A musical flow like the Ganga
DEEPA GANESH
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The legendary shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan is no more.But he has left behind abundant memories and lives on in them
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Photo: Bhagya Prakash K.
ACT OF FAITH Ustad Bismillah Khan was a devout Muslim. But at no point were music and religion two separate entities for him
Death is too final. What does one say about the legendary shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan who has journeyed into a world that transcends our understanding of living? And that too by way of summing up? The mind is at once frighteningly vacuous and overpoweringly crowded. Pity it is not divided into neat, chronological compartments that can be individually summoned just when you want it, like you would at the press of a key on a computer.
Does one talk about the ever-so-many Ramanavami concerts of Bismillah Khan when he not just filled our eyes with his charming comportment, but also filled our beings with a music that was so stirring? Should one go back to the heady music of the landmark Kannada film Sanadi Appanna, when the Ustad spent over a month in Bangalore getting his flourishes right? Or does one pick from recent memory when he visited the city twice as a grouchy, frail, two-toothed, 89-year-old savant of the shehnai?
Even as I assiduously carried on with my efforts at regimentation, it was one image that took the vanguard position: Bismillah Khan swimming in the Ganga, sitting on her banks every single day by the side of Balaji Temple and practicing his Shehnai. The two inseparable components of his life stuck in the mind — the Ganges and his Shehnai. But for brief moments of estrangement in a life that spanned nine decades, the Ustad adamantly refused to move out of Varanasi. Name, fame, riches were for him but the scum of the earth.
G.N. Joshi of the recording house H.M.V. in his book Down Melody Lane records an incident that speaks of the Ustad's irreverence for all material acquisitions. Way back, Khan sahib and his group were on a Europe tour, and as was the case always, this time too, he mesmerised his audience. So much so that they wanted the Ustad for keeps. They offered him a plush car, a bungalow, servants, money, and even citizenship. At the end of it all, the Ustad had just one question to ask, which threw the organisers into a philosophical silence: "Ganga idhar bahti hai kya?"
The Ustad's life was marked by a certain conviction; a faith that was music. And so, when others saw contradiction between his religion and music, he declared music was namaaz. In fact, an orthodox Muslim Shia maulana from Iraq made scathing attacks on him and dubbed his music blasphemy (haraam), a trap of the devil. As a reply, undauntedly, Khan sahib sang "Allahee, Allahee" to him in rag Bhairav. Of course, needless to say the maulana was left speechless.
When India gained independence, it was Bismillah Khan's outstanding rendition of Raga Kafi from the Red Fort that greeted the nation. Yet again, when India became a republic it was the Ustad playing. It was his daily ritual to play at the Sankat Mochan and Mangala Gowri temple. He walked playing his shehnai to the Fatmeen qabristan every year for Muharram, to offer his tribute to the Karbala martyrs. All these episodes from his life, from different geographic locations, occupying distinct public spaces, to us may seem one cohesive effort at secularism of which the Ustad became the biggest symbol in post-independent India. But for him, each of these was a very private expression of his personal faith. Something that was intuitive and never deliberate. It went on to become great, simply because of the pluralistic, cultural context in which the Ustad lived. Which again, largely remained out of bounds for the Ustad. Can't help remembering how the Ustad had snapped in an interview. "All that I know is music. If we are here to talk nonsense, I'm not interested." Don't we know of the ambivalence that exists between an artiste and his relationship to a society?
On that rainy evening in Bangalore, as I stood there in anticipation of the Ustad who wouldn't tire of adding his bit to the beautiful downpour with the so-many kajris and chaitis, which carried in them the fragrance of the Benarasi soil, his son Nazir Hussain Khan heaped me with advices. "Talk to him without mentioning the word `interview'," he had warned. I stood there determined to ask him about Varanasi; the temples; how he slept with the shehnai next to him; all that I felt were topics after his own heart. "You listened to me, didn't you? I have nothing more to say what my shehnai didn't... " he said, quietening me.
Now, as I try hard to put these fragmented memories together, it seems such an impossible task to separate Bismillah Khan's world from his worldview. For, they never were disparate. This devout Muslim's act of rebellion, as the world saw it, stemmed from his deep faith. For him, music was a spiritual act. In his physical death, as we follow him through his immortal music and its expressions, struggling to make him local, pan-Indian, global by turns... you realise that Bismillah Khan was rooted in an intangible way in his sur, in his implicit faith.
Quite contrary to the usual practise of giving up things that you love most, the thousands of pilgrims who visit Kashi will have something to bring back: from every drop of his beloved Ganga, from the air that wafts from the temples he inhabited, from the streets he roamed on his favourite cycle rickshaw and the strains of shehnai that has filled every corner of the temple town he loved so dearly.
Is this what T.S. Eliot meant when he spoke of `life in death'?
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Local strains
Vijaya Reddy, director of the film, who lives in Chennai, recalls the heady days of Sanadi Appanna. He heaps praises on Khansaheb. "Only when you see him, you understand what dedication to art is," he exclaims.
Dissatisfied with the shehnai player they had initially chosen, the team decided to ask Ustad Bismillah Khan. Producer Vikram Srinivas went all the way to Varanasi and stayed put at the maestro's house, determined to wear down his resistance. The initially hesitant maestro was impressed by the story. In fact, when he heard that Dr. Rajkumar was playing the lead, he was more than willing.
The maestro came to Bangalore with his 10-member troupe and camped for one whole month. "The Ustad was highly disciplined. He sternly told us that we shouldn't cut short his renditions. `You must allow me to play the ragas completely, and then you can use it the way you want'," he had warned us.
Like a devout student, the late thespian Rajkumar cancelled his shooting for a month, and carefully followed the Ustad's shehnai playing techniques.
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