WITH his salt-and-pepper shoulder-length hair and childlike eyes, he could have been the model for Satyajit Ray’s eccentric scientist Professor Shanku. Subhendu Ghosh may not quite match up to his level of fictional genius, but that doesn’t stop him from touching the high notes. In his other life, you see, the head of the department of biophysics of Delhi University is a Hindustani vocalist par excellence.Yet even as he is talking music, he can’t quite shake off the demeanour of the professor. In a particularly impassioned moment, he jumps out of his chair, reaches for a highlighter and draws a huge circle on the whiteboard behind him, and then another intersecting circle. He picks up another highlighter and colours the overlapping area. ‘‘Here,’’ he says, ‘‘here, in the area where the emotion of arts and the rationality of science meet, this is where I want to reside.’’Easier said than done, of course, but if Ghosh can lay claim to the area, a huge part of the credit must go to ‘‘my father, a very ordinary, lower-middle class man, a railway engineer who didn’t particularly care for what he did. He saw in me something he did not see in my siblings, and admitted me into a free-flowing kindergarten that encouraged me to do whatever I wanted to. That’s when I discovered painting.’’Painting? Did we hear right? ‘‘Yes, painting was my first love, music came later. Growing up in suburban Kolkata, somehow painting fell by the wayside and music began to give me release,’’ says the 45-year-old Ghosh. ‘‘Even as a child, I was prone to depression. And though I started learning Rabindrasangeet from a teacher who came for my sister, by the age of 11-12, I was aware I needed a more pure form of music to express my pent-up emotions. Music became a survival tactic.’’Simultaneously, Ghosh was discovering a love for mathematics, a predilection that immediately grouped him with ‘good’ students in West Bengal’s regimented academic system. Science was the no-question stream of choice, and Presidency College, hallowed by the likes of Meghnad Saha, J C Bose and S N Bose, the ultimate destination. But it was not till a couple of years after 1976, when Ghosh came to New Delhi to join Jawaharlal Nehru University for his master’s degree in physics, that he found his true guru. ‘‘I met Hafiz Ahmed Khan sahib of the Rampur gharana through a cousin. After much persuasion, when he finally agreed to take me on, he made me work on saregama for four years,’’ Ghosh remembers.The musical journey ran along a track parallel to Ghosh’s scientific career, which saw him joining Delhi University in late 1986 after his Ph.D in biophysics. ‘‘I knew academics was the only profession that would give me the freedom and the security to pursue the arts,’’ says Ghosh. ‘‘At the same time, I really loved science for its own sake.’’The next turning point came in 1992, during a three-month academic trip to the US, where Ghosh performed live before an audience for the first time. ‘‘I realised that though I wasn’t earning money from my art — that was never my intention — I was singing professionally. After a point, the strain began to tell. And I began looking for common ground between my two pursuits. As a scientist, I began to wonder: How do we learn music? I pondered on the biology of learning, of the mind. I began working on auditory cognition, as opposed to visual cognition. How does the brain instantly recognise a raga as Malkosh or Bageshri? Music creates an auditory pattern in the brain, and the better the musician, the more beautiful the pattern.’’Hardcore science? Not quite. Perhaps more in line with the concept of natural philosophy propagated by the ancient Greeks. No strict compartmentalisation, no boundaries. Just infinite. knowledge.
