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A Pathway to Knowledge
your teacher during concerts. The general tendency in teaching tabla,
though, is to teach it as a solo artistic form. Learning to accompany
is an ongoing process.
The first group of students to play had formed a semicircle around Za-
kirji’s tabla. Everyone was playing something different as they warmed
up, waiting for class to begin. It sounded chaotic and loud to my ears.
Each tabla was tuned to a different pitch, resulting in a collage of tabla
noise. Class was divided into three sections, beginner, intermediate,
and advanced levels. The students who were ready to start made up
the beginner level. Behind them in my row were the intermediate stu-
dents, and behind us sat the more advanced students. In the first two
groups, I noticed that five of us were women. This seemed more or less
consistent with what I had observed the previous year. Many others
sat chatting in smaller groups, renewing their friendships.
As Zakirji began to play, everyone turned his or her attention to him.
All eyes were on his hands. Taka terekete taka terekete. Soon everyone
picked up the exercise and attempted to play along with him. Under
our breath, we recited the bols so that our hands would remember the
sequence. Where was he stressing the pulse? What was the intonation
of this bol or that one? Where were the accents? Just as soon as I felt
comfortable and in the groove of the moment, he changed the phrase
by moving accents around and changing tempo. There was no time
to think. We had to attend to the moment with all our concentration
and just do as he did. It was a game of follow-the-teacher-if-you-can.
He abruptly stopped the class and said, “Watch and imitate. Get your
wrists to fall down. It’s just a matter of getting used to the drum.” He
started again slowly moving the accents around and around, chang-
ing our conversation with each other, changing the feel of the exer-
cise. Our tempo was all over the place. We consistently sped up after
each cycle of the exercise.
I remembered the thoughts Zakirji had expressed the year before
when the same thing happened. One of the students asked why it was
that we always speed up. Zakirji responded:
It’s a natural tendency to rush. We are always trying to catch up
to something. We always want to get paid more than someone else
and we always want a better car than somebody else. We always
