Mungal Patasar makes a mean baigan choka. Well, not a choka, per se, but a baigan bharta, a north Indian dish that tastes similar to our local choka, but with the addition of tomatoes and “a little bit of masala”, as he says.
He generously offers the recipe (and after a taste test, it is excellent). Food might not be the first creative outlet one thinks of when one hears the name Mungal Patasar, but he is a man of many interests. On a typical day, he can be found cooking for his family, or practicing jazz on the piano.
Expanding his piano vocabulary has become his latest musical preoccupation, joining his exploration of clarinet (where it all started as a child), mandolin, guitar, harmonium, dabla... as he lists, his wife, Roshni, interjects in the background of the call to remind him of his stint with violin.
“Oh, yes!” he exclaims. Perhaps it eluded his memory because it didn't quite stick.
“It didn't speak to you?” I ask.
“Well,” he says with a laugh, “The sitar spoke louder.”
An exuberant cook, a voracious writer, a connoisseur of many instruments—but the sitar speaks louder.
“I was about 16 years’ old when my brother Latchmi brought home a recording of Pandit Ravi Shankar,” says Patasar. “I just could not move. I stood with my hair on end, tears streamed down my eyes... I was transfixed.” Now, on the cusp of 80, he is still listening.
After that first visceral encounter, it would be ten years before Patasar purchased his very own sitar. “Where the journey started,” he says. That journey would take him to India in his 40s, where he earned a Bachelor of Music from Banaras Hindu University and a Master of Music from Prayag Sangeet Samiti.
But his training in Indian Classical music would not be the only prevailing influence for his evolving sound. It was an encounter with “...a guy teaching jazz music in QRC by the name of Scofield Pilgrim,” he says, who first introduced him to 'Calypso Jazz'. This would become the basis of the genre Patasar now considers to be his home space—Indo-Calypso Jazz.
“Pilgrim, Clive ‘Zanda’ [Alexander], [Lennox] ‘Boogsie’ Sharpe, [Michael] ‘Toby’ Tobias... they were doing Calypso Jazz workshops and they invited me,” he reminisces. “I made a lot of stumbles, because I wasn't trained in that kind of music...” But his Indian classical instincts lent themselves well to jazz improvisation. “[Zanda] said, 'Mungal, you are a genius!'”
This fusion of sound became the foundation of his band Pantar (-pan from steelpan, -tar from sitar). Elaborate musical recipes comprised of sitar, pan, keyboards and dabla, combining into a range of satisfying dishes that tasted a little of jazz, a little of Indian classical, but certainly overpoweringly Caribbean.
Now, to add to his myriad of honours from institutions around the world, he has been conferred with the Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from The University of the West Indies. It is a fitting commemoration of his scholarly work both as a musician and an academic who has published several papers, which he also generously offers to share with me—although his crowning creative achievement might just be a hearty stack of love letters to his wife Roshni, who mischievously suggests I read through those also, as they both dissolve into laughter.
