Having done so, Pt Shivaputra was like an unpressured painter in his studio, using the swaras of each melody like a predetermined palette, but applying paint in his own way, at his own pace, standing back, looking at the effect, returning, adding colour, overlaying one stroke with another, till gradually the image of the raag emerged. However, if a singer desires the freedom of abstraction, the only way he can gain it is by disregarding the concrete lyric.
A bandish dictates the shape of a raag and its words dictate the mood. One can see what motivated this deliberate choice. What we heard on Sunday was a masterly presentation of this alternative form, made effective in both the pre-interval Multani and the post-interval Jogkauns by playing down the words of the bandish in preference to nom-tom and sargam. This approach that had seemed tentative then, has grown in the interim to full maturity. Three years ago, at Karnataka Sangh, he sang a brilliant two-tiered Puriya Dhanshree in the conventional way with nomtom alap leading to the vilambit and drut bandishes but in the next bada khayal in Bageshree, he shook the familiar ground under our seats by rejecting the conventional pyramidal architecture of the khayal to deconstruct the raag and put it back together through fragments of itself. But the few times that I have heard him, I have been filled with wonderment at the uniqueness of his genius. I cannot claim to have heard Pt Shivaputra as often as many of his devoted admirers who packed the auditorium to bursting that evening must have done. If you were looking for a long and leisurely evening of inspired music, Sunday was the day, Tata Theatre the venue and Pt Mukul Shivaputra the singer - presented by TOUCH, an NGO for underprivileged children.
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