The Indian Takeaway: A harmony of two repertoires

The sounds of the violin, piano and clarinet meld into one another to create a melodious classical music composition, ending with a lively round of applause from the class. However, this is not your typical music lesson, but one that brings together two different musical repertoires in harmony, equipping western classical musicians with the skills to play – and teach – Indian classical works on western orchestral instruments.

Yogesh Dattani, head of the Ealing Music Service, is the driving force behind these unique lesson plans. He created the Indian Takeaway Resource for the Independent Society of Musicians (ISM) Trust to introduce people in the UK to new and diverse music using teaching methods and instruments they are likely to be familiar with.

‘Indian music is a very beautiful musical culture,’ says Dattani, when we met via Zoom earlier this summer. Whereas in Western musical traditions, Dattani explains, the forms of art and music are more compartmentalised, Sangeet – as it is called in Hindi – is not just about instrumental music, but involves dance, drama and vocal music too. However, despite the beauty and breadth of the tradition, Dattani points out, very little is known about Indian classical music in the UK, ‘there is still some sort of mystique about it’.

So in 2021, Dattani decided to create a lesson plan to teach the basics of North Indian classical music in a classroom setting more familiar with western classical music with the aim of encouraging more of the UK’s young people to engage with the tradition. His online resource, the Indian Takeaway, breaks the basics of the genre down into 12 lesson plans, each taught through a video clip ranging from two to six minutes and, where relevant, useful guidance to follow Dattani’s teaching at one’s own pace.

With more than 20 years of experience teaching tablá – a pair of hand drums from the Indian subcontinent – in schools, workshops and community hubs, as well as time spent spearheading performing arts programmes in the UK, Dattani’s passion is evident throughout our conversation. He offers examples of Indian classical beats and sings verses of Hindi songs which bring his ideas and teaching approaches to life with an ease and talent that hints at artistic abilities perfected over the years, and transports the listener to the humming heat of a Delhi concert hall. It is this passion and love for his craft that fuels Dattani’s mission to make it more accessible to people in the UK and take away the distance and unfamiliarity associated with North Indian classical music.

‘I like to use the analogy between Indian music and food,’ he says. ‘Everybody loves food, but supermarkets help by packaging it to enable wider access and suit the general needs of the population.’ This ‘packaging’ is what Dattani believes is needed for Indian classical music. The concept led him to choose the title Indian Takeaway for his resource: ‘It is catchier and captures people’s imagination. And it is like a takeaway box – except without the excess salt and oil,’ he notes with a smile.

The Indian Takeaway has two central elements; tāl, which is a traditional rhythmic pattern and rāg, which is a melodic framework of improvisation in North Indian classical music. Dattani covers the basics of both in his resource videos before offering a more in-depth perspective. As a part of his tāl resource, for example, he covers the concept of tihai, a cadence in North Indian classical music that is repeated thrice. To make the technical concept more accessible and easier to grasp, Dattani tells me, he uses creative improvisation. ‘I slow it down, change the language and in two or three practices, I am speaking to musicians,’ he says, demonstrating by replacing the traditional syllables of ‘da da tin tin na na’ with ‘I love caterpillars, spiders and gorillas…’ in the same rhythm, adding a touch of playfulness to the words.

This approach has certainly been met with a positive reception from audiences. Dattani describes a workshop he presented for the Manchester Hub where he taught the tihai and three compositions based on it with the aim of showing western classical musicians how it is possible to create on-the-spot compositions by learning a few of the rules of North Indian classical music. ‘They [the audience] would have been so hungry because the workshop ran from 12pm to 1pm but the engagement was incredible,’ says Dattani, adding, ‘if we had not been asked to leave the room at 1pm, we would have continued for another hour!’

Dattani adopts a similar approach to make the idea of rāg more accessible, using staff notation and a pentatonic scale to make it more recognisable to students and teachers in the western classical tradition. Using this scale makes it possible to teach North Indian classical rāgs, like rāg Bhopali on instruments including a saxophone, clarinet, violin and piano. ‘Even when they are just jamming,’ says Dattani, ‘it sounds pleasant because they know the scale and can make it their own even in a new musical tradition’.

In addition to word rhythms, Dattani adopts a multi-sensory approach to his teaching to facilitate better engagement with his audience. This part of the Indian Takeaway resource required some in-depth thought, he explains, because unlike ‘your local takeaway, we cannot engage our sense of smell or taste in music. So, we are restricted to the auditory, visual and kinaesthetic, that is an approach used in the UK education system’.

In the lessons, Dattani encourages his audience to follow his lead. ‘I would clap a rhythm of four beats, and ask them to repeat that after me, but also tell them to watch carefully because I might change my beats.’ The audience learns the beats by engaging their sense of rhythm and observing Dattani’s actions. The exercise also involves kinaesthetic learning, where they process information through touch and movement. ‘Everybody has a preferred way of learning,’ observes Dattani, ‘and when you involve all the different ways of learning, then you are going to have more degree of success with more people.’

The ingenuity of these methods has helped Dattani engage diverse audiences, but developing the resources for the Indian Takeaway has not been without its own challenges. When staff notations for different instruments proved to be a particular roadblock, the ISM Trust brought an expert on board to notate each resource in four different clefs – the treble Clef, G Clef, bass Clef, E flat Clef and the B flat Clef – ensuring the resource can be accessed by learners on any instrument. Although, as Dattani admits, ‘that was not something I could manage along with planning other parts of the lesson,’ he remained involved throughout the process, checking the material to ensure the resource served its target audience as intended.

Recording the 12 lesson plans for the resource took long hours of practice and careful preparation to ensure each section –recorded in one session each – would reach its creator’s high standards. Describing the process, Dattani recalls: ‘I put in a lot of time to plan what I was going to say and do to ensure it was a polished product for the resource.’ Alongside each recording, users can also access textual resources providing vital context. ‘I had to break down the basics of Indian classical music into coherent theoretics modules,’ explains Dattani, a process which involved a lot of thought to successfully meet the learning needs of the students.

While these challenges reflect the differences between Indian and Western classical repertoires, in their rhythms, techniques, concepts and compositions, Dattani believes that the fundamentals of teaching lessons in the two traditions are the same. From a pedagogical perspective, he notes a similarity between the multi-sensory approach used to teach in the Western classical tradition and the fundamental sikha, dikha and parikha (auditory, visual and kinaesthetic) elements of learning Indian music. Dattani describes sikha, (meaning ‘to teach’) as a practice which ‘involves listening to instructions and paying attention to what is being told,’ while dikha translates to observing and learning by seeing and parikha means ‘discerning for oneself, which is the kinaesthetic and practical element’. Particularly in the context of educating young people, he emphasises the importance of making lesson plans accessible and fun, embracing innovation and encouraging students to participate in every step. ‘We need to take the mystique out of music and take away the complexity so more people are encouraged to learn new music and develop a passion for it.’

With his Indian Takeaway project, Dattani has made significant progress toward his goal of bringing a complex tradition to the UK’s musical population, and this success in making North Indian classical music more accessible has now fuelled a new mission to delve deeper into the repertoire. The next step for him is to teach simple Indian songs building on the basics of rāg and tāl. Although the teaching of songs in a language completely new to the majority of Dattani’s students is likely to necessitate a substantial amount of practice, he believes it is an effective way to immerse his students in the Indian classical culture, with songs ‘acting as a story and giving a better insight into the cultural context.’

For this deeper, more widespread understanding to become a reality, Dattani calls for a systematic approach, with more people championing the ethos of integrating different musical repertoires into the ecology of a school or a music service setting. ‘We would need society to embrace different cultural and musical traditions for this to become accessible nationwide,’ he says. The Indian Takeaway Resource is certainly a promising start.