REMEMBER the cult song made famous by Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music? The hills are alive with the sound of music?

And she, who was one with nature in a verdant Austrian landscape, crooning the memorable lines in a riveting long shot at the start of the movie?

That was the image, not Nero’s fiddle, which came to mind when Zubin Mehta and the Bavarian State Orchestra caressed Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No3 in Kashmir’s Mughal-era Shalimar Bagh recently. Mughal Emperor Jehangir, who crafted the fabled Samarqand-patterned garden, the venue of the concert, would have approved.

The love of music his father, the great Akbar, had cultivated into a veritable state policy would have rubbed off on the son.

Indian classical music is constructed along cyclical beats, while its Western cousin, barring jazz perhaps, takes the linear path.

With my ears trained for glides and scales of Indian music, I couldn’t help detect the suit of seven notes intact in a sargam-like exploration at the very start of the Beethoven composition.

It picked up gently as if Kesarbai Kerkar was practising the full notes of Raag Yaman, as Indian singers often do, before starting her concert. I haven’t heard Kesarbai’s Yaman though, and would be indebted if someone will point to a link or a CD. It must be rare if it exists.

A couple of years ago Delhi’s Sangeet Natak Akademi had released a warped recording of her Shuddh Kalyaan, although the label described it as Shuddh Bhopali. Anyway that is the closest I have come to hearing a Kalyaan group composition in the legend’s voice.

But I am straying, and you could blame it on the effect music can have on anyone of us. How I wish the perpetually glum leaders of the Hurriyat Conference too had strayed into Shalimar Bagh on Sept 7. Instead, they sulked in a corner, or as many corners as the fractious separatist group now occupies.

Who cares who organised the Zubin Mehta concert or why? Whether a devious German ambassador had plotted it, as my friend Ravi Nair, the tenacious human rights activist wrote, or Indian agencies planned it to show the world that life had returned to normal in the perennially bludgeoned region.

A good music concert should never be opposed, much less shunned. What would be the difference between the Kashmiris seeking to stop Zubin Mehta’s musical tribute to their homeland and the right-wing Hindu zealots who periodically tear down art exhibitions and history books across much of India over one excuse or another?

Should Kashmiris stop rejoicing, having families and singing because of Indian occupation? Is that the vision its valiant fighters for independence have?

The vilest criticism I have heard of the concert is that it was a Zionist conspiracy to subvert Islam in Kashmir, a reference to Zubin Mehta’s association with Israeli musicians.

Such critics would surely have felt small had they heard the maestro speaking at the heavily fortified venue. He all but apologised for the way his show was projected for politics rather than to spread the joy of music. Mehta confessed he would have preferred to play in a larger stadium for the ordinary people, Kashmir’s Hindus and Muslims sitting side by side. And he promised to do so very soon.

His other dream, he told The Hindu in an interview, was to play in Ramallah, in occupied Palestine, for the Palestinian audiences.

There was a backhanded compliment for India here, and Hurriyat grumblers should note it. He told The Hindu he was happy that India had refrained from building Israel-like settlements in Kashmir. Did someone detect how the loaded comment delineated India’s status in Kashmir?

Mehta patronises the group Hand in Hand in Israel to encourage Jewish and Arab children to mingle, to share each other’s cultures. He wants Jewish children to learn to speak Arabic, the way nearly all Israeli Arabs speak Hebrew.

These were not comments from a pro-occupation rabid ideologue masquerading as a musician but the yearnings of a sensitive mind. Mehta’s unorthodox views were equally evident when he praised Richard Wagner’s contribution to Western classical music.

Wagner, as we all know, is largely shunned as anti-Semitic, not least because Adolf Hitler patronised him. But the artist in Zubin Mehta was enthralled by Wagner’s music.

And that’s how the Kashmiri dissenters should learn to regard Zubin Mehta instead of being obsessed with his surmised politics.

A veritable paradise that has ever so often become a living hell for its inhabitants — that’s how Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah described the venue of the maligned concert.

Could Syed Ali Shah Geelani, one of the most senior leaders of Kashmir’s struggle against the Indian army’s depredation of his land, question that description?

I expected Yasin Malik, at least, another veteran opponent of Indian rule in Kashmir, to show up, if for no other reason than for the fact that his wife is a gifted and sensitive artist from Pakistan.

Artists in Pakistan are not safe from narrow-minded critics, and Sadequain was not the only sufferer in the right-wing assault against art and artists in Pakistan. Is it possible that the self-styled liberators of Kashmir have themselves been so Talibanised that they harbour and spread scorn for music?

Kashmir is rich with music of its own even though the local sample presented to start Mehta’s evening did not represent the best talent it has.

There was a phase in Kashmir’s turbulent history when Indian forces targeted a famous minstrel from the Valley, took away his rubaab and handed him a gun.

They trained Kuka Parray to use Kalashnikovs and explosives to target his own people. Would it not be better if Parray had stuck to expressing his point of view through his art, as Zubin Mehta does? Or as Maria Von Trapp did, in Nazi-occupied Austria?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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