“Ramrang” Remembered

I last spoke to Ramashreya Jha “Ramrang” on December 28, 2008, calling him from California. He was in a hospital bed in Kolkata, awaiting cardiac surgery scheduled for a few hours later. He did not survive the operation, passing away on the morning of January 1, 2009, India time. Fittingly, our final conversation centred largely on music.

I came to know Ramrang in the final twelve years of his life, during which we forged an intensely close bond. It was from him that I learnt the true meaning of raga – its structure, its aesthetic, and its place in musical experience (raganubhava).

So many memories crowd the mind, and in time I may share some of them here. Ramrang’s first-ever airplane ride was in 1999, when I invited him to Goa. I still see the way his face lit up as he stepped off the plane, and hear his animated account of the experience, told in his musical Bihari cadences.

Below are video excerpts from Ramrang’s recital at the Kala Academy in Panjim on August 4, 2007. Harmonium accompaniment is by Sudhakar Karandikar; on tabla, Tulsidas Navelkar.

Note: The videographer hired for the event inadvertently drove his audio feed into saturation, rendering the soundtrack rather unpleasant. (I tried applying a low-pass filter, but to no avail.) Fortunately, I had set up a separate audio channel, so the full recital – audio-only – has been properly archived.