From Japan to Juhu: Kyoto-based sarangi player recounts strings attached to Mumbai

In a crowded Churchgate-bound local, Yuji Nakagawa looks less like a classical musician headed to the NCPA and more like a sportsperson rushing to Oval Maidan. Masquerading as a bat in the tennis racquet kit on this Kyoto-based Japanese national's right shoulder, is a string instrument that used to signal crisis to a generation of Hindi movie buffs.

It was 15 years ago in 2009 that the wistful allure of the sarangi had made this former guitar player move from Osaka, where the train doors close to Mumbai, where they don't. Several misal pavs, Hindi lessons and nail injuries later, Nakagawa, it seemed, had not only mastered the bowed instrument under the hawk eye of his Juhu-based guru Pandit Dhruba Ghosh but also mustered the courage to do in packed Mumbai trains what he would never do in packed trains in Japan: tap a shoulder. "Here, I can easily ask for help placing the instrument on a shelf. In Japan, I'm scared. People tend to keep their distance," says Nakagawa as he prepares to sling his tennis racquet bag over the shoulder of his silk kurta once again.

This evening, alongside tabla player with whom he once shared a rented flat in Juhu, the seasoned Kyoto-based sarangi player--who performs in India twice a year--will ascend a stage in South Mumbai and try to showcase all that his late guru taught him for eight years before his passing in 2017. "Look right at the centre of the sound," Ghosh would demand in Bengali each time his pupil's attention tended to waver. "The melody should resemble a kite flying in the air," the ustad would say, urging Nakagawa, his senior-most disciple, to coax ragas that would float as breezily as the emotion ran deep.

Entailing odd hours, the training in the rigorous guru-shishya parampara--supported in part by an Indian Council of Cultural Relations scholarship from 2009 to 2015--reminded him often of his home country whose creative legacy is steeped in a similar teacher-student dynamic. Incidentally, it was in Tokyo of the mid-2000s, that this student first met his future Indian guru. By then, Nakagawa owned a sarangi from Varanasi, where he had spent two months learning from Ustad Faiyaz Ali Khan in 2003. His first real encounter with the sarangi, though, happened the previous year in Nepal.

Having befriended a folk musician in Kathmandu during a sight-seeing tour fresh in the wake of graduation, the blues fan returned home to Japan with a four-stringed sarangi gifted by the Nepalese local in 2002. On spotting this rare India-adjacent folk instrument in Osaka, a local Japanese tabla player had excitedly asked Nakagawa to accompany him onstage. The result was mutual regret. "At that time, I had no knowledge of Indian music. I messed up badly onstage. He was very upset," recalls Nakagawa.

Keen to dive deep into Indian classical music--a genre that Japan then saw as "exotic"--Nakagawa scoured music shops in Japan of the noughties for audio CDs and stumbled upon one by Pandit Dhruba Ghosh. "I was mesmerized on hearing it," says the then Osaka resident who lugged his sarangi on a bullet train to Tokyo in 2004 when he realized Ghosh was going to perform there. "After the show, I told Pandit Dhruba I was keen to learn from him. He asked me to give him a demonstration of my skills," recalls Nakagawa, whose cuticles nervously worked the strings made of goat intestines, filling the ustad's hotel room with the evening tune of raag Yaman. Five years later, Ghosh's home in Juhu doubled up as a musical dojo to Nakagawa. "He would only speak to me in Bengali, never in Hindi," recalls Nakagawa about the hard-to-please Ghosh who--after his pupil's first public performance in a college--had merely relented: "Thik ache".

While he says he isn't fluent in Bengali, Nakagawa sounds pretty convincing when he spouts Mumbai-style Hindi. "All the notations in the textbooks at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan where I studied were in Hindi," recalls Nakagawa who has performed extensively as a soloist and has accompanied many eminent Hindustani classical musicians . "I am an outsider to this genre. So, I feel very lucky to be given a chance to share the stage with great vocalists and masters," says Nakagawa, who has won several awards.

Though he doesn't have a favourite raga, he seems drawn to Raag Shree --a calming tune he can be seen performing in a video interview. "My guru used to say, whenever you have a problem, play Raag Shree," confesses the Japanese musician in the video. The raga would likely have come in handy during a recital in Kolhapur, where his otherwise misal-favouring gut took a long time to recover from a jaunt to an eye-wateringly spicy misal eatery. "That, and Andhra food, I cannot take," laughs Nakagawa who now prefers Indian cuisine over Japanese fare.

So far, Nakagawa has given solo and ensemble performances in countries including Thailand, Singapore, the Netherlands, Canada and Japan. While the Netherlands is more exposed to Indian classical music , Japan, he says, is still learning about it. Canada and Singapore, with their vast Indian diaspora, too, display a grounding in it. However, in India, apart from airport security guards from Rajasthan--who can easily identify the instrument in his heavy fibreglass case--many uninitiated strangers have mistaken his sarangi for a sitar.

"We should perform more in schools and colleges," says Nakagawa, when asked if young people show a keen interest in the overshadowed Indian instrument. While most of his audience in India is grey-haired, the sarangi players' students include US-based Indian kids apart from Japanese school goers. He is happy to be back in Juhu where--unlike Japan--the neighbours don't mind his nocturnal riyaaz. "In Japan, I can only practise between 10 am and 5pm," he says.