Singers Die Twice: Journey to the Land of Dhrupad is a piece of travel writing written by Peter Pannke, a German national and singer of the Mallik family’s gharana of dhrupad. The text is written as a series of journal entries that skip across time and space from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, London, and Zagarolo to Delhi, Bangalore, Banares, Darbhanga, Samastipur, Patna, Bettiah, Vrindavan, Amta, and Vaiyanath Dham. Entries include personal narrative, thick descriptions of places, Indian rites, concerts, foodways, and travel, as well as short historical passages to provide context that weights the imagery and events. He also includes biographical passages about the scholar Alain Danielou (46) and singer Vidur Mallik (96-97). While the author touches on ethnographic themes within the social world of Indian music making, gharana rivalries, religious affiliations of instrument-makers, hierarchies of different instrumentalists, and the guru-shishya relationship, the journey that Pannke takes us on is primarily his own. Therefore, this text more closely aligns to a piece of travel writing than ethnography.
This text was clearly written for a European audience with, at least, a passing familiarity with classical European terminology. Though critical of classical European music (6), Pannke frequently uses European classical music vocabulary in his writing, for example: “the gradual accelerando of the wheels” (9); “Every sleeper added a new beat and when two rails met end to end, they unleashed a cascade of staccato and hard syncopation” (9). He composes rich aural landscapes (13-14) that ground the reader in Pannke’s world, hearing through his ears, seeing through his eyes, and dreaming his dreams. The India that he describes is at times depicted with almost tangible realism and at others it departs into a dreamland India of the European imagination. For example, he frequently anthropomorphizes objects and places, such as the sarangi (37-38), the pakhwaj (55), and India “herself” (3).
Throughout the course of the book, the reader learns more about the author than anything else. Pannke writes in his own voice about his outsider experience of India, Indian people, and Indian music. His poetic descriptions tell us a great deal about how he perceives, but not at all how Indians perceive. Pannke describes blues singers as his “first gurus” (7), amidst the outlining of his personal musical tastes and how it led him to the study of dhrupad. He draws connections between these genres, noting the deep, masculine voices of Ram Chatur Mallik and Charlie Patton (122-123); however, given the weak evidence he provides during his musing, I am led to believe this connection is more meaningful to Pannke than it is to either singers of dhrupad or blues.
Indeed, both of these genres conjure a privileged sense of romantic nostalgia in the author. Blues stirs up imagery of “the poverty of the workers in the sugar fields” (123), and in India he “imagined he could see cotton plantations just behind the rice fields” (123). Likewise, dhrupad represents an ancient Indian imaginary for the author. He believes that through listening to modern recordings of dhrupad, he is accessing a relic of ancient India (8). He does not acknowledge that while dhrupad has ancient roots, it is also—like any tradition—created in the present with reference to the past [1]. Perhaps he was attempting to ignite the same nostalgia in the reader by recreating this “shrinking of time and space” (8) with the nonlinear formatting of his journal entries.
The title of the book alludes to a dream of Pannke’s in which he confronted death, a woman dressed in black who stabbed him twice, saying to him, “Singers must die twice” (4). Pannke returns to this dream at the end of the book (200), this time with an interpretation: the first death is of a person’s body and the second is when the memory of the person is gone. His dream, first presented as a mystical encounter, brackets his experience and confirms that the book both begins and ends with him and how India has imprinted “herself” on him.
Amongst the narratives of Pannke’s journeys are vignettes of his struggles abroad, such as being denied use of a library due to his status as a foreigner (131), seeking the correct official permission for use of facilities, and contracting malaria, dysentery, and typhus (156). He also discusses the difficulties of arranging the proper documentation for international travel for his Indian musician contact to attend a federally sanctioned event for distinguished artists in Germany (194). These passages illustrate the realities of life in the field: the limitations and the dangers. With Pannke’s evocative language and sensational storytelling, the book is an exhilarating read with clear accounts of the author’s experiences and perceptions in India.
In this light, Singers Die Twice would make an excellent text for music students taking a beginning course in ethnomusicology or seeking a vicarious glimpse of ethnography. Additionally, this text would serve as an example, for more advanced students of ethnography, of how self-referential writing that attempts to account for the subjectivity of the author, and thereby “demystify the anthropologist’s unitary authority”[2], can lead to naval-gazing and unapologetic ethnocentric assumptions that, in truth, do more to reinforce neocolonial perspectives and relations than seek to understand the worldview of a dhrupad singer in Vrindavan; for example: “I now learnt that religion was something quite different from what I had been used to. It was like a game” (31); “a glass painting in the naïve style” (92); “but as they say in the Orient, the soul does not fly as fast as a jet, it travels at the speed of a camel” (12).
Notes
[1] Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Theorizing Heritage,” Ethnomusicology 39 (1995): 369.
[2] F. Mascia-Lees, P. Sharpe, and C. Ballerino Cohen, “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions From a Feminist Perspective,” Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15 (1989):9-10.
Editor's Note: This book has also been published by University of Chicago Press (2014).
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[Review length: 983 words • Review posted on March 1, 2017]