Review: The Disciple Is a Deeply Felt Look at the Search for Musical Perfection

Throughout Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple, there are numerous serene interludes during which rare audio interviews of a reclusive, now deceased Indian guru are heard, typically over images of the film’s protagonist, Sharad (Aditya Modak), riding his moped around Mumbai and the dreamlike droning of a tanpura. In one of her many sage sayings, the never-glimpsed guru, Maai, declares, “There’s a reason Indian classical music is considered an eternal quest. And to embark on that quest, you will have to surrender and sacrifice.” As with most of her other quotes, Maai’s declaration speaks to the extreme asceticism she deems necessary to becoming not only a great classical Indian musician, particularly in the raag tradition, but to achieve a state of enlightenment and transcendence.

It’s an alluring, at times intoxicating, pursuit to which the 24-year-old Sharad devotes his every waking moment. Occasional flashbacks reveal his pushy, albeit well-meaning, music-obsessed father (Kiran Yadnyopavit) demanding that he constantly practice, and it’s this paternal tutelage that pushes Sharad to meet his guru, Sindhubai (Dr. Arun Dravid), a revered musician who, like his own guru, Maai, never achieved popular success. And these gurus, living and dead, shape Sharad’s worldview, namely his intense dedication to training and unwavering allegiance to raag, which later becomes at least somewhat problematic.

Sharad’s austere stance toward raag is complicated as Sindhubai not only begins to chastise his student more frequently during lessons, suggesting that he’s not improving no matter what efforts or changes he makes, but openly criticizes him when the two are performing live in front of an audience. Sharad’s devotion to his guru remains resolute throughout this period and the next 15 years that unfold over the course of the film, but it’s here that it begins to dawn on the young man that he may have reached the limits of his potential.

Yet like the destitute musician at the center of Ritwik Ghatak’s The Cloud-Capped Star, Sharad sees singing as more than just a profession; for him, it’s a heightened state of being. And even as we see Sharad become weathered and pudgy as time, along with a lack of success and, naturally, money, wears him down, he remains determined to teach raag at a local school, while still performing and trying to sell CDs of rare raag musicians on the side.

Given the philosophical nature of Maai’s interview snippets and the remarkably beautiful musical performances of Sharad and his guru (unsurprisingly, Dravid and Modak are indeed trained musicians), Tamhane appears, for much of the film, to be fully celebrating the asceticism and endless struggle that Sharad has committed himself to. But as time goes on, we not only see the costs of pursuing perfection, but also the isolation that results from his strict and limiting adherence to practicing and teaching only raag. It’s a single-minded focus that is, in large part, passed down from his own gurus, though when he berates one of his students for wanting to sing raag in a fusion band, it reveals not a love for the artform to which he’s devoted his life, but a domineering spirit that arises from his musical monomania.

Despite the occasional insensitivity, even cruelty, of Sindhubai toward Sharad or Sharad toward his own student, the film takes no moral stand regarding either of the men’s methodologies. The film doesn’t celebrate cruelty as a necessary means toward achieving musical perfection, a la Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, nor does it take a moral stance against such tactics. Tamhane, instead, is dogged in giving full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru, and the issues that arise when young artists put their teachers on a pedestal of nearly mythical proportions.

The Disciple presents this as an intrinsic part of human nature, at least as it pertains to artistic pursuits. We see our mentors, our heroes, our gurus as something akin to perfect, unassailable encapsulations of what we ourselves want to be, and Tamhane sees both the beauty and danger in that notion. When a friend of a friend openly criticizes both Sindhubai and Maai in front of Sharad, it’s no surprise that he gets a glass of water thrown in his face, as an insult to his gurus isn’t a mere insult to Sharad, but a denunciation of his sacred cows.

This scene appears to mark a potential turning point in the film, perhaps serving as Sharad having the rug pulled from underneath him as the man’s derogatory statements about Sindhubai and Maai can be seen as undermining everything Sharad has built his life around. But Tamhane is too skilled a filmmaker to rely on cheap twists, and these accusations are both left unsubstantiated, as it seems possible that the man may have been provoking Sharad, whose pretensions had annoyed him throughout their entire conversation.

Instead, this provocation is shown as another step on Sharad’s quest for musical transcendence, and whether or not, as his friend’s acquaintance suggested, Maai was pretentious and crazy or Sindhubai was bumping up against his own limitations during his early public performances, these revelations shape rather than destroy Sharad’s spirit. The Disciple is certainly fixated on the difficulties that face those on a journey toward perfection, or rather, as Maai says, “a path to the divine.” But the men and women in the film, gurus or not, are undeniably imperfect. It’s what makes them so genuinely human, and that Sharad remains undeterred in his search for that elusive perfection makes him all the more real—neither a hero who should be viewed in awe nor a pretentious ascetic whose restrictive methods lead to his social isolation. He’s instead what he always wanted to be: a true artist, with all the contradictions, complications, and aggravations that go along with that.