“The flute must be played through you”

One of the highlights of the Auroville Festival in Chennai was the sound of Chandra’s haunting flute which concluded the inauguration. But such mastery does not come easily. Here Auroville-born Chandra talks about her upbringing in Auroville, her three year apprenticeship with bamboo flute maestro Hariprasad Chaurasia, and her recent academic journey which led to her gaining a place at Cambridge University.

What was your school experience in Auroville?

Interesting! I went to a number of different schools. The one I enjoyed most was Mirramukhi. It was a very alternative form of education. They created their own curriculum, they didn’t want to use anything that came from outside and everything was in French: I didn’t learn to read or write English until after I left. Their philosophy was based upon perfection; everything that you made or did had to be an expression of beauty in its most perfect form. It was also very disciplined. In this it was different from other Auroville schools, but I saw it as a positive thing because it really taught you how to conduct your life. I still feel that some of my most important principles come from that school.

Mirramukhi closed down when I was nine. After this there was another experimental school run by parents, but this was chaotic and after one year it closed. I was frustrated. I had this urge to learn but except for a very few classes it was not satisfied. That’s why, at the age of 12, I already wanted to stop school, but I was told I should keep trying. So I went to Last School for one year and then Future School.

At 15 I stopped school altogether because by then I had ran out of schools!

When did music come into your life?

I started becoming interested in music when I was six or seven. I didn’t understand music but I felt music was a different world, something mysterious and interesting, and I wanted to be part of that world. I started violin and recorder classes.

Some years later, I was about 13, I gave a concert: I was playing the recorder, accompanied by a guitarist. A professional silver traverso flute player from Germany was in the audience and he came up to me afterwards and said he wanted to teach me how to play the silver flute. It took me by surprise but I was very happy. And that same night an Italian lady gave me a silver flute!

Over the years, he taught me when he visited Auroville and later I twice went to Germany to study with him. It was a kind of pre-gurukul (a place of learning where you live in close proximity to your guru eds.) experience because I lived with his family, he would take care of me and not ask money to teach me. And the sessions with him were quite intensive.

Before I went to Germany, a good friend of my mother’s who was director of the Sydney Chamber Choir, invited me to stay with him. He had children my age who all played instruments. I was there for six months and it turned out to be a very good experience. It didn’t really develop my flute playing; it was much more about discovering my independence because I was only 15 but I travelled all over Australia by myself.

You obviously have a good grounding in Western classical music. When did you become interested in Indian classical flute music?

At an early age I didn’t like Indian music. In fact, I had an aversion to it. When my mother would put on cassettes of Hariprasad Chaurasia [the great Indian bansuri flute player eds.], at the first sound of his flute I would run out of the house. For some reason, those long meditative notes irritated me to the core.

Then a lady from Colorado came to Auroville and offered a dance workshop. I participated and afterwards she sponsored me to come to America for an international youth summer camp. It was called ‘rites of passage’, and for six weeks we lived together, exploring through dance and music how youth become adults. It was very much an opening up experience for me.

It was then I started appreciating Indian culture. As children growing up in Auroville we didn’t appreciate it very much, but when I was in America I realised that I am partially Indian and I have this heritage that it is very beautiful and deep, and the soul of India cannot be compared to anything else in the world. I think this was the biggest change that eventually led me to Indian music.

Much later, when in Germany, I suddenly heard the sound of the Indian bamboo flute in my ears; it was calling me.

At that time I had not been doing music full-time. I had been training to be a yoga teacher in India and Europe and I had also attended a film school in Delhi for one year where I completed a course on film-making. I was always searching out something new, but none of these things were really ‘it’.

When I returned to Auroville, I found someone who gave me a small bamboo flute. So there I was with this small flute and I didn’t know what to do and how to learn. Then, one evening, a boy knocked into me coming down the steps of La Terrace. He had a bag on his shoulder and when I asked him if he had flutes in his bag, surprised, he said “yes”.

He opened them up and showed me all these Indian bamboo flutes, and he told me he was a student of Pt. Hariprasad Chaurasia and gave me his number. I didn’t even know that Pt. Chaurasia was still alive or that he taught. But the timing was right because on that very same day I had wished I could have him as a master, and a few days before I had been feeling that what I really needed was some kind of gurukul experience where students, as in ancient times, live with the master and through this absorb the whole culture. I really wanted to get in touch with these Indian roots of mine.

So the next day I called Pt. Chaurasia and said I would like to learn flute from him and he said, “Come tomorrow.” He was in Bhubaneswar, Orissa. I was taken aback. “Tomorrow? That’s a little difficult.” “OK,” he said, “Come the day after.”

So I bought a ticket and I went to Bhubaneswar and eventually, with no address, I found his place. I had no idea how to behave with him, what to call him, but I knew that in India the way you address someone is very important. I think I called him ‘Sir’. Actually, it should have been ‘Panditji’ or ‘Guruji’.

He didn’t ask me to play immediately because in some cases he assesses people intuitively. He wanted to see my level of commitment. He was having his tea and I told him I would like to learn from him and he said, “O.K., minimum three years”. And, right away, I don’t know what possessed me, I said. “Of course”. The implications only caught up with me a few days later!

What would a typical day look like in his Vrindavan Gurukul in Bhubaneswar?

It is an environment where you have to be very self-disciplined: nobody is going to come and tell you what to do. Ideally, one should wake up at five and practice the flute for two hours to warm up. Then all the students cook breakfast together. After that, there is a morning class run by Chaurasia when he is there (he has another gurukul in Mumbai and he also tours extensively). His classes can last as long as 4 hours, without breaks: they are very intense. If he is not there, a senior student conducts the class. Then there is lunch, a brief rest and more practicing until dinner. So you are normally playing 6-8 hours a day, sometimes I would practice for up to nine hours.

How would Chaurasia teach?

In this system there are no examinations, it’s a lot like free progress. But he would often make comments like, “This time you were a bit weak on the rhythm.” Actually, during the classes hardly any words are spoken. You have to listen and observe. Even the mood, emotion, behind each melody won’t be described, you really have catch it by observing how he plays it. So the more perceptive you are, the more you can learn.

But in Indian music the spirit behind it, the inner spirit, is very important, so how does that develop? Does Chaurasia give any kind of spiritual discourses?

Even the spiritual aspect you have to catch mainly through observation and receptivity. But sometimes during tea he would talk to us, in his own way, about life and spirituality. He reminded us, for example, that the bamboo flute is Krishna’s instrument, and that it must be played through us. We must not feel we are the ones playing it.

Did you have to unlearn a lot of your Western music knowledge?

Yes, so much. During the first class I was completely lost because I had always been used to reading musical notes on paper, and suddenly I just had to listen and reproduce what I heard, and then even improvise. It took me a long time to adjust to that. To sit for four hours and to have to follow everything is like learning a completely new language.

At the same time, many of the things I learned in Western music were very helpful. I had learned very well on the Western flute how to achieve precision and clarity of tone, modulation and transitions between octaves, which are very subtle on the flute. I could see that the Indian students who didn’t have a Western training were missing out a lot on the technical aspects, because these are not taught in the Indian system.

However, I got to a point where I was able to express myself through the Indian flute in a way I could not on the Western flute. There are so many nuances, so many intricate ways of presenting one note, and you improvise according to the mood you want to evoke. This is unique, and recently it inspired me to record a meditative CD on the twelve qualities of The Mother’s Symbol, interpreted with various classical Indian melodies. This will be available soon.

When you finished your three-year apprenticeship you came back to Auroville and, at the age of 25, decided to study for ‘A’ levels in preparation for going to university. Why?

I always had an urge to learn but I couldn’t find the right space or circumstances that suited me. The gurukul experience was all intuitive; no intellect was needed. But during my last year there I started reading poetry and literature and appreciating it so much. I realized what a huge world it is. At the same time, reading Sri Aurobindo made me see how my intellect was limited. Some people can read Sri Aurobindo in an intuitive manner but I need to go through the mind first. That’s what really made me want to learn more, to refine my intellect, because for 10 years I had not had any intellectual stimulation.

I knew I wanted to study literature and languages, so I chose English, French and Italian. I decided to take three A-levels in four and a half months – it was a big task because this usually takes two years. But I find that whenever I have a challenge, a deadline, it makes me work much better. I received incredible support from wonderful mentors and teachers here, for which I am immensely grateful. And I had such a thirst for this kind of intellectual challenge that I just dived into it. It was another immersion experience.

Actually I see a lot of parallelism between learning the Indian flute and learning languages. Learning languages, at least orally, is a lot about perceiving and hearing, and that’s exactly how you learn Indian classical music. In Indian music there is a structure but within that structure you are free to improvise, and I see that it is the same with languages. When you write a poem you have the structure, which is grammar, but within that you are free to improvise.

You had to wind down your flute playing while studying?

Yes, and I had to stop almost altogether when I was doing the exams. But I needed that kind of pause to assimilate and to digest such an intense three years. Actually, I feel that my music has matured because of this. With my intellect waking up again, I developed not only more clarity in my speech and my writing but it helped the music as well. Now I improvise with more clarity, I am more concise, less redundant in my musical phraseology.

You achieved outstanding ‘A’ level results and have gained admission to read Modern Languages at Cambridge. Why Cambridge?

The dream of going to Cambridge came when I was still in Orissa. I’m inspired by this dream of a disciplined atmosphere where you can really learn intellectually, where education is top quality and learning is so well fostered that you can give all of yourself to it: another kind of gurukul. Cambridge is such a place. And the fact that Sri Aurobindo went there is also very inspiring. But a Cambridge education is expensive and I’m still trying to raise the money for the tuition fees.

Where does Auroville fit into all this? How do you experience your relation to Auroville?

It’s my only home, the dearest thing to my heart. I don’t think I would even exist if it was not for Auroville. Every time I go out, I appreciate Auroville more and understand better how deeply the earth needs this place.

One of my dreams is to help Auroville in whatever way I can. I don’t know exactly how, but I feel that at Cambridge, with my background, I will be able to start making bridges, connections, to Auroville and introduce more people – particularly young people – to this city the earth needs. We really need this energy.