Thanks to the unceasing efforts of Yehudi Menuhin over the past decade discerning music lovers in this country were not altogether strangers to Indian music even before the Edinburgh Festival.
Ravi Shankar had been here before and had held successful concerts. So had Ali Akbar Khan. But it is only now that they have achieved what can be called a break-through. Without any exaggeration at all it is possible to say that at long last Indian music has arrived in this country.
Next only to Menuhin Lord Harewood deserved our thanks. He fell for Indian music and dance years ago. In 1951 he saw Balasaraswati dancing in Tokyo. This was her first debut abroad. That settled the issue for him. Now all those who have written about the Festival are grateful to him for his efforts to secure an effective representation from India.
The exhibition “music and dance in Indian art” in which music and dance, poetry and painting and sculpture form one indivisible unity provided an excellent background at the recitals. The exhibition was superbly arranged. The pictures were provided by another friend of India, Richard Lennox – a strange commentary on official agencies entrusted with the task of publicizing India abroad. He has already published a pictorial book on India and will soon be back in India
High Praise
To illustrate the reception the Indian musicians and dancers received, I quote briefly from Desmond Shaw Taylor, one of the top if not the topmost music critic in Britain today: “I never expected to find myself putting Indian music first in an account of the Edinburgh Festival,” he wrote and added: “When Menon (Narayana) began to pluck the gentle veena, and still more next morning when Ali Akbar Khan played the sarode and Alla Rakha the tabla, the air, tingled with shared vitality and joy.”
Adjectives like “incomparably” and “legendary” have been freely used by outstanding critics for Balasaraswati. One critic called her the “living embodiment of countless centuries of sculpture, painting, music, dance and song” for “in India all these are part of one art designed by Shiva to lead us to a comprehension of the two infinites – inward, inside us; outwards, beyond the stars”. On all accounts the Indian artistes gave the festival its one “true centre of gravity”.
It is probably natural to ask why the authorities did not send a team like the present one to the Edinburgh Festival in previous years. One can only wonder if this was partly due to a mistaken view that Western listeners could not understand and appreciate Indian classical music and dance. As one critic put it on the present occasion, Indian music is different from their own but not “so remote that, with patience, it cannot make a direct appeal to our senses and understanding”. A lot of people are willing to show the necessary patience.
Sex & Morals
In this “silly” season when everyone who can afford it goes grouse shooting in Scotland or sun bathing in the crowded Mediterranean beaches and nobody usually bothers about anything at all, the Minister of Education, Sir Edward Boyle, is caught in the age-old controversy of sex and morals. It is not that he has said something profoundly shocking to the Established Church and others. His crime is that he refuses to lay down the law for his subordinates.
The present controversy opened with a speech by the education ministry’s principal medical officer who said: “I do not myself considet that a young man and woman who plan to marry and who have sexual intercourse before their marriage are unchaste.” Though he was careful to emphasise that promiscuity was not to be condoned before or during wedlock, the minister was asked to repudiate him which he has refused to do. He now faces the charge of undermining the country’s “moral fibre”.
Dr Peter Henderson’s remark might not have provoked such a fierce controversy if they did not fall neatly into the pattern of thought conveniently labelled “new morality”. Last winter, Professor Carstairs, well-known sociologist author of the famous book Twice Born In the Indian Society, said in the course of Reith lectures on BBC that charity was preferable to chastity.
This was followed by the Quaker report on sex already referred to in these columns. Then came the book Honest to God by the Bishop of Woolwich calling into doubt faith in the virgin birth, the Resurrection and Christ being the son of: God. More recently Alex Comfort said on the BBC that chastity was no greater virtue than malnutrition.
Reaction was bound to be fierce and so it has been. It is interesting that it is not the spokesman of the Church but a medical practitioner who has commanded the widest attention in this campaign of the rebuttal of “new morality”. Dr Ernest Claxton, assistant secretary of the British Medical Association, has shot into prominence on the strength of one speech. Even old morality has to depend on the support of science.
Figures Speak
According to Dr Clarke, in spite of the availability of penicillin and widespread use of contraceptives, the incidence of venereal disease had risen from 97,231 in 1950 to 141,061 in 1960, the biggest rise being among persons between 15 and 24 years of age. Illegitimate births had soared to one in 16. In 1961 over 5,000 homosexual offences came to the attention of the police. The Ward trial brought to public attention the problem of abortions. If figures could settle a controversy, these should help. Unfortunately they never do.
Recently two boys found the heads of six cows and one horse in the woods. One of them later found two eyeballs cut in half, two jawbones wrenched apart, signs of fires under trees, and two circular enclosures where bushes had been beaten down. There was a twisted tree that could have been used as an “altar”. Black magic were the only explanation.
Some weeks earlier, the bone of a woman who died in 1770 had been taken from her tomb from a churchyard and arranged around an iron stake crowned with the skull. Now two reporters have come out with the disclosure that Britain is witnessing the biggest upsurge of interest in black magic and witch craft since the middle ages. Chelsea which is the modern counterpart of Bloomsbury in the thirties, is said to have become a new centre of the dark beliefs. Regular meetings of the “devotees” take place all over London and the home counties as well.
According to this report, the “devotees” have poured blood on to bound, blindfolded semi-doped boys and girls in mockery of baptism. One former detective sergeant of police is quoted as saying that he came across things he could not even narrate for fear of inviting disbelief and even ridicule. He toyed with the idea of taking action but dropped it because it needed risking valuable policewomen to obtain proof admissible in a court of law.
There were vague references of such rites in connection with Ward’s trial. They seem to go with mad “rave” parties with the emphasis on sex but it is said that the basic urge is not sex but a compulsive desire to destroy.
The Times of India, 8 September 1963