THE SPEAKING HAND: ZAKIR HUSSAUN AND THE ART OF THE INDIAN DRUM

India, 2003, 104 mins. Beta SP source: Cinema India! Written and directed by Sumantra Ghosal. Produced by Ram Madhavani. Photographed by Barun Mukherjee, Vijay Khambati, Harsh Dave, Sumantra Ghosal. Edited by Amit Karia, Manoj Shroff, Adesh Dubey, Sumantra Ghosal. Principal cast: Zakir Hussain, Ustad Alla Rakha, Bavi Begum Alla Rakha, Pandit Jasran, Khursheed Aulia.

From an interview with Sumantra Ghosal by Jeet Thayil, India in New York, April 16, 2004:

The greatest risk is not taking risks. Some musicians won't do it. Me, I just jump right in: if I fall on my face, so what? —Zakir Hussain

He was speaking last year at the New York premiere of The Speaking Hand, a rare documentary about his work made by Mumbaibased filmmaker Sumantra Ghosal. Interestingly, Husain's comment could apply as easily to Ghosal, who was present at the screening, as to himself. Introducing the documentary Husain said, "Nobody asked Sumantra to make this film. He just got together everything it would take and did it."

Why? "Because I'm nuts," Ghosal told me in a diner on the Upper West Side where we met over coffee. It was difficult not to agree with that assessment when I heard details about the film's funding—there wasn't any. Ghosal funded it himself.

"I have worked long years in advertising and been very successful. It allows you some money to splurge," he said. Not that he splurged exactly, at least not in the conventional sense of the term.

"I could have bought a Mercedes with the money I spent. Instead I took a subway and made the film."

Ghosal was speaking metaphorically—there are no subways in Mumbai and the local trains are so crowded ad filmmakers would not go anywhere near them—but his point was well taken.

As for the documentary, Ghosal said he was able to do something rarely done, at least when it comes to Indian classical music. The few that exist—notorious for their static quality and Government of Indiavetted subjects—end up eulogizing the musician at the very end of his life, when he is a doddering laureate whose achievements are long past. A Ravi Shankar documentary is a case in point; it was made some two decades ago, when Shankar was 60.
"I got Zakir at his prime," said Ghosal, "at the peak of his career, when he had done a lot of interesting work and had a way to go. I got him when he had not yet been feted by the world."
"Our technology had evolved so we could do long-format work without going bankrupt. Indian government documentaries are such that you make 10-minute films, cheaply, on people picked out for you. We were independent."

Not to mention long. The film in its original format was all of 3,5 hours long. Ghosal cut it down, albeit reluctantly, to two 52-minute sequences.

Ghosal had earlier worked with Hussain on an advertising film for Taj tea. Once the idea took shape, Ghosal decided to take his time shooting the film [It was done over three years and then shelved for 10 years while Ghosal wondered what next to do].
He said the scariest part of the project was what Hussain told him before they started shooting.

"Zakir said if you want to make a documentary on an Indian musician you have to live with him. He said I should bum around with him on a concert tour of South India. We traveled at night and through the day to get to the next gig."

The documentary builds its portrait of Hussain, very likely the leading tabla player in the world today, through the use of concert footage and interviews with such musicians as ghatam player Vikku Vinayakram, Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, santoor player Shiv Kumar Sharma, flautist Hari Prasad Chaurasia, and, of course, Ravi Shankar.

The tabla initially started off as little more than a timekeeper for the soloist. This is a point Hussain makes in the film. If the soloist were feeling generous he would let the tabla-player take a solo.

"Thanks to Zakir, the tabla can hold a concert by itself today," Ghosal said. "I was surprised at how interesting pure rhythm is.

You never get bored with it. It's not just the beat, but also mathematics and divisions, complex rhythm cycles within which there's complete freedom to improvise. It is not rehearsed; it will not happen the same way the next day."

Coming from the incestuous high-octane Mumbai sub-culture of advertising, Ghosal knew what he didn't want for his first documentary—mood shots and fancy lighting.

He did not want to get in the way.

"I didn't want to make an ad film. I didn't want to show off. I wanted to take a back seat," he said. "I wanted the audience to stay with the musicians like I did, it's the only way to get an understanding of how the Indian music mind works, it doesn't come to you prepackaged."

The film's subject himself was a source of endless ideas. "Zakir forms such a pivotal part of this film. He is so articulate; there is no fumbling for words or thought, his is a clear mind at work."

There was certainly no fumbling at the New York screening. One young musician, in the guise of asking Hussain a question, said the tabla was being cheapened by it use in a television commercials for a brand of Chevy SUV. He asked Hussain if that was not a case of selling out to commercial interests?

"Look," Hussain replied. "I'll do anything to grab people and bring them into a concert hall. Advertisements don't cheapen the tabla; it is a sound, not classical music, and if the tabla can make people hear the music, even if it means an ad for the Chevy Tahoe—Hail Mary to that."