Harmonium Dreaming
This is one of my first memories of acting as part of a community: sitting in a crowd of singing people, some friends and family, others complete strangers. A deep brown, rectangular instrument takes center stage. As incense wafts through the air and the tabla player taps out a rhythm for everyone to match, the husky notes of the harmonium rise above us, its piano-like keys guiding us into a unified melody.
It surprised me to learn that, although today a staple at South Asian gatherings, the harmonium by no means has a centuries-long or storied place in our history. Despite its current indispensability to so much of the music of the subcontinent—despite the fact that the instrument has meshed so fully and completely with our traditions—the harmonium traveled quite a geographical and musical distance to get to us.
In the 1800s, at the height of the British Raj, the harmonium first came from Europe into the parlors of Brits residing in India. Evolving from a pump organ created by a physiology professor in Copenhagen named Christian Gottlieb Kratzenstein in 1780, this free-reed and West-invented instrument was quite the event. Over the next several decades, other European inventors tried their hands at developing it—including Alexandre Debain, who patented his version and gave it the moniker of “harmonium” due to the ease with which harmonies could be played on the instrument.
Because of its portable size and relative convenience, the harmonium quickly found a place at gatherings instead of the larger pipe organ. Around the late 1800s and the early 1900s, harmoniums were produced in many variations and great number—yet the reasons for its fame made it easily replaceable once another instrument with a similar tone and timbre emerged. The electronic organ was invented in the mid-1930s and proved to be even more accessible and convenient, and the harmonium’s reign in the Western world came to an end. Yet while the instrument faded out of use in Europe and the United States, it experienced a heady rise in popularity on the other side of the planet: the Indian subcontinent.
But there were some modifications to be made before the instrument could be suited for South Asian music. After British colonists brought the harmonium to India, a musician named Dwarkanath Ghose introduced some key changes: making the instrument hand-operated and smaller, and adding a pump at the back that musicians would work with one hand while playing the music with the other. Since classical Indian music was melodically rather than harmonically based, there was no real need to play it with two hands, and many South Asian musicians performed sitting on the floor, making a hand-operated instrument much more manageable.
Despite the suspicion that South Asian musical purists felt towards an instrument they viewed as an encroaching stranger, the harmonium was quite rapidly incorporated into various musical traditions in the South Asian subcontinent, from qawwali to ghazals to bhajans—particularly gaining credence in devotional music. Artists found the ease with which the harmonium accompanied vocals and traditional percussion instruments such as the tabla or mridanga appealing, and the pump feature meant it could be heard clearly in vast concert halls and small rooms alike. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s incredible qawwali arrangements, for example, were rarely complete without one or two harmoniums, their swift and quivering notes matching the rhythm and fluctuations of his powerful vocals with aplomb.
I remember quite clearly the wonder I felt the day my parents brought home a harmonium of our own. Perhaps in some way, simply having one in the house as an immigrant has been internalized as an achievement, signaling that one has both the money to purchase it and the training to play it. Indeed, my parents did spring for lessons soon after buying the harmonium and a set of tablas, so that we could join the ranks of those immigrant children becoming adept at classical singing and instruments. And for a time, daily music sessions occurred at our house, an often cacophonous but occasionally melodic auditory feast drifting from the living room.
As tends to happen, though, eventually school and work took precedence, and it became difficult to make time for music. I had always been an uneasy harmonium performer when my parents asked me to sing at our monthly spiritual gatherings, so for me this was something of a reprieve. Although I spent so much time with the instrument, my hands instinctively assuming their places whenever I got near it, I was deathly afraid of misplacing a note and throwing the entire song off key. The dual acts of keeping my voice clear while my fingers moved often felt like an impossible task, no matter how much I practiced at home.
My parents still lament this failure on occasion, shaking their heads over a completely functional and lovely instrument lying in the attic untouched—all their hopes for my singing career mostly dissolved. And accordingly, I’m good at waving these comments off by throwing myself into some other work.
Yet over the last few weeks of social distancing, I have been presented with the incredible privilege of an unreasonable amount of free time. The harmonium, still quietly ensconced in its case in the attic, has begun to draw my attention more and more. It’s a strange thing, to have a relationship with an instrument as complex and fraught as mine is with this. For my family, music existed to be performed, and because of my anxiety surrounding solo performances, I resented the harmonium as much as I admired its beauty and sound.
There certainly is an enchantment about its pearl marbled keys, the rich brown of the wood stain, the deep purple fan of the hand pump and the music it creates in the hands of a practiced player—those rich, husky notes following each other in surprising agility and harmony. I loved the sense of community I felt when singing choral arrangements and kirtan, a kind of melodious chanting with accompaniment—but playing and singing on my own in front of crowds has long drawn a singular sense of terror from me.
It has been interesting, then, to play the harmonium again without the expectations of my family or the hope of our community that I would carry on this hallmark of their heritage. What cracked me open was the knowledge that in fact the instrument had only recently become such a cornerstone of South Asian classical music. Before I had known of its newness, but not the vehemence with which it was rejected by South Asian music scenes. Many musicians shunned it passionately, and a major radio station in India completely banned the harmonium from its airwaves until the 1970s. Today that station, All India Radio, still maintains a ban on harmonium solos, the idea being that the instrument has nothing to offer on its own, that it is meant only as accompaniment for different sounds.
Naturally, this means that an emphasis on learning the harmonium as a solo instrument has become secondary in South Asian musical circles, despite the fact that many harmonium solos are musically complex in their own right. And I can’t deny that the way our musical traditions have revived this instrument, shaped it for our use, but still assigned its purpose as solely accompaniment troubles me somewhat. Nor does the lack of complete acceptance shock me—as a colonized people, it makes sense that we are wary of incorporating a European transplant into our music, of giving it the same respect and attention of a traditional instrument.
Yet many of those worries strike me as unnecessarily purist. In a way, South Asian culture itself has created the harmonium, providing a space for the instrument to evolve into something with the power to connect communities, a creation built for the collective. Looking over the years since it’s been incorporated into South Asian music, I find that the harmonium’s contributions are too great to eternally consign it to the background.
To some extent, learning the true status of the harmonium, which had once seemed so esteemed and untouchable, has also struck up a sense of kinship in me. After all, influential though the instrument may be now, there have been moments—and there are still moments—when it was deemed wanting, too coarse or newfangled to make a lasting impact on South Asian music. There is a lonely quality to its music that I find just as striking as its ability to make itself heard. As relearn its notes, not with designs of becoming a famous ghazal singer or performing in front of crowds but simply to let my hands rediscover their rightful homes, I imagine the instrument breathing with me: opening my eyes, urging me on.