The Mind Creative MAR 2014 MARCH 2014 | Page 26

The Mind Creative March 2014 The Goan Quintet with Anthony Gonsalves is seen second from left His dream was fulfilled in 1958 when he funded and launched a 110 piece orchestra called “The Indian Symphony Orchestra” with India’s legendary voices Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey as the frontline singers. Gonsalves maintained that this was not an experiment in fusion but a symphonic form of ragas with orchestration and choir. He later said that he did this for the love of music and to demonstrate the richness of traditional Indian classical music. The Indian Symphony Orchestra was received with a lot of enthusiasm but the interest soon died down. According to musicologist Rajan Parrikar, “An episode in 1959 was to injure Anthony‘s psyche, one from which he never quite recovered. The then-Minister of Information and Broadcasting, B.V. Keskar, in a display of bigotry, refused to let Anthony compose a score for an animation film because Keskar held the barbaric view that “Indian Christians should not even be provided with jobs.” 26