Desert Island #4: Mallikarjun Mansur, Ramdasi Malhar

The editor of an online list of great performances wrote: “In case anyone wonders why I do not appear: frankly, my tastes are very very narrow; if I had my way, I would simply put Mallikarjun Mansur beside each entry and be done with it!”. I too find this a strong temptation. That said, some Mansur specials rise above the rest. There is a brief section in the Films Division documentary on him where he is singing Ramdasi sitting on some random verandah presumably in Dharwad. There is little or no accompaniment, but his voice simply soars across the darkening sky. The repeated madhyam-pancham, the curving rise through the two nishads, the swoop down from the taar Sa via the komal Ni through more intricacies back down to the rishabh, lay the compositional groundwork. But it needs the scratchy voice of a man in the grip of some rain-soaked fever to imbue it with a sense of Wordsworthian epiphany. We do not know what Mansur saw when he sang Ramdasi Malhar, but no one has presented the wind-swept monsoon landscape with more compelling urgency and charged intimacy.