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Someone close to him once said: ‘Woh toh galti se sach bolte hain.’ He speaks the truth by mistake.
My journey into his life is also an attempt to understand that abiding paradox: how anarchy can coexist with harmony.
anger that would erupt randomly, sometimes unwarrantedly, when things didn’t go his way.
Humiliation—especially when it strikes an impressionable teenager—can catalyse either self-destruction or single-minded ambition.
harmonium be banned on radio as an instrument of accompaniment because it was foreign and could not glide smoothly between notes.
Extreme deprivation and formidable talent can be a combustible combination.
He served as a reminder that there are spaces more intoxicating than fame.
As Hans Utter wrote, compared to Ravi Shankar, Vilayat Khan made his life and art ‘a narrative of resistance’.
Unlike Calcutta, where Bengalis and Marwaris monopolised the new aristocracy, Bombay had a cosmopolitan elite that consisted of Parsis, Maharashtrians, Gujaratis, Kutchi Bhatias, and anyone who wanted to participate in building the commercial centre of a bright new India.
while earlier compositions were in praise of the maharajas, now the songs changed to acknowledge the new benefactors. In his book, Hindustani Music in Colonial Bombay, the musician and scholar Aneesh Pradhan writes that, in 1907, the feisty Gauhar Jaan sang in
Bombay’s Town Hall a song praising the philanthropy of Bombay’s rich businessmen, even naming some of them in the lyrics. Rahe abad ya rab Bambai aur Bambai vale Kahan main ek musafir aur kahan yeh qasar sultanee (I, an insignificant visitor to this magnificent edifice Pray that Bombay and its citizens may forever prosper)
Amma cooked, sprinkling her food with a generous dose of venom against whoever happened to fall foul of her that day.
But it was sustained by an interdependence between the practical and the lyrical.
Vilayat Khan had a strange relationship with wealth—he
he was charitable, profligate and stingy all at once.
vocal music is able to establish continuity, while the frets of an instrument create a staccato effect.
‘How about leisurely deliberation . . . A space that involves both introspection and expression, a simultaneous movement inward and outward.’
the women fluttered in and out of his life like beautiful, wounded butterflies.
In India, truth is considered overrated. Mythology overwhelms fact.
There is a deep relationship between colour and sound and beauty. They feed one another, they create harmony.’
Exhausted with its arrogance and rapacious errors, people in the West had started turning to India as a space of healing. It was the time of Karma Cola.
‘Well, you know, the problem in India is that there is so much ooh-ing and aah-ing; I prefer the quietness of audiences here.’
Berkeley Community Theater, with seraphic
Musicians may be magicians when it comes to their art, but when the lights go down, they become human and are besieged by
the same mortal imperatives that fragment so many business families—ego, greed and power dynamics.
A lion and a tiger cannot be in the same room.
For the moon to shine, the sun has to be extinguished.
Memory is like a construction site, where the scaffolding may be factual but much of the material is selective nostalgia.
She probably realised that this brilliant mercurial man had never belonged to her and never would. She was competing not with another woman, but an entire universe that made room only for passing travellers.
The music and the tears, they both come from the same place.’
in matters of art and spirituality, the presence of the guru was the key.
‘He used to say that technical perfection is only half the game. The other half is thought. The musical imagination has to be active.’
‘Seeing is one thing, vision and focus are a completely different matter,’
‘Now let me tell you a story. A Majnu was walking around dazed, muttering his lover’s name, his feet blistered, but he was oblivious. He passed by a maulvi sahib who was kneeling in prayer. The man suddenly got up and slapped the Majnu and said, “How could you just walk past me while I was reading the namaz?” The Majnu said, “You saw me? While praying? Well, I never saw you!”’ Satguru smiled. ‘Who was more focused here? Who was more in tune? What you see, what you don’t see. It is very important.’
Backstories can change the filters of perception.
‘He believed that you must develop an interest in the finer things in life, in beautiful design. All that eventually reflects in your music .
He used to tell them that ‘shahgird’, which means student, could be broken into ‘shah’ or king and ‘gird’ to circle around. That is all he expected—that his students circle around him, the shah.
‘Abba, may I come inside and listen?’
‘No, darling. For then it would no longer be practice, it would become performance.’ Sometimes great ideas collide and merge inadvertently, because that is the nature of truth and beauty. Princeton had always been famous for its great physicists, and right at that moment, Vilayat Khan had invoked one of the most fascinating theories of quantum physics—that the act of observation affects the object being observed.
A drop of practice is better than an ocean of theories, advice and talk.
