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COUNTRY NOTEBOOK : M. Krishnan : Of Birds and Birdsong : The Sunday Statesman: 2 July 2017
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SHAMA

"SOMETIME ago I heard a caged Shama sing in a by-lane of one of the most congested parts of Madras. Its owner, a Muslim artisan, had built his pet a roomy bamboo cage, considerately provided with two perches. He was careful to give it the kind of food it should get, and though he could afford no luxuries, he had made a cover of fine loose-woven green silk, spangled with tinsel stars. For the cage, he explained that it served to keep the bird relaxed and quiet at night, and save it from frightened by passing cats, while still letting the air in, moreover, for some reason beyond him, it made the bird sing more freely.

In the close confinement of that tiny room, cluttered up with broken chairs and assortment of tin trunks and gaudy cardboard boxes, with children shrieking and playing in the lane outside and an altercation between two women literally next door, the Shama's sustained liquid melody was as surprising and lovely as anything could be but it did not delight me. Not that an anthropomorphic, sentimental feeling for the prisoner dampened my spirits. It was only that song, at all times and of whatever kind is as dependent on the environment and the musical experience of the listener as it it is on the singer, and that I had heard the Shama many times in the dark, cool jungles that it loves.

In particular, I remember a few days in the forest block of Supa in Karwar. The great deciduous was all around our camp, and not far away there was a patch of giant bamboo, and a pair of Shamas had nested in one of the clumps. Every morning and evening before sunrise and at sunset, I would go over to the bamboo patch to hear the Cock's song. The Shama's song has been extensively studied by expert's like Dr. Thorpe, both from its live voice and from recordings (to borrow terms from broadcasting), but few of these men have heard the jungles it lives, and I think that the appeal of birdsong, in particular is much dependent on its setting.

Would Keats have written,

In some melodious piot
Of beechen green and shadows
Numberless
Singest of summer in full-throated case

If he had only heard the Nightingale singing from a cramped shrouded cage in the smoky murkiness of London? Very likely he would. The much-vaunted Keatsian sensuous imagery has always seemed to me wholly independent of experience or recollection, and entirely the product of imagination conditioned by a feeling for euphony. The man was a songbird in a sense that he could sing from a cage.

However that might be, the Shama should be heard in the deciduous forests that are its natural home. The feathery cool green caves and intricate tracery of the bamboo branchlets provides a fit auditorium for the welling melody ineffably sad to the human ear at one moment and cascading with liquid delight the next. We know of course that birdsong is more instinctive proclamation of territory and part of courtship display than anything else, and we do not know for certain what moods the avian mind can sense. But then, I am writing only of human apprehension of birdsong and nothing that I have ever heard has affected me so spontaneously and deeply as the Shama's song."

- M. Krishnan

This was published on 31 October 1965 in The Sunday Statesman

#The photograph of Shama calling has not been reproduced here.