upset her so much she set up AAA. She reckoned she needed a team of like-minded people to take the dream forward. It made about 55 spiritual albums with Times Music, did 19 TV shows and lots of special events, including a fund-raiser for Kargil war heroes. In 2006 came the Indian Music Academy, the corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative of AAA. It discovered talent that was (then) mentored by Pandit Jasraj, helped struggling musicians with stipends, medical aid and scholarships. Jasraj soon realised that to scale up, she needed to get funding and professional management. In 2009, Neeraj Jaitly, an associate vice president with (then) Ernst &Young, came on board.

 
The dinner is over. It is 11:30 pm and the restaurant needs to shut. So we amble across to the coffee shop and order a couple of green teas. AAA has been, arguably, a huge game changer in the classical music ecosystem where scale is unheard of. Its repertoire includes more than 50,000 audio recordings, 600 live concerts, 35 television productions, more than 600 digital concerts/ podcasts, and content syndication on FM Radio and 16 international airlines. Its library spans 250 genres of Indian music and features 45,000 musicians. It is also what gave Jasraj the confidence to take the next step.

 
“A large proportion of what we do is fulfilled in a CSR way. So AAA is about building a catalogue, making profit, creating new content, OTT etc. The Foundation is about building the soft and hard infrastructure needed to sustain classical music,” she says. The learnings from the Indian Music Academy and AAA is what made her seek outside help in the form of an independent advisory board. There is Vikram Mehra who heads Saregama, Jaimin Bhatt, the financial head of Kotak bank, musicians such as Ustad Amjad Ali Khan, and several bureaucrats, among others. It brings serious talent and brains to the task of building the kind of framework that would nurture this genre.

It is half past twelve now. Jasraj is still incandescent about what needs to be done. This foundation is destined to go places, I think, as we bid goodbye.