When Silence Became Sound

When Silence Became Sound

Booklet Two

WHEN SILENCE BECAME SOUND Nāda Brahma, Om, Nataraja, and Art as Worship

A reading through sound, rhythm, language, art, grief, and surrenderSasidhar Valluru

Cover photograph: Siva liṅga pratiṣṭhāpana in Kāśī, author collection.

Author’s Note

This booklet is the second in The Inward Fire Series. The first booklet asked what happens when dharma is tested, when māyā is named, when knowledge is humbled, when surrender becomes the final shelter, and when even the familiar gods seem silent. This booklet begins after that silence. Because silence is not always absence. Sometimes silence is pressure before sound. Sometimes silence is the field in which Om becomes audible. Sometimes silence is the place where the child first says, “Be with me.” The first booklet ended by asking whether art can also become worship. This booklet turns toward that question. Not art as decoration. Not art as entertainment alone. Not art as self-display. Art as offering. Art as discipline. Art as devotion. Art as liberation. The living doorway here is nāda: sound, rhythm, Om, the damaru, the cadence of poetry, the body in dance, the voice in prayer, the tongue in language, the hand in sculpture, the breath in mantra, and the silence beneath all of it. I do not write this as a professional musician or as a formal scholar of musicology. I write it as someone who has lived with sound, language, poetry, performance, vivid dreams, Siva, Kāli, Kāśī, grief, and the strange unignorable rhythm that keeps playing inside. For a seeker drowning in jargon, the matter is simpler than we make it. The body is an instrument. The mind is an instrument. Language is an instrument. Breath is an instrument. Rhythm is an instrument. Art is an instrument. Knowledge is already present as seed. The work is to focus it, align it, and offer it.

That is the path this booklet tries to walk.

Opening: After Silence, Sound

1. The First Prayer Was Not a Mantra 2. The House Where Language Entered as Sound 3. Siva, Kāli, and the Parent-Child Secret 4. Kāśī: The Sound Behind Sound 5. Om: The Doorway Between Silence and Creation 6. Nāda Brahma: The Human Being Is Already an Instrument 7. Nataraja: Stillness Dancing as Creation and Dissolution 8. The Liṅga in Kāli’s Courtyard 9. Poetry, Dandakam, and the Fierce Gait of Devotion 10. Rāvaṇa Brahma, Arjuna, and the Danger of Unsurrendered Art 11. When the Sound Remains After the World Breaks 12. Art as Upāsana 13. The Gist

Epilogue: When Language Learns to Bow

Opening

After Silence, Sound

The first booklet ended at a hard place. Dharma had been tested. Māyā had been named. Power had been humbled. Knowledge had been warned. Bhakti had been placed at the center. Harishchandra stood where even gods seemed silent. That silence is not a decorative silence. It is not the silence of a meditation poster. It is not the polished silence of a well-lit spiritual retreat. It is the silence after everything has been asked of a person. The silence after argument has failed. The silence after philosophy has done what it can do and can go no further. The silence after grief has entered the room and sat down without asking permission. And then the next question arrives.

What remains?

One answer is surrender. Another answer is sound. But not sound as noise, not sound as distraction, not sound as entertainment, not sound as the restless mind trying to avoid itself. Sound as presence. Sound as Om. Sound as the background current that was always there. Sound as the first tremor of the Formless. Sound as the way silence becomes approachable without ceasing to be silence. If the highest Truth is nirākāra, nirguṇa, nirañjana Brahman — formless, attribute-less, stainless — then why does the heart still sing? Why does the body dance? Why does poetry arise? Why does a child hold a Siva liṅgam in the dark? Why does grief go to Kāśī? Why does a father carrying his son’s ashes still fold his hands and say only: be with me? Perhaps because pure Consciousness is not dead emptiness.

It vibrates.

It resounds.

It becomes nāda.

That is the doorway of this booklet.

Chapter 1

The First Prayer Was Not a Mantra

My first real prayer was not a mantra. I was in fourth standard. Balasore, Odisha. Sometime in 1985 or 1986. I was about nine years old. My grandfather had died. My parents had gone to Hyderabad. I came back from school and found our defense quarters locked. My father was a defense scientist, and the house was a large two-bedroom government quarter. To a child, it felt even larger. A young Telugu-speaking neighbour called me from upstairs. She was newly married, perhaps around twenty years old, and had probably been chosen because she could speak to me in Telugu. She gave me a glass of milk and told me my parents had gone out of town and I would stay at her place. I nodded. Then I asked for the keys. I went home. Bathed. Changed. Did my homework. Went back upstairs. Ate dinner. Then I insisted on sleeping alone in my own house. This was not courage in the Republic Day-child-hero sense. I had watched those Doordarshan episodes too. Children rescuing people from fires. Children saving villages. Children being honoured for bravery. I had read Amar Chitra Katha books and Jataka tales. I had heard puranic stories from my maternal grandparents during summer vacations. So naturally, my imagination was not sitting quietly like a well-trained clerk. It was manufacturing every possible ghost, fire, demon, god, hero, shadow, and adventure. The house was large. Outside the window there was hardly anything. No comforting city lights. No crowd. No constant traffic. No human reassurance floating in from the street. Just darkness, space, and a child trying to act bigger than his fear. That first night, I slept in the pūjā area holding a small Siva liṅgam. I did not know proper prayers. I knew a couple of small couplets. That was all. But even then something in me felt that this should not matter. My mother had told me Bhagavān is like a father. Parents do not demand formal petitions from a child before sitting beside him. So my prayer was simple.

Be with me. That was all. Not give me this. Not remove that. Not make me win. Not make me special. Just be with me. The second night, I carried the small Siva liṅgam to my bedroom. By then another thought had begun to work inside me. If He is everywhere, why should He remain only in the pūjā room? If He is truly Bhagavān, then He is in the bedroom too. He is in the dark too. He is in the empty corridor too. He is outside the window too. Then another childhood logic arrived. My mother had told me He is Bhūtanātha: Lord of beings, Lord even of bhūtas, pretas, piśāchas, and all the strange beings that children imagine when the lights are gone. So why should I be afraid of them? If they came, I could tell them: we are under the same Lord. I am also His. You are also His. He is with me, around me, inside me. Do not waste my time. Let me sleep. Go play somewhere else. Those seven nights changed something in me permanently. Since then, I have never really known how to ask Bhagavān for things. I go to temples. I do pūjā. I participate in homas and yāgas. I fold my hands like everyone else. But the prayer has remained almost the same from that locked house in Balasore. Be with me.

Be with me as Krishna was with Arjuna. I will fight my fights. I am not asking You to remove Kurukṣetra. I am asking You to stand in the chariot. That is where my understanding of sound begins. Not with music. Not with performance. Not with scholarship. It begins with silence becoming presence.

Chapter 2

The House Where Language Entered as Sound

Before I ever studied Telugu formally, I heard it. My father wanted my mother to graduate after marriage. She had come from a village and had not completed a degree beyond school. When she prepared for entrance examinations, Telugu literature was part of the syllabus. She wanted to study political science and sociology, but Telugu stood at the doorway. So my father taught her. Chandas. Meter. Grammar. Poetry. Prose. Andhra Mahabharatam. I was a child sitting somewhere nearby. What else does a child do when the father is teaching the mother? He listens. He pretends not to listen. He absorbs. Telugu was never a school subject for me. Not then. Not later. But it entered me differently. It did not come first as marks, exams, correction, and punishment. It came as sound in the house. It came through my father’s voice teaching my mother. It came through Nannaya, Tikkana, Errapragada, through meter and meaning, through the dignity of language before I even knew how to name that dignity. So when people ask, “Who is your guru?” I cannot answer in the usual clean way. I learnt from my parents. I also learnt with them. That matters because nāda is not merely music. Nāda begins before music becomes formal. It begins in the way sound enters the nervous system. In the way the household carries rhythm. In the way a child hears language before he learns grammar. The tongue is trained long before the textbook arrives. The ear is initiated long before the student knows he has been initiated. A child may think he is merely nearby while the parents are studying. But some sounds enter and stay. Later, in Balasore, Bhagavān became the guru in another way. Not as a lecturer. Not as an examiner. As presence. The first gurus gave language. The inner guru gave the prayer. Be with me.

That is enough to begin.

Chapter 3

Siva, Kāli, and the Parent-Child Secret

After Balasore came other doors. Teenage life in North Odisha, close to Bengal, has its own religious texture: pandal building, Kāli pūjā, Durga pūjā, Viśwakarma pūjā, bamboo, cloth, lights, drums, noise, sweat, friends, labour, excitement, devotion, spectacle. The world did not divide neatly into religion and art. The goddess arrived through both. By then I had found Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramahamsa in books at home, public libraries, and wherever else they appeared. Naturally, of all the pleasant and gentle goddesses available, I became drawn to Mā Kāli. Fearsome. Intimidating. Mother.

That is the secret outsiders often miss. Kāli is not merely terror. Dakṣiṇa Kāli is the Mother before whom terror itself is brought under control. When the mind is too disturbed to speak to the Father, the child turns to the Mother. Even in ordinary homes, if the father does not buy something, the child goes to the mother. Not because the father is absent. Because the mother has another route to the same heart. That is how I came to understand her. Not as fear. Not as boon-machine. Not as some exotic image for dramatic religion. As Amma.

There have been times of extreme stress when the mind was too disturbed to speak clearly to Him. In those moments, I have felt her presence. Sometimes in vivid dreams. Sometimes as anklets. Sometimes as the sense of sleeping in her lap. I do not offer this as proof for anyone else. I only say what the inner life knows. The relationship was never born of fear or bargaining. It was parent and child. This is why the old devotional verse remains powerful: త్వవ మాతా చ పితామే త్వవ ।మే త్వవమేబంధుశ్చసఖా త్వవ ।మే త్వవ విమేద్యా ద్రవిణంత్వమేవ । త్వవ సమేర్వంమమ దే వ దే వ ॥

You alone are my mother. You alone are my father. You alone are my kin and friend. You alone are knowledge and wealth. You alone are everything to me, O Lord of Lords. That is not poetry alone. It is the grammar of surrender. And the Devī tradition says the same thing through another door: యా దేవీసర్వంభూ తేషు మా#త్వర్వం పేణంస& స్థితా। నమస(*స్యైనమస(*స్యైనమస(*స్యైనమో నమ,॥

To the Devī who abides in all beings as the Mother, salutations again and again. The seeker who understands this does not approach Bhagavān merely as a cosmic official. The seeker approaches as a child. That changes everything. A child can ask. A child can complain. A child can fall asleep. A child can stop performing. A child can simply say: be with me. This is why bhakti is not weakness. It is not infantilism. It is the courage to stop pretending self-sufficiency before the One who was always holding the ground.