A non-believer’s guide to divine music

Do you have to be religious to understand sacred music?

Comment is free, The Guardian, 15 May

I was with a group of westerners attending a a concert of Carnatic music – south India’s classical music – in Chennai. An affluent looking middle aged man in the row in front of us turned and smiled. He asked us if we liked the music. We said yes. Then he said: “But you cannot really understand it if you do not believe.”

Now, it’s true that the lyrics of much Carnatic music are addressed to various members of the Hindu pantheon and strongly coloured by the south Indian bhakti tradition of personal devotion. It’s also true that they are written and sung in languages I don’t speak (though I’ve read what I can in translation). But I resented this gentleman’s complacent assumption that I could not understand the music. When the percussionists pumped out their rhythms and the violinist soared away with the melody, a visceral charge passed through the audience, believers and non-believers alike. A gift from one group of human beings to another. A gift that is at one and the same time intellectual, emotional, and physical.

Music is a material phenomenon, entering through the ears, pulsing in the blood, prompting the muscles. Carnatic music is sometimes seen as forbiddingly technical, but when the audience in Chennai counted the rhythmic pattern with fingers, palms, slaps on the thigh, they were moved by the same power that’s tapped by rock n roll, township jazz or bluegrass. And in the miraculous alchemy of art – the only miracle I believe in – that material stimulus becomes much more than physical. It engages, soothes, sensitizes the human being as a whole. And the human being as a whole is by definition a cross-cultural entity.

You don’t have to be a Christian to feel the swooning power of gospel music. You don’t have to be a Muslim to be thrilled by qawalli. I’m an atheist and a materialist but I’m excited, touched and inspired by the art of William Blake, Kabir, Curtis Mayfield, Giotto – all of it saturated in faith. And I don’t see that as a contradiction.

Religious art, when it’s more than just a rite for the faithful, is multi-dimensional, enriched by undertones of doubt, desire, frustration, jealousy, and fear. It can be cerebral, erotic or political (dangerous as it is to generalise, I’d say that the greatest religious art tends to be protestant and prophetic, rather than orthodox). And it offers something hard to find in secular art: a fragile but somehow limitless hope, poised against all evidence to the contrary, a consoling promise, a reaching towards an ultimate peace. When this hope is given body in great art, in Bach or Tyagarajah (the Carnatic Mozart) or Hank Williams (”I saw the light, I saw the light, no more trouble, no more night…”) its appeal is irresistible, even to the most die-hard sceptic.

Much as I respect sincere believers of all faiths, I’m afraid I remain convinced that human beings are alone in the universe and that it’s in our individual and common interests to recognise this. I’m with the Russian anarchist Bakunin when he wrote: “The first revolt is against the supreme tyranny of theology, of the phantom of God. As long as we have a master in heaven, we will be slaves on earth” and with the Tamil iconoclast Periyar when he declared: “The temples are not built for gods. They have come up for the livelihood of the Brahmins and to degrade and exploit the common people.”

Nonetheless, I think we atheists and materialists also have to admit that in the end there remains a mysteriousness to life that is not merely a mystification. There are basic questions which humans ask to which we cannot give definitive answers. The impulse to explore these mysteries seems to me healthily human and not inherently retrogressive or escapist. And whatever happens to religion in the future, art is certain to remain one of the prime means by which we engage in that exploration.

The song performed at the Carnatic concert that we had been told we could not understand was, in fact, Tyagarajah’s Vararagalaya – a sprightly and sarcastic composition. “They chatter and blabber, pretending they’re top notch experts in melody and cadence but they don’t have a clue in their brains …” it begins. “They chatter as if they’re aficionados of raga and rhythm. All the while they don’t know a note from a fluttering.”

There’s a wonderful irascibility in Tyagarajah: he’s frequently impatient with his listeners, his fellow musicians, himself and at times his God. In Vararagalaya, he’s angry with those who do not understand that “the sounds which arise from the body are indeed the outpouring of the divine OM”. I suppose that would include me. Still, the thrust of the song is a complaint about people who substitute the form for the soul of the music, just as elsewhere he complains about people who substitute outward ritual for inner devotion. Whatever Tyagarajah himself might have thought, I feel I’m closer to him in this matter than some of his more sectarian devotees.