The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan

by Namita Devidayal

In the old days, great artistes believed that their children should learn music before they learned how to speak or read and write. Without the clutter of words, the child absorbs music like a sponge. That is how music becomes his first language. It establishes itself as an interiority that will influence everything he later does and feels. It creates a direct connection to the universe because unstruck music lives in rivers and birdsong and in silence.

An interesting pedagogical development at the time was the introduction of sitar performance manuals. These booklets were a curious by-product of the English education system and marked a first-time shift in India from oral to written transmission of music. The Sitar Siksa by Krishnadhan Bandopadhyaya was even written with Western notations.

His music rose from the immediate physical space into one where the seen meets the unseen.

Vilayat Khan ran away to every corner of India and the world throughout his life, but Calcutta remained the constant in his heart. The place haunted his imagination like a boatman’s song. Wherever he was, by November, he would be back there like a homing pigeon, and stay till February. He slipped into Bengali like it was his mother tongue. He loved his mustard fish, his walks along the Hooghly, and the first call to prayer which brought raga Bilaskhani Todi floating in through his window like a morning bird. It was one of the few things in his life that centred him, realigned him with himself, for otherwise Khansahib belonged to a universe that was not rooted in geography.

He spent hours listening to Abdul Karim Khan, Abdul Wahid Khan, Faiyaz Khan, Zohrabai Agrewali and later Kesarbai Kerkar. He learned their music by heart, each note and phrase and pause. Though he had no formal education, he had a photographic aural memory and his mental spools were constantly active.

All India Radio was launched in 1936, a few years before Vilayat Khan reached Bukhari’s doorstep. Before that, the first radio stations in India were the Radio Club of Bombay and the Calcutta Radio Club and a few more in some princely states such as Mysore, where Dada Imdad Khan had produced his first recording. All India Radio was a revolutionary broadcasting force for a new India, and a series of British and Indian officers were assigned the challenging charge of setting it up. Lionel Fielden, an Englishman who put it all together, wrote in his memoir, A Natural Bent, that ‘none of the staff had ever seen a microphone before and they found great difficulty in using it, or in believing that it was of any use’, while most of the radio artistes ‘ate opium and refused to come to rehearsal in their “opium time”’.

In a curious move in 1940, John Foulds, a musician and composer who had been brought in to head the Delhi station’s Western music section, proposed that the harmonium be banned on radio as an instrument of accompaniment because it was foreign and could not glide smoothly between notes. His view was widely supported. Even Rabindranath Tagore wrote a letter stating that he had banned the harmonium in Santiniketan for those very reasons.

Smell with your ears, listen with your hands. Then your senses will start making sense!’

Ravi Shankar and Vilayat Khan had two things in common—mastery over their instrument and unabashed self-absorption. But they came from very different worlds, which perhaps shaped the way they approached their music.

But then I realised that every musician makes choices, and Vilayat Khan had very deliberately chosen a certain path, one that looked within for depth rather than beyond, one that was solitary rather than collaborative. It would not lead to sharing record sleeves with famous pop stars, and it would not make him famous among the musically naive. But it is what he chose. He served as a reminder that there are spaces more intoxicating than fame.

Bhatkhande then did something extraordinary: he painstakingly gathered compositions from musicians all over India and devised a notation system, applying Western scientific systems of documenting knowledge to what had been an oral tradition. Experiments in notation of Indian music had been carried out earlier in Calcutta and Baroda, but Bhatkhande’s contribution was far-reaching. Many musicians may not have been able to identify the precise notes they were singing. Now, for the first time, the grammar of their music was being analysed and written.

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.

Gunche teri zindagi pe dil hilta hai sirf ek tabassum ke liye khilta hai. Gunche ne kaha ki, is chaman mein baba ye ek tabassum bhi kise milta hai ‘If you can blossom and give your listener even one chance to smile, it is well worth it, dear brother. How many have even that in their destiny . . . Remember that music must never be separated from nature and from the divine. It cannot merely be a medium to please the masses. Never sing or play for your audience. Treat this with sanctity . . . let it be like the beautiful flower that blossoms, making people’s heads turn. Or like the wispy smoke of incense which floats above both the musician and the listener and leaves an aroma long after.’

At some point in his life, if he is lucky, an artist moves from being a technically competent master to a creative spirit. Most musicians fall somewhere along that spectrum. Very few stay consistently brilliant. Some may achieve that sublime space only at a particular moment in their performing life; some may reach it in private, and no one would even know. Some practice and practice but only start flying in another lifetime; a few reach it only as teachers, not performers.

In Vilayat Khan’s life, there came a time when years of stubborn determination and monastic practice yielded to a space of ease. He now held his instrument without the desire to dominate it; the mind and body and the sitar were able to interact in a space of love. Something else began to happen.

His ‘gayaki anga’ (vocalist style) was a significant departure from the ‘tantkar anga’ (the style that describes plucked instruments). The crucial difference between vocal music and a plucked instrument is that vocal music is able to establish continuity, while the frets of an instrument create a staccato effect. Vilayat Khan could effectively play with what is known as ‘meend’, the indiscernible continuum of notes between two notes, which only a singer can achieve. He had both the craft and the knowledge to fill the space in between.

‘All great musicians and composers have the uncanny ability to know exactly when the listener needs relief, a sudden change in pace, that element of surprise,’ said Deepak. ‘Vilayat Khan, Beethoven, Mozart, they all knew. After a particularly dense segment, Vilayat Khan would inevitably throw in a light lilting phrase. You can see it in his ragamalas.’

‘You know, my father always taught me that the ultimate aim of the musician is not to develop technical mastery, but a pure and tender heart . . .’ Ali Akbar Khan said with great earnestness.

Film studios became playgrounds for some of the most talented music directors of all time. Hindi film music grew out of a confluence of the Bengal stream, the Marathi stream and Western music, which came from Anglo-Indians and later Goans. The Bengal stream came from Calcutta, where composers like Pankaj Mullick and R.C. Boral had been working in New Theatres studio, and had made some bold experiments fusing elements of Western harmony and orchestra with traditional Indian classical music. Mullick was influenced by Rabindra Sangeet, and Boral was a well-established tabla player who was close to Enayat Khan and had even accompanied him on several concerts. The Marathi stream, which was the more dominant one initially, came out of Pune and Kolhapur, and had much more of a Hindustani classical element, thanks to playback artistes like Saraswati Devi, a Parsi dhrupad singer who worked for Bombay Talkies. When Bengali composers like Anil Biswas migrated to the thriving Bombay industry, they started changing the music scene, eliminating the Marathi elements, bringing in other melodies, introducing Western instruments.

Bhairavi was the one raga he played with heightened ecstasy, and perhaps the raga he played the most times in his life.

Vilayat Khan was raised a Muslim, and was rarely without his prayer beads, but his devotion to the goddess Parvati embodied in raga Bhairavi was purer and more intense than any Hindu priest could have mustered. In his mind, the mythology of Bhairavi and the melodic manifestations of Bhairavi merged into one. Bhairavi was the counterpoint to Bhairav, the raga embodying Shiva.

Bai, Abdul Karim Khan, Imdad Khan.

On the nights that the electricity went off, and the stars above shone brighter, and the silence of the surrounding forests loomed inkily, it could very easily have attracted wandering spirits, especially if Khansahib was practising a particular thumri in Bhairavi.

I remember I was once in Kolhapur for a concert, and I passed a cobbler. As he stitched a slipper, he was humming raga Malkauns. Can you believe it—the way someone today would hum a Kishore Kumar song! It was his version of Malkauns, of course, but it was Malkauns alright. This is because he had heard it so many times in the court of Shahu Maharaja who loved music and loved his people.’

Vilayat Khan was not a hypocrite. He truly believed that artistes existed on a plane several notches higher than most mortals, higher even than the prime minister of the country.

Just as Bach’s Goldberg Variations were used to heal, Khansahib’s music would soothe the prime minister’s body and mind and help him sleep restfully.

‘Ratibhai! Let me tell you, the best singer who lived before our time was Zohrabai Agrewali . . . Uff, what a cheez! What exquisite pain there was in her voice. There has not been one who could sing like that after her.’

Vilayat Khan had just returned from a trip to England, and had brought back Cadbury’s Bournville drinking chocolate. He was very excited to introduce his son to this delicious drink. He stirred up two steaming mugs in the kitchen and brought them out to the porch along with two quilts. He wrapped one around the boy and the other around himself, and they sat there, in silence, holding their mugs. It was freezing. In front of them was the dark silouhette of pine trees fringing the hills. ‘Beta, you know this feeling you are experiencing right now? This whole picture of us sitting here—the inky trees all around us, the sky a lighter shade of black, the cold you are feeling outside, the warmth and comfort you feel inside, this utterly gorgeous moment . . . You have to learn to transcribe all these feelings and this beauty into your music. It is not about the notes but what goes on behind those notes. This is why a musician’s son will always be different from one who comes to learn music. These are things that cannot be taught, they have to be experienced. Every experience must translate into your music. That’s all there is for you to remember. You, my firstborn, will play like a king one day.’

An orange-and-gold sun was emerging in the distance and they could hear soft singing. A group of village women in bright colours were walking towards the well to wash and bathe and fill their vessels. ‘If we stand here for another half an hour or so, you’ll see them come back and they will be swaying differently. They will look different. The way they look when they are coming back, that is the picture you have to translate into your music . . . There is a deep relationship between colour and sound and beauty. They feed one another, they create harmony.’

The Western world was first introduced to Indian music sometime in the early 1900s when a musician and sufi scholar called Hazrat Inayat Khan travelled to America and introduced audiences to a sound they had never heard before. He played the veena and sang, but did not gather much of an audience. Gradually, he stopped playing what he called ‘struck music’ and turned his attention to exploring the mysticism of sound, how ‘unstruck music’ flows in and around us. He integrated sufi thought and music into a series of beautiful essays.

The Mysticism of Music, Sound and Word

In the early 1950s, similar ideas about the potency of Indian music and its capacity to create harmonies within and among people travelled into the mind of the great master violinist Yehudi Menuhin. Long before the term ‘world music’ was coined, Menuhin became its biggest missionary. Although he was raised in America, he always turned to other cultures for inspiration. He wrote about his fascination with India in his memoir, Unfinished Journey: Having grown up in competitive America where survival was by will power and pesticides, I could not find other than marvelous a world which drew its strength from the encouragement of so much life and the destruction of so little . . . To belong to such continuity relieves the individual, I think, of much of the burden of uniqueness. Life and death are not all and nothing, but stages in a process, episodes on an infinite river to which one trusts oneself and all other phenomena. So, it is that Indian music reflects Indian life, having no predetermined beginning or end but flowing without interruption through the fingers of the composer–performer; the tuning of the instrument merges imperceptibly with the elaboration of the melody, which may spin itself out for two, three or more unbroken hours. Melodically and rhythmically, Indian music long ago achieved a complex sophistication which only in the twentieth century, with the work of Bartok and Stravinksy, has Western music begun to adumbrate . . . What Indian music has not, and Weste...

Besides Menuhin, the Beatles, John Cage and Philip Glass had been seeking sounds outside their known notes and scales. Bob Dylan discovered the Bengali singing mystics; John Coltrane explored half-tone riffs in his jazz music. People were seeking answers in those undecipherable microtones and unseen notes that can never quite be transcribed, nor fully owned, realising perhaps that life’s rational, perceived notes have limitations.

During a radio interview with BBC in London, sometime in the sixties, he was asked to compare the audiences in India with those in Britain and he said, ‘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.’

As George Harrison wrote in the introduction to Ravi Shankar’s book, Raga Mala: ‘For him to go and study for seven years, eighteen hours a day, and become master of an instrument which was obscure in most of the world, and for which nobody was particularly craving outside India, and then spend the rest of his life trying to hip everybody to it—what a thing to do!’

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.

Memory is like a construction site, where the scaffolding may be factual but much of the material is selective nostalgia.

Is it better to be quietly happy, surrounded by healthy relationships, or to be lonely and famous? These are personal choices. Or maybe they are not even in one’s hands. As I was leaving, Imrat Khan said: ‘The recordings are already composed for us by the one above. We are just sitting here playing His instrument.’

But could it be that Vilayat Khan did not want to be rescued? He had experienced inordinate pain, but he also believed that sadness was crucial to music.

He had said in Komal Gandhar, ‘I have seen a lot of sorrow in my life but all this sorrow that has lived inside me has to come out somewhere, so it comes out in my music. To make others cry through your music, you have to have cried a lot yourself. The music and the tears, they both come from the same place.’

Jagjit Singh lived in a village called Bhaini Sahib near Ludhiana in Punjab. It could have been any other sleepy village surrounded by wheat fields except that it harboured an amazing secret: every child was taught Hindustani classical music. Regardless of whether they grew up to become farmers, traders or homemakers, music was their second language. They learned how to sing, play the sitar, sarod, tabla and dilruba. They learned compositions about leaves dancing in the rain, and about Krishna and Guru Nanak. They learned how to accompany each other. They learned how to listen.

The tradition of teaching music to children was started by Jagjit Singh’s father, Satguru Pratap Singh, who famously said: ‘I want the fragrance of music to touch every child. Music keeps negativity away.’ He died in 1959, and his son, who had inherited that passion, kept up the tradition.

Jagjit Singh told Vilayat Khan how the entire Granth Sahib is set to music. Each verse goes with a raga and there are thirty-one ragas in the book, starting with raga Jaijaiwanti, ending with raga Shri.

Vilayat Khan, in turn, told them stories about music that he had heard, about his father and grandfather and how they could present the entire world in a single note.

Vilayat Khan had once told him, ‘Diya se hi diya jalta hai.’ A lamp can only be lit by another lamp. He was alluding to an important element of Indian classical music: it has no known beginning and no one knows when it changes along the way. When you listen to an artiste, you may hear elements and influences of past masters, sometimes decipherable, at other times less obvious. A single musician’s rendering is like a wave, individualistic and whole when it washes up, but dissolving into a larger ocean when it recedes.

He sat with his eyes shut and back erect, the way he did on stage. He started singing Bilaskhani Todi, building on notes in the lower register in that unhurried meditative manner that no one else could do before him or after. He was demonstrating the Merukhand technique of building a mountain of melody, gradually and with great mindfulness, without any desire to titillate. It was as if he was a solitary presence in the room.

By around eight in the morning, which was usually the time that the scent of freshly watered grass mingled with the aroma of parathas simmering in ghee, the music was in full swing. Shujaat was playing his sitar seated on the floor, attentively following Amir Khan, who continued to sit on the bed in front of him, lifting his hand to direct him. Jung Singh played a tanpura on one side of the room. The other tanpura was being played by Vilayat Khan. Everyone sat respectfully, facing the great singer, as if in a temple of music. Cups of tea floated in, and empty cups were refilled at least two times over—the session went on for the next three hours, until the notes of the majestic morning raga had serenaded the entire house, drifting out into Surbahar Avenue, touching the rose petals, and lingering for many hours even after it was all over.

‘I remember that Abba used to tell me that I need not practice ten–twelve hours a day,’ Amir Khan said. ‘He used to say that technical perfection is only half the game. The other half is thought. The musical imagination has to be active.’

There were many such moments when unlikely voices broke the routine of raga music. Anyone cycling past Surbahar late at night would have been startled to hear the sweet sultry voice of Ella or Janis Joplin, or an aria by Mozart or Bach. Vilayat Khan’s all-time favourite was Béla Bartók, the Hungarian composer. These were not musicians he had grown up hearing, and yet he was drawn to them and brought them into his world with great openness and humility. But the music he listened to for hours on end was that of the old Indian greats—Zohrabai, Kesarbai, Faiyaz Khan, Abdul Karim Khan and Omkarnath Thakur. He had all their long playing records. He made his children and whoever was around him listen with deliberate awareness.

‘Children, there are four great singers who have influenced me and I want you to learn what is great about each one. Faiyaz Khan was royal and regal and dignified. Abdul Karim Khan represented beauty. Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was about freedom. He was like a bird who could take off from a tree, fly anywhere and land exactly where he wanted.’ He then paused and put both hands in front of him, palms close to his face as if he were praying. ‘And Amir Khan is only about ibadat. Prayer.’