Opinion The Voice falls silent
When we lose such artists,we lose an entire university.
Acolleague remembers being put to sleep,as a child,to the recordings of Bhimsen Joshi. Thats a strange story Bhimsen,with his full-throated voice,was after all reputed to even bring back the dead to life. So,if he himself has now died,just weeks short of his 90th birthday,it brings some comfort to think that his voice will continue to wake us up and keep us alive for generations.
It is one of those moments. In the space of a few years we seem to have lost most of the artists who shaped a national cultural consciousness over the past 60 years artists who drew the contours of musical traditions,theatrical and performative practices and visual lexicons.
It is hardly half-a-year since we lost Gangubai Hangal,Bhimsen Joshis gurubehn. And now,with Joshis demise,over eight flourishing decades of the Kirana gharana initiated by Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan has finally returned to sama. An entire musical legacy has folded into itself.
However Bhimsen Joshis legacy is of a very different texture. What he leaves behind,besides a genuinely grieving nation,is the possibility of an artistic leap of faith transcending ones own circumstances. This eldest child among 16 siblings,he expressed his musical inclinations and talents quite early in life,happily grabbing a tanpura kept aside by his grandfather. Not finding the oxygen that his musical spirit craved,Bhimsen was to leave home at 11 and,like little Nachiketa of the Upanishads,set out in search of a guru.
His story also gives us a good entry into the idea of the nation as conceptualised by Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore saw the nation both as mrinmaya (territorial) and as chinmaya (ideational). It is interesting now to think back on the year 1933 when the little would-be maestro wandered off on his own,for some four years,into a territory that was pre-national. But if one tracks his trajectory from Bijapur in Dharwad to Pune to Gwalior and finally to Jalandhar,from where he was rediscovered and brought back home by his father,one can actually draw the map of a different India a music India,perhaps more authentic and honest than all the contested state and national borders with which we have entangled ourselves. The Kirana gharana effortlessly unifies the south,north and west of the subcontinent. It is perhaps this India that will suffer the most from the departure of artists like Bhimsen and Gangubai. But Bhimsens return to Dharwad was fortuitous as he found the guru,the master that he was searching for,right in his backyard Pandit Rambhau Kundgolkar or Sawai Gandharva in Kundgol,near Bijapur. His earlier training with Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan at the Madhava Music School in Gwalior had helped open his voice; under Sawai Gandharvas unsparing tutelage he was to quickly blossom into a vocalist with an awesome range of fast-paced taans and an intuitive grasp of the complexities of the raga.
It was also fortuitous for Bhimsen when Gangubai,eight years his senior,began travelling from Hubli to Kundgol to learn from the same guru. The young lad was assigned the task of escorting her back to the railway station every day after the lessons. He would request her to sing to him whatever she had been taught that day and then quickly sing it back to her as his own form of riyaaz. No wonder he was,by 22,cutting his first HMV disc.
Though Bhimsens gaayaki was primarily drawn from the Kirana tradition,he also drew extensively from the Agra and Gwalior styles. This contributed to the full-throatedness of his khayal renderings. His Miyan ki Todi,Bhimpalasi,Puriya Dhanashri and Multani had a distinction which hasnt yet been equalled. It is,of course,legendary now how he kept himself open to influences as far-ranging as from Kesarbai Kerkar to Amir Khan and to Begum Akhtar.
The Kirana gharana received immense ballast from Ustad Abdul Karim Khan,with his mastery of the nishad and his shimmering daughters Hirabai Barodekar and Roshanara Begum. Sawai Gandharva had expanded on this repertoire and
Ustad Amir Khan chiselled,cut and perfected it,to a crystal of incredible beauty and majesty. It took Bhimsen to pick this up,and with cavalier abandon and a robust energy make it accessible enough that it could be returned to the connoisseur on the street.
The struggle to return music to the countrys ordinary people was not easy. Bhimsen was perennially torn between the pull of the earth energy and the adoration of the elite. There was a recklessness in his approach to life which had its own magnetism. He loved life on the fast track,especially with expensive Benz cars. Stories of his periodic binge drinking are legion. But every time he caught himself and brought himself back on track somewhat like a replay of the time in childhood when he ran away from home and returned.
Till the end Bhimsen believed that there is no substitute for a guru. He scoffed at the university style of teaching music. With the decline of gurus,he was constantly thinking and speaking about the need for devising an alternate system of training youngsters,by which the health of the musical systems could be sustained. He has written about his fears regarding the dilution of the teaching process because of modern Indias inability to create an appropriate system for its real needs.
He also believed that the computer can possibly replace everything; but not our music. Till the last he would plead with the government and its institutions to have faith in the vitality of our age-old music,and not restrict it within artificial systems of pedagogy. This is a question we will have to engage with urgently. For with Bhimsen Joshi passing away,we have once again lost an entire university. Like Nalanda,hopefully this too will not languish into a ruin.
The writer is a Chennai-based cultural critic express@expressindia.com
Share
