Between the fifth & seventh swara

He erupted into life the way his creation, Dum Maro Dum, explodes out of a speaker. Where the beat comes before the breath, and melody lags behind the pulse. The kind of beginning that doesn’t wait to be invited.

Years before that song ever crackled through a speaker, RD Burman had earned a name that foretold his fate. Legend says his childhood cries fell on the fifth note — Pa, or Pancham. Part myth, part memory, the name stuck. So did the prophecy. He would pick the note apart and reinvent it, forever halfway to flight.

Married to a world still anchored to ragas and restraint, he arrived with distortion pedals and conga drums, a harmonica tucked behind his smile. He infested the puritanical music scene with textures — of breath, of rebellion, of Bombay’s weathered soul. In an industry that prayed at the feet of melody, he came bearing rhythm. He may have been named after the fifth note, but he always played in places between the swaras, in the shadows that don’t get named.

Born into music but never content to inherit it, he crafted tunes like puzzles made of smoke. While his father, SD Burman, worked in melody like a calligrapher on silk, Pancham tore the paper and stitched it with funk, jazz and the grief of his own silences. He made tablas whisper and guitars cry. He turned beer bottles into percussion. He recorded laughter, footsteps, the sensuous hush of a woman’s sigh — life itself—and wove them into his soundscape.

Pa, the fifth swara, is said to symbolise balance. Pancham brought it to chaos. He pulled Kishore into creative anarchy, wrote with Gulzar in riddles, and coaxed from Asha Bhosle a voice that could hold both honey and fire.

His music wasn’t afraid to sweat. Chura Liya Hai Tumne was scored with spoons and cups. Piya Tu was half-dance, half-hunger. Lovers clung to them. Loners sank into them. Time passed through them, and came out altered.

But every scale must move. From Pa, music ascends to Dha, the sixth note—associated with beauty, yearning, the sense of things beginning to slip. In the 1980s, the crowds thinned. The industry he once electrified now found him excessive, unpredictable. Producers drifted.

Still, he worked. Asha remained. Their partnership—musical and more—defied easy description. There was romance, yes, but also rivalry, distance, devotion. She was his most intricate instrument; he, her most haunted composer. Then comes Ni, the seventh swara. In Indian classical music, it is the note that never quite resolves—hanging just before home. That’s where he stayed. Even in the shadows, he composed. He gave 1942: A Love Story its soul — and then slipped away before its echo reached the world.

He died in 1994, on the edge of a comeback. Today, the songs return in snatches—in cabs, in weddings, in the sudden hush of a long drive. They’ve outlived fashion, as only truth can. Pancham was never just the fifth note. He was what stretched between the fifth and the seventh—the faith to invent, the ache of oblivion, and the sound a soul makes when it’s still trying to find its way home.

VARUN KAUSHIK

Features