Rajan Parrikar Music Archive

Iceland’s Great Women Problem

Kesarbai Kerkar, Marie Curie, and the empty frame.

[This column was published in its Icelandic version in Nútíminn on June 2, 2026. It arose from a simple observation: despite the bragadocio surrounding women’s rights, gender equality, and female empowerment in Iceland, the country has produced no women of truly exceptional accomplishment.]

In December 2024 I committed a grave offence by writing a column suggesting that a certain class of Icelandic women was helping lead the country in a destructive direction. The reaction was volcanic: infantile insults, earnest invitations to return to India, but not one engagement with the substance of what I had written. Bertrand Russell once observed that anger in an argument is a sign that one lacks a good reason for one’s position.

The intervening eighteen months have borne me out. Iceland has been brought to a dismal pass by the all-women government. The economy is wobbling, housing is in crisis, healthcare is under stress, immigration remains a mess, and the campaign to slip Iceland into the European Union proceeds under false pretences.

This time my scope is narrower.

Listening to Icelandic gender discourse, one might imagine that the central drama of human history is the acquisition of women’s rights. But rights are not the highest measure of a civilisation. They are the scaffolding; achievement is the cathedral. The point was never merely to secure freedoms but to build a civilisation worth handing down to the next generation.

Iceland keeps telling itself and the world that it is the pinnacle of female empowerment. But where are the great women – not the famous ones or the politicians, but women whose accomplishments transformed or enlarged the horizons of their field?

Icelandic public life is saturated with talk of equality, representation, and empowerment. But when one asks for examples of women whose achievements command worldwide admiration, the room empties rather quickly.

The usual defence is that Iceland is a tiny country. It is also a country that produced towering figures such as Halldór Laxness and Sigurður Helgason. The population defence therefore springs a leak before it has cleared the harbour.

Björk is famous. We are discussing excellence, not celebrity. Vigdís Finnbogadóttir was symbolically important. She demonstrated that a woman could occupy the highest office in Iceland. But she is not of the same order as Marie Curie, Emmy Noether, Virginia Woolf, Maria Callas, or Kesarbai Kerkar.

Kesarbai who?

We shall come to her presently.

One of the minor entertainments of modern life is listening to smug Western commentary on India, which is routinely presented as patriarchal, backward, oppressive, and perpetually in need of instruction from enlightened Westerners. The tacit assumption is that if only India learned from the Nordics, Indian women might finally begin to flourish.

India’s shortcomings are neither secret nor ignored. Indians themselves discuss them incessantly. But the condescension becomes difficult to sustain when one examines the women it has produced.

If you have never heard of Kesarbai Kerkar, you should not be lecturing India about women.

Kesarbai was born in Goa. In 1977, NASA placed Kesarbai Kerkar alongside Bach and Beethoven on the Golden Record carried aboard the Voyager spacecraft, a curated collection intended to represent the finest expression of human civilisation. Today that voice from a small village in Goa is drifting through interstellar darkness and will likely outlast every nation, institution, and language alive today. Rabindranath Tagore described her as “an artistic phenomenon of exquisite perfection.”

She is not an outlier. She is merely primus inter pares. In music alone, examples of Indian women who reached Everest-like summits abound. Nor is music unique in this regard. India has produced women of extraordinary accomplishment in science, literature, business, politics, and the arts. India’s imperfections proved no barrier to the emergence of exceptional women. Nor did these women spend much time discussing empowerment.

Which brings us back to Iceland.

The country has invested an inordinate amount of emotion and energy in gender ideology. But the promised harvest remains elusive. We hear endless boasts about female empowerment and remarkably little about female greatness.

Nor has the project been cost-free.

The activists and their misbegotten ethos of equality have weakened families, impeded new family formation, and accelerated demographic decline. At the same time they have encouraged immigration from societies whose views on women and homosexuality are fundamentally at odds with the values they claim to cherish. They spend the entire morning denouncing patriarchy and the afternoon importing more of it.

The importance of a strong male presence in the upbringing of girls was once considered obvious. Today it has given way to talk of “toxic masculinity” and a persistent suspicion of masculine virtues. What Iceland calls progress has amounted to dismantling guard-rails fashioned through centuries of hard-won experience.

A civilisation cannot live on rights alone. After decades of being told Iceland is the summit of female flourishing, one question still hangs in the air, unanswered: where, exactly, are the great Icelandic women?

Bhagavad Gita and Krishna – Misconceptions

[Written as a coda to Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates.]

A common Western tendency is to approach Krishna and the Bhagavad Gita through categories familiar from the Abrahamic traditions: “God” and “scripture.” The impulse is understandable, but it is also misleading, for it encourages the assumption that they belong chiefly to the domain of religion and therefore have little bearing on contemporary concerns. The misunderstanding is widespread enough to warrant a few observations.

The Bhagavad Gita is not “scripture” in the usual Western sense. It does not lay down commandments or a fixed set of prescriptions. What one encounters is a sustained examination of action, knowledge, and the self, preparing the ground on which decisions must be made. The mind is disciplined, judgment is sharpened, and the burden of decision is returned to the individual.

At the end of the dialogue, Krishna does something extraordinary. He does not assert divinity and demand obedience. He says instead to Arjuna:

“Reflect fully on this; then act as you think fit.”

This is not a decree, nor a law code, nor a prophetic proclamation. It is a dialogue under existential duress, embedded within the Mahabharata’s field of battle. Action is not reduced to formula. Dharma is not specified either, for it is contingent and context-bound.

The text ranges over metaphysics, conduct and consequence, knowledge, discipline, and the nature of the self. The battlefield is the setting, not the limit of its scope.

Part of the difficulty lies in the medium. The Bhagavad Gita is composed in classical Sanskrit, a language capable of an extraordinary density of thought (in tech parlance, one might call it ‘lossless compression’). What appears plain on the surface often carries multiple layers of meaning. A first reading yields very little. With each return, more is disclosed, not because the text changes, but because the reader’s own understanding is being rearranged.

When the preservation of a social order is at stake, the question is not whether one acts, but how one acts without destroying that which one seeks to preserve. This lies at the heart of dharma, the maintenance of order. Within that, ahimsa (minimisation of harm) operates as a constraint, guiding conduct in a field where harm is unavoidable.

In the Mahabharata, Krishna is not presented to most participants as an object of worship. Only a few are aware of his divine nature. For the majority, he is encountered as a man of uncommon ability and an exceptional political intelligence. To read Krishna only as “God” is to miss the operational dimension of his role in the epic. He is a strategist navigating constraints, asymmetries, and moral hazards.

The epic furnishes concrete instances of this, which I set aside here in the interest of brevity.

Each case is uncomfortable if read as moral exempla, but makes sense when understood as statecraft in extremis. The war is the terminal phase of a diseased polity, where action is judged by its place in the larger order rather than by isolated rule compliance. Exceptional measures enter the frame as responsibility shifts from personal purity to civilisational outcome, a difficult doctrine that offers no moral comfort.

The same Krishna who refuses to command Arjuna in the Gita is the one who departs from established norms when adherence would undermine the very ends they are meant to serve. This is not a contradiction but a recognition of hierarchy, of what must sometimes yield if order is to endure.

Sagas and Itihasa: Cultural Cognates

[This essay was published in Icelandic in Morgunblaðið on May 18, 2026. See screenshot below.]

Iceland and India lie separated by ocean and a civilisational chasm no map can bridge. Yet the bones of language still carry what geography and time cannot efface. In both Icelandic and far older Sanskrit, traces of a common inheritance persist. Sanskrit vid, “to know,” echoes in Old Norse vita. Icelandic hvítt and Sanskrit shveta descend from a common root. So do sannr and satya. Geography divides. Language remembers.

There is another correspondence, not of words but of form.

The Icelandic sagas and the Indian itihasa are cultural cognates, defined not by origin but by function. They are often called ‘mythology,’ or worse, ‘historical fiction’ – terms that misplace them entirely. Nor are they history in the archival sense. They belong to another order altogether: civilisational memory given narrative form.

Arising from a long oral inheritance, the sagas hold the record of a people entire: lineages, settlements, feuds, and the judgements that follow. Law does not stand apart but enters life directly, spoken openly, contested, and borne by men who must sleep with the consequences they set in motion. Honour is neither proclaimed nor adorned but enacted, often driven to breaking point, as in the world of Njáll and Gunnar, where a decision once taken cannot be unmade and consequence moves with its own implacable momentum. Nothing lies outside the human field; everything is answered in action and aftermath.

That such literature arose in Iceland is one of the remarkable facts of human culture. From a population of a few tens of thousands, set on a harsh, exposed edge of the inhabited world, emerged a body of narrative with such control, depth, and unerring command of human motive that it resists easy explanation. The achievement is not merely striking but extraordinary and, given the scale that produced it, close to the improbable.

In the Indian tradition, itihasa, “thus indeed it was,” refers to the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. These are neither inventions nor chronicles. They are a civilisation speaking in its deepest voice, examining duty and action, tracing the bonds of kinship and the fractures that follow, laying bare love, betrayal, ambition, and renunciation.

At its heart stands the Mahabharata, the longest poem ever composed in human history. Scale is the outward sign of a far greater ambition: the attempt to encompass the totality of human experience. Its composer, the sage Vyasa, states at the outset: “What is found here may be found elsewhere; what is not found here is nowhere to be found.”

This is not boast. The Mahabharata does not console or simplify. It examines the entanglement of duty, desire, power, and consequence with a severity unmatched, refusing easy divisions between virtue and transgression. Dharma is not proclaimed; it is tested, strained, and often revealed only in the wake of action. Krishna, at the centre of the epic as the Supreme Reality in human form, bends the rules in obedience to a necessity beyond human measure.

The poem is not merely a war story. It stages the collapse of order and asks what remains when every norm collides with every other. Kings contend over law and legitimacy; vows bind and destroy; loyalties fracture. At its most charged moment, the Bhagavad Gita emerges as a text of the deepest philosophical insight, a sustained meditation on action, existence, and being. Narrative and philosophy are not separate strands but one movement.

Both traditions arose in worlds that trusted memory over the written record. They were not read but recited, and lived. A child in India meets Rama and Bhishma long before meeting them in print. The same was true in Iceland, where in turf homes, across long dark winters, names, lineages, and episodes were spoken, binding the living to the dead.

These figures do not remain confined to their narratives. They enter speech and moral imagination. To invoke Draupadi is to recall a woman humiliated yet unbroken; to speak of Karna is to summon loyalty bound to tragedy. The sagas do likewise: to name Egill is to summon fury yoked to genius.

The kinship between sagas and itihasa is evident. Their differences in scale and scope are equally clear. The sagas are anchored in a defined historical horizon: the settlement of Iceland, the ordering of society, the play of law and honour within a small, tightly bound community. Their domain is human, and their force lies in the directness with which a deed returns upon the one who sets it in motion.

The Mahabharata unfolds on a far larger canvas. It extends beyond the human sphere and places action within a wider frame of time, recurrence, and consequence. The question is not only how one ought to act, but what action itself means.

The sagas and itihasa answer the same human need: to give lasting form to experience. They are among the fullest expressions of that need – two civilisational vessels of memory shaped into narrative and carried across time.

Morgunblaðið, May 18, 2026

Melody Before Harmony

Is melody fundamental, or is harmony?

From a long civilisational view, melody is the primary element in almost all musical traditions across the planet. Human song begins as a single melodic line. Rhythm, and later harmony, are additions to that primal impulse. The melodic line carries expression, contour, inflection, breath, and language. It is music complete in and of itself.

Harmony, by contrast, is an invention. It emerges in the West from medieval experiments with organum, later systematised into counterpoint and tonal harmony, and eventually into the lush chordal textures of the Romantic and modern eras. Outside that lineage, harmony in the Western sense is largely absent.

Indian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Central Asian, Chinese, and Japanese traditions are overwhelmingly melodic.

The distinction can be drawn plainly.

Melody is fundamental: it arises naturally from the human voice, exists across cultures, and remains whole even in isolation.

Harmony is contrived, in the following sense: it is a conscious construction, historically localised, and dependent on a framework of rules and training to sustain coherence. Western musical thought has too often elevated this contingent invention into a universal principle.

The word “contrived” is not meant pejoratively. Borrowing from mathematics, melody is analogous to integers, while harmony resembles complex numbers. Once developed the latter opens the door to polyphony and the construction of large-scale musical architecture.

The distinction comes into sharper focus when we examine Indian Classical and Western Classical music.

Western Classical music reaches its summit in figures such as Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven; the comparison is with the ne plus ultra of that tradition.

The difference lies not in achievement – even at that summit – but in where each system locates musical creation.

In Western Classical music, the roles of composer and performer are inherently separated. The score is authoritative and binding. The performer realises and interprets, but does not create the underlying musical material. The conductor is accorded some latitude in phrasing, dynamics, and tempo, but the notes, harmonic progression, and overall content are fixed. This is not incidental; it is built into the system.

The role of notation reflects this separation. Western Classical music depends on a detailed written score that specifies the musical content with precision. Indian Classical music, by contrast, is not written down. Notation, where it exists, is mnemonic, serving only as an aid to memory. The music itself resides in the trained mind and is realised in performance.

Harmony is central to this difference.

Harmony imposes simultaneity. Multiple voices must align at every instant. The system therefore demands tight synchronisation. Once a harmonic structure is in motion across several instruments, deviation by one performer is not freedom but an error. As a consequence, the scope for individual invention is necessarily limited. Creative authority resides with the composer, who conceives the music in advance; the performer realises it.

Indian Classical music is entirely melody-centric, and the performer is, in effect, the composer in the moment. The raga is not a fixed composition but a generative framework. The musician unfolds it moment by moment, guided by grammar but not bound to a pre-written score. There may be a skeletal composition, but it serves only as a basic runway from which melodic flight takes off and charts its own course in real time. The substance of the music lies in spontaneous creation. This spontaneity is not arbitrary; it arises from long training and internalised discipline.

A melodic system such as Indian Classical music operates unshackled by harmonic constraints. The artiste is accorded full creative and expressive freedom, without having to negotiate shifting targets. Within the boundary conditions of the chosen raga, the music unfolds as it is being made.

Melody was there at the beginning. It remains what it has always been: the ground from which music arises.

A final note: Certain vocal techniques, such as overtone singing, can yield more than one audible pitch at a time. Yet these emerge from a single melodic generator and do not amount to harmony in a structural sense. The argument stands.

PS: For what Western popular music really is, see Western Popular Music Is Trash.

Mistaking a Murti for an Idol

Many non-Hindus, and some Hindus, even those otherwise educated, hold a fixed image: a Hindu standing before a stone or metal figure, understood to be God itself. From this image arise familiar labels, chief among them “idol worship.” The purpose here is to clear that misconception.

The stakes are not merely conceptual. Across centuries, Muslim rulers and armies in India, and later Portuguese colonialists in Goa under Catholic sanction, destroyed temples and shattered images on a vast and sustained scale. They treated such worship as forbidden and its practitioners as infidels. The extent of this iconoclasm is part of recorded history.

The underlying error has not vanished. It persists today in recognisable form, where Hindu practice is still dismissed as “idol worship,” reduced to caricature, ridicule, and casual contempt rather than policed by the sword.

What the Hindu stands before is not an idol, but a murti. The distinction is fundamental. An idol is taken to be God. A murti is a form through which the divine is invoked and invited – a conduit, an access point.

The divine, in its highest conception, is formless; yet the tradition does not set form and attributelessness in opposition. The murti offers form without confinement, allowing an approach to the formless through form.

What imbues the murti with presence is pran pratishtha, the act of consecration. Without it there is only form; with it there is presence, not because the stone has become God, but because the form has been prepared, through ritual and intent, to receive and reflect the divine. The murti does not confine the divine; it functions as a focal point where the mind is drawn and held, an interface between the visible and the invisible.

This is why Hindus visit the temple: for darshan. The word means “seeing,” yet the act is reciprocal. One does not merely look upon the deity but stands before it and is seen in turn, held for a moment in that presence. The murti is the locus of that encounter.

Dattatreya murti from Goa

A related point often goes unnoticed. Even where no consecration has taken place, an image bearing the likeness of a deity evokes an immediate, almost unbidden reverence in a Hindu. The form of a deity long loved and revered carries a deep impress of meaning and memory, and is not met as an inert object but as something already charged.

To call this “idol worship” is to misapprehend the practice at its very beginning. The murti is neither a substitute for the divine nor a claim about matter. It is a discipline of attention, a way of gathering the restless mind and turning it toward that which exceeds form, yet consents to be approached through it.

Asha Bhosle: 1933-2026

Not of an age, but for all time.*

Asha Bhosle passed away today, April 12. No parallel anywhere. A voice that carried entire eras.

The photo was taken during the making of the Legacy album in 1995 under Ali Akbar Khan at Skywalker Ranch in Marin Country, California, where George Lucas placed his facility at Khansahab’s disposal for a week.

* Ben Jonson on Shakespeare.

Asha Bhosle and Rajan Parrikar (1995)
Photo by: Rana Bose

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