The music of love and loss
Jyotirmaya Sharma
|
Honest attempt to portray the complexities in this outstanding musician's life
|
BEGUM AKHTAR — The Story of My Ammi: Shanti Hiranand; Viva Books Pvt. Ltd., 4262/3, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi-110002. Rs. 1295.
One has to thank the year 2005 for bringing to us two outstanding books on music. The first is the translation of Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur's autobiography (The Hindu, August 7, 2005). The second is this biography of Begum Akhtar by Shanti Hiranand, who was the Begum's star pupil, but also shared a deep emotional bond with her. This explains why the subtitle of the book is `The Story of My Ammi' or the story of my mother. Having said so, this is hardly a hagiographical account of one of the greatest singers of the Hindustani tradition. The triumph of this book is its honesty and the ability to deal with the complexities and contradictions in the life of an outstanding musician.
The persona
Shanti Hiranand writes about Begum Akhtar accepting Janmashtami prasad with great reverence and saying this to her pupil, "Krishna is the God of love, and anyone who doesn't love Krishna cannot sing!" This book is also about Begum Akhtar's elusive search for love. The undisputed queen of the Ghazal form came from a tradition of tawaifs or professional singers. The scars of her early days made her relentlessly search for respectability and love.
For Begum Akhtar, respectability came in the guise of her marriage to Abbasi, a respected lawyer of Lucknow. She was grateful to him for having elevated her social status, but was also a prisoner of her large, and selfish, family. While respectability was desirable, it bored her after a while. She dangerously swung between spells of domesticity and periods of decadence. Hiranand calls her marriage `the pinnacle of her achievement'. She wanted to be Begum Abbasi. But she also had to `plumb the depths of depravity at times'. The inspiration for her music came from the latter. Her innate restlessness made her tire of both domesticity and decadence quickly, and then the search for that unattainable love commenced once again.
In the best tradition of bhakti, Begum Akhtar saw herself as a sinner and then proceeded to fabricate her own relationship with the Almighty. She claimed a personal equation with God. On being asked by Shanti Hiranand as to why she had stopped praying, the Begum retorted, "Ladai hai Allah Mian se!" (I have quarrelled with the Almighty). No amount of hard drinking, ceaseless train of Capstan smoke, bouts of pathedine abuse and reckless flirting diminished her musical soul. None of this shook the foundations of her largely loveless marriage, but it did cause a great deal of pain on all sides. Despite all this, Abbasi carefully nurtured the Begum's choice of Ghazal compositions, and she died uttering his name.
Search for love
The Begum's search for love made her mould herself in the "wily lifestyle of a tragic courtesan." The pathos in her voice, the dazzling diamond nose-ring and the limpid notes she used helped carry the poetry she sang to a plane unmatched to this day. She would sing the `dadra' composition `abke sawan ghar aaja' (a longing for the season of love to return) and break into tears. Her restlessness and her mercurial moods were the very stuff that gave her music its distinctive quality. Feeling rather than fidelity to form characterised her music.
Her love for an individual could be smothering, suffocating and dominating. Her love kept people captive and often determined their lives. Shanti Hiranand describes her devoted, yet difficult, relationship with her guru and `ammi' vividly, and calls her `my meditation, my salvation'. Yet, this bond affected all her other relationships, including those with her husband and children.
Apart from everything else, the Begum was gullible, fickle and prone to flattery. She was fond of the new and the exotic, and this fondness for novelty stretched from objects to people. She was not above creating competition and jealousy among her students and rejoicing from the rivalries among them for gaining her attention.
If she could be gullible, she could also be generous to a fault. People exploited her shamelessly and she let them do so. When asked by the author as to why she allowed people to take her for a ride, the Begum's response was both startling and characteristic: "I have been trained to please. I have been trained never to annoy. I have been trained not to upset my kadardaans."
No bystander
She tried hard pleasing people but in the end her background as a professional singer would always come in the way. She was aware of it and knew that however hard she tried she would never `belong' in the true sense of the term. There is a moving anecdote where the Begum collected all of her husband's shoes and started cleaning them. When Abbasi remonstrated, she said: "Arre mian, tumne mujhe is chabootare par laake bitha diya, varna hum kahan hote?" (My dear, you have given me this place in high society, otherwise where would I have been?)
In the end, Begum Akhtar attained a sense of purity in music and in life by transcending her reckless participation in life. She was no bystander or a claimant to phoney innocence. The opposite of good for her was not evil but boredom.
She fought the ordinary and the predictable all her life and searched for a love that always seemed to slip out of her grip. Three of her most memorable renditions — `deewana banana hai to deewana bana de' (If madness be the consequence of love), `ae mohabbat tere anjaam pe rona aaya' (I cried at the thought of the culmination of love), and `mere hum nafaz' (My beloved, don't betray me after being my friend) — are about the madness and pain of love, and its absence.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Book Review
