On a January morning of indecisive sun and lingering sleep, I lugged myself into a stuffy classroom with yellow walls. Caught in a trance within its world, not one of the dozen students dared to disturb the stillness of the air. All of them were hypnotically rapt by the subject of their study: a thumri folk playing out of a smartphone on the teacher’s table. In its lilting tune of yearning, Radha’s affection merged with Meera’s worship, lines were blurred- between love and longing, meeting and absence, the corporeal and the transcendent.


After Prabha Atre had serenaded her audience in a class on Longinus, the sublime made itself self-evident. No hands were raised, no questions asked. But the ache of the lover who also assumed the role of the prayasi (devotee), had insidiously been transferred on to the listener.

Atre’s voice is persistent, almost nagging, yet the words she mouths do not speak of surrendering to the unrelenting beloved. The needle of love remains balanced on restraint: careful not to shower undeserving praise upon the beloved, but describing with great fervour the fever that their absence causes.


The speaker identifies herself as Radha, enclosed in the affluence of her unchi haveli (tall mansion) and fragrant baths with chandan. However, the space means nothing to her until Shyam arrives to fill it up. The only colour she wishes to be stained with is that of his love. Although the refrain remains the same throughout the song, Atre’s tone escalates from being inviting to pleading. In the process, she commits an annihilation of the self, as opposed to an exaltation of the beloved.

In 2004, Rituparno Ghosh, inadvertently hit the same chord of Longinian sublimity with the music of his film, Raincoat. Loosely based on O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, Ghosh evoked the age-old trope of the lovelorn Radha-Krishna through the lead pair played by Aishwarya Rai and Ajay Devgn.

The setting is thoughtfully contemporised for the modern audience, but the longing is oddly resonant with India’s celebrated History of Desire. Over here, love is unspelled, uncategorised- a common thread passing through the submission of a murid to the pir, the devotee to the worshipped, the lover to the beloved.


Regardless of the heart that loves, its language remains the same: indolent but intense, generous yet restraint. Gulzar lends his voice to Ghosh’s screenplay and successfully exhibits all those qualities in his rendition of Piya Tora Kaisa Abhiman.

Notorious for not having an English counterpart, the deliciously ambiguous word, ‘abhimaan’, contains within itself nuances of anger, pride, arrogance, jealousy, and unbridled affection. ‘Abhimaan’ beckons to be cajoled and at the same time promises union after a playful intermission of viraha (separation). Once the aching heart survives the period of waiting, its patience is rewarded with a meeting, although it may or may not result in consummation. This is only made possible within the realms of transcendent desire where the mistress holds the same authority as the jogan (pursuer).

The magic of the music lies in consonance with the art of wooing. Piya Tora echoes the melancholy of Jamuna Kinare- both throwing up images of distraught lovers by the riverside. In Gulzar’s song, the iconic river slicing through the Indian valley swells with the tears from the estranged lover’s eye. They bathe in the river of their own making, preparing oneself to be received by the beloved. However, their body remains lack-lustre since it is yet to be embraced with love.


The song is punctuated with the growls of thunder, foreshadowing a spell of imminent rain that corresponds to the lover’s catharsis. Furthermore, the Tansen-esque quality of the song to invoke the rain Gods, while the real addressee continues to be elusive. These ballads of love indiscriminately dwell upon the ubiquitous absence of the beloved. But their words make no attempt to recreate the muse’s presence through hyperbolic descriptions of beauty or virtue. Instead, courtship becomes an act of self-erasure.

These songs categorically dismantle the physical and emotional constitution of the self. Amir Khusro complains of being robbed of everything on meeting the gaze of Nizamuddin Auliya.


Love is so divorced from the worldly realm that it achieves spiritual transcendence through physical abandonment. But the lover’s complaint is seldom disapproving. Its defeat is as indulgent as voluntary. By the end of it, when the lover has removed themself completely, and resigned to a space where the elusive beloved belongs, both their essences cancel each other. The listener in us experiences the wildness of the emotional gamut along with the emptiness of nothing. Our forms are swept only with the all-consuming sublimity of their passion.