Strains of Melancholy: Thumri and the Indian Music of Waiting

Thumri explores the dual sides of love: union as well as the pangs of separation.

This is Out of Time, a bimonthly column by Rajat Singh, that explores how South Asia’s artistic traditions have shaped his understanding of queerness.

Naushad Ali composed two thumris for the 1960 period film, Mughal-e-Azam, a lavish production that told the illicit love story of a Mughal prince and a court dancer. The first time my mother showed me the film, the thumris, a style of music drawn from a centuries-old tradition of Hindustani classical music, eluded and bored me. They were a slower, more trying genre than the easily consumable, energetic dances performed throughout the film. My mother, on the other hand, wished for me, at nineteen, to appreciate the subtle shades of mood that a thumri painted. In delicate brush strokes, thumri evoked amorous longing. But, blinded by the film’s spectacle, I struggled to attend to the songs’ crooning, or languorous pacing, or sophisticated oscillations between notes, which seemed to me out of touch, old-fashioned, wearying.

Thumri flourished in the nineteenth-century courts of Lucknow, before the British annexed the region in 1856 and dismantled the entire system of patronage. Outmoded and hardly heard today, thumri, to an untrained ear, resembles wailing. The genre explores the dual sides of love: union as well as the pangs of separation. Through poetry set to music, a female character, often the maiden Radha, anticipates a rendezvous on the horizon or, more often, laments that her beloved, in the form of Krishna, is off with someone else. She questions, pines, complains. Why, then, salvage a seemingly unseemly, self-indulgent style of music? Why has the thumri, which interrogates the act of waiting, taught me to experience time in the wrong tense?

I was nineteen the first year I had a room of my own, having shared my bedroom all through childhood. I’d opted for a single dorm in college, with the desire to have boys come over. I discovered, however, that the room didn’t increase my confidence to put myself out there, or make me more attractive. I spent nights watching my phone, waiting for it to light up with a text, an invitation from a friend or a hook-up. The privilege of a single room, seven stories up and overlooking Boston’s Charles River, enacted a sort of self-exiling, within which I did my utmost to suffer.

For a long time, I used to go to bed early. I’d begun to collect recordings of Hindustani classical music, including thumris, which I stumbled upon through erratic searches. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but this genre, for all its foreignness, haunted me like an old companion. Singers stretched out to me from the past, scratchy voices recorded on gramophones and phonographs that sounded as if they were underwater. I strained to meet these lamenting voices in time. I played them on shuffle before bed, in the blue quiet of my dorm.

The spell broke, however, the instant an invitation arrived to attend a party with friends or casually stop by a boy’s place for a drink. I could leave my room and be saved by my queer brown friends, all of us going out and finding a home within each other’s arms. But the defining features of queerness that were offered to me, when we went out, features like irony or drag or camp, seemed more vulgar than what I expected queer desire to look like. Mainstream and cheap, these modes of performing queerness seemed not only Western, but also fake—emotionally hollow. The fierce power of queer culture in America was lost on me.

I cast my gaze overseas, and through time, to foreign, foregone expressions of longing—thumri embodied the dramatic tension and emotional intensity I craved. As a form of high art, it offered me a vessel into which I could feel too much. Enjoying thumri in secrecy, then, lent a form to the exclusion I shut myself within. I preferred to play melancholic thumris over and over, wrestling with the pleasure of finding out whether they might nestle with me or I might burrow inside them instead. Eventually, though, I could no longer ignore the text, Rajat come out. Out of where, the past? Into the present? Playing with these shifts in meaning, I showered and left my tower, wondering why we pretend to be occupied when we simply wish to sit with the self. When the need to tilt the gaze inward is so strong, why resist that orientation?

*

One snowy November afternoon, a girl came by to lift songs off my iTunes library. In went her USB; out went Hindi songs I’d collected and cherished, songs she knew from her childhood but didn’t own. Scrolling to the thumris, she passed over them without a care. What did she know, anyway? Her refusal didn’t offend me so much as it suggested that my tastes were superior and that I operated at an emotional depth entirely incommensurate with her. I began to connect my version of solitude with the permission to look down on others. The girl left as the snowstorm turned severe. I thanked the weather for keeping me in, keeping me contained.

My window extended the width of the room. Available to me was a curiously empowering position from which to reveal myself. Like the glitter that takes its time to float to the bottom of a snow globe, moments passed slowly in my room, as if I were suspended, waiting for a call or knock on my door to shake me up. I could see all of Cambridge, the bend of the river, the faint glow of a stadium in the distance—even the Boston skyline if I craned my head. Yet I remained faceless to everyone. Only a few neighbors in the brownstones across the street, could see into my room and even then, they could only make out a silhouette. If the edges of my body were sharply defined against the light of my room, its core was dark and indistinct. I longed for voyeurs. Solitude took from me more than it gave me. Solitude depended on a public declaration: “Look at me—I can be alone.”

In the window, my reflection appeared as a mere glimmer of a self against the tenebrous sky. For these years, I hid from myself, avoiding the very self I carted around campus. Suffering was a carefully practiced art. I could control how much I hurt. In my cell, I crafted a self that could pulse and bleed as much as it wanted, even though nothing particularly miserable was happening to me. Perhaps, then, that was this issue. I longed for memories I didn’t have or didn’t know I didn’t want.

My mother will send me voice memos of her practicing Hindustani semi-classical music, or post videos of her performing for small audiences of friends. She’s been learning these scales and classical songs for several years, working with a private instructor to master breathing techniques and various scales—and to get the arrangements to sound the way she desires. She’ll practice a short composition from YouTube, to try to get it close to the singer. If she wants to match the melody of the artist, however, I want her to trust herself, as she steps out over the edge and lets her voice carry. I want her to hear her voice take on a grand, spacious power. But to hear her restlessness is to know it’s the very thing being concealed from me.

My mother stayed with my boyfriend and I for a week in New York, the summer her mother’s health began to significantly decline. She took the train each day to sit with my grandmother in Flushing, Queens, packing containers of rice and lentils that she’d prepared at our stove to feed her. I wonder whether my grandmother, largely unresponsive, felt less lonely with her daughter next to her, or felt only the absence of pain. How can one feel an absence? I accompanied my mother once or twice, saying little to my grandmother: Hello, how are you feeling? Anything else seemed trite, thoughtless. I waited on the side as a still body—strong enough to lend my mother my presence.

That week, in one of my more insensitive acts, I played my mother a song, a poem about dying, set to a melody on the harmonium. The singer began, in Urdu, “Let’s go to that mountain, from which not even a shadow returns.” I sensed this was a song about a world beyond death, where a soul might find quietude.

“Why listen to such depressing songs?” my mother asked. “Is this how you feel?”

“I don’t find it depressing—it’s hopeful. There’s something on the other side of hardship.” I couldn’t say how I knew this, but I knew, as I searched for a way to land on my feet after graduate school, I was inhabiting multiple tenses. I knew of Freud’s distinction, that mourning was working through loss, whereas melancholy was letting it inhabit you. But that was theoretical and I’d broken up with academia. Longing wasn’t everlasting.

In the year after my grandmother died, and in the months after my mother’s first reconstructive knee surgery, my mother took to her bed. Because opioids rendered the borders of her body blurry, she preferred to endure the pain, a decision I admired. Amidst the blue glare of her iPhone, my mother floated in an endless stream of music on YouTube. In between naps and little meals and physical therapy, which pained me to watch her push herself through, my mother practiced her craft. She was strengthening her confidence, not in a body that had been failing her for years, but also in her persona as an artist. What is a moving scale of notes other than the sound of pain leaving the body?

*

Where thumri used to be appreciated at royal courts, in formal halls, and in the salons of respected courtesans, few listeners exist today. As I write this, the experience of enjoying thumri has been atomized to the space of my apartment, or even closer to the body, within headphones.

When my parents picked me up from the train station on Christmas Eve, I told them in the car the day and time of my return trip. According to my booking, our time together was finite. The day I was due to depart, my mother called me into her bedroom, where she was lying in bed with a cold. I suspect she was anticipating my leaving. In her mind, had I already left?

“Come sit with me,” she said, when I went to check on her. “You’ve hardly said a word all week.”

I’d spent the past few days reading with intensity. What’s more, I saw how the journaling I was doing by hand, filling up pages, was a powerful act. My time at home had blurred and I now felt my body spent, unable to give a thing more. “Detachment,” writes May Sarton, “must be cultivated against the longing to be perfectly open and receptive.”

“I’m fine—nothing to tell,” I replied.

Several hours later, I felt my stomach cramp up, as I thought of my journey. The strains of a thumri escaped from behind my mother’s door. I caught fragments of notes, followed by a sweeter voice, striving to match the scale and evoke the feeling of the song.

“What are you listening to?” I asked, poking my head in.

“What do you think of this singer? I just love Kaushiki Chakraborty. Her voice is sweet—light, not too heavy or serious.”

Even after all these years of teaching myself how to listen to the music of my past, I never know what to say when my mother asks my opinion of a song. I feel I’m too amateur to respond with sensitivity or thoughtful consideration. Worse, I feel I don’t have a right to claim to know such a rarefied form of artistic training. In the absence of a language for evaluating music we both enjoy, I respond with bland appreciation. All I know is how to let the compositions enter me. Each musical arrangement is a mode for sliding between time and tense.

“She’s lovely,” I replied. “I have another version of this thumri you might like.” I found it on my phone and watched as my mother sat with the new rendition.

“You have a good ear,” she said, after a minute. “You hear the delicacy, embellishment, the style more than me.” I smiled, but sensed in that moment that I wasn’t simply sharing songs to make her forget about her cold, or pass the time before I left. Wasn’t this longing for attachment also a burden I was placing on my mother? She didn’t need to worry that these songs reflected my own emotional state. Art works like a mirror, into which one sees herself, or it functions as a window, through which we frame the world. I was beginning to see how thumri acted like the latter.

*

I’ve been with Nikhil for over seven years, but I always forget he’s not just my boyfriend. He’s the person with whom I went to the city clerk’s office, in 2015, to obtain a domestic partnership, to take advantage of his health insurance. I joke with him that I’m just waiting for the ring now.

I hadn’t been in love before I met Nikhil. But at a noisy bar, I once told a friend of mine, whose boyfriend had been unfaithful to him, “You may not be in love with him anymore. I think that’s OK—I’m not in love with Nikhil.”

“You’re not?” my friend asked.

“No, I love him. I used to be in love with him. I just think what we have now is stronger. One falls in love. I want to stay standing.”

I made the mistake of repeating this conversation to Nikhil a few days later. He stared at me, bewildered. The silence between us demanded I explain myself, fast. But outside the bar’s pounding bass, my defense rang hollow. I couldn’t have sounded more heartless if I’d meant it.

The words of one Mughal-e-Azam’s thumris, sung during the night the prince and maiden share with one another, mean something like, “She goes toward her lover, becoming an ascetic.” Here, the word for “ascetic” is “jogan” (related to “yoga”). The root of both Sanskrit words is “join,” although this presents a problem: How does turning away from the world effect union? Queer bodies work through a similar problem. The root of “queer” is “twist.” Bodies born like this have to search for new ways of looking at the world, ways that don’t face forward into time, but rather, bend inward.

My restlessness for an interior life, I’ve long thought, made reaching for Nikhil in bed seem like a betrayal. To have my writing hour slip away because pangs of guilt for abandoning Nikhil makes me irritable. Better to protect my solitude and withdraw, rather than snapping at him for my own inability to do so.

The evenings I have the apartment to myself, I don’t have to ask for solitude, and I squander it anyway. I pour myself a highball of tequila—no more than the height of my thumbnail—topping it with Perrier, flavored with pink grapefruit. It’s a clean, bright, bracing drink—full of possibility. The ritual enacts a lie: I will use this time to write. I hope the cocktail will loosen my anxiety, let me go, let me type freely into the evening. An hour later, however, my eyelids turn leaden, as the thumri in the background lulls me into a dream-like state. A drink becomes the prop to complete my self-portrait: uninhibited, elegant. An element of ruinous glamour has never not filled the moments I’m left alone. In these periods of stillness, I’d sooner throw it all away than learn how to treasure it.

It seems I’d rather perform a character than practice essaying myself. In most thumris, a bol recurs throughout, literally, a word repeated but modulated each time, to reveal subtle shifts of emotion. A self emerges slowly during the musical arrangement, learning to see itself anew each time it’s uttered. But a strange mixture of excitement and disappointment, dismay and relief, apprehends me the moment I hear Nikhil’s keys turn in the lock. What startles me is that I suddenly want him near.

For its association with the female courtesans who performed and protected them, and for recording wantonness and waiting, thumri has been denigrated as a form of artistic expression. What’s mourned, however, isn’t the loss of a lover. Rather, thumri documents and interrogates a world in which love is possible when the self demands its own attention. This fundamental, irreconcilable disappointment is never answered within a thumri’s narrative framework. Instead, the genre becomes a roaming, self-doubting conversation with the self. Self-interrogation, in the guise of longing, becomes the mode for not only enduring loneliness, but also treasuring solitude. A singer invites a listener to witness her desire for wholeness.

“Will you miss me?” I ask Nikhil, as he packs for a week-long vacation with his parents. I want to be longed for. But I tell him, and myself, I won’t miss him—a thought that makes me seem cruel. But to miss him is to hurt and I can’t hold onto that. To say “I miss you,” the French say, Tu me manques—literally, “You are missing to/from me.” One submits to what one lacks. One lets loss take over.

Nikhil and I sat on the couch the day after he returned home, he studying, I writing. Each of us had a wireless Airpod in one of our ears, and we alternated between his music and mine. As a thumri began, I thought for a moment that “isolation” wasn’t derived from insula, meaning “island,” but perhaps a strange joining of iso, Greek for “equal,” and latus, Latin for “side.” Of course, this is wrong, but isolation is lovely if you think about having someone on the opposite end of the couch with you.

I had another thought that I tried to write out on my mind: What if lovers, lying side by side in bed, dream together? Certainly, lovers can’t wait together, as long as they’re in each other’s presence. But what if they exist at different times? Then one would wait for the other, right? What if Nikhil and I could wait together?

When I first typed that last sentence, I inadvertently left “and I” out. What if, instead of me, the people in my life have been the ones who’ve been waiting all along? For me to mature, for me to realize the fullest expression of myself? For years I hid from myself, but I know my loved ones see through the melancholy and affectedness. They see something yearning to polish itself. They see a self committed to roving, seeking, becoming.