Tribute
Her legacy will live on
ANJANA RAJAN
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Remembering Gangubai Hangal, the gentle singer with the stentorian voice and doyenne of the Kirana gharana.
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Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash
Mesmerising voice: Gangubai Hangal.
Looking back at the legend that was Gangubai Hangal, we see many a stereotype busted, many a tradition preserved. The divide between the Carnatic and Hindustani music scenario is often talked about.
If Carnatic musicians are seen as being paid less and living less flamboyantly compared to their Hindustani counterparts, we find in Gangubai’s life a different kind of overshadowing, but one borne of love.
Once Gangubai, in an interview to Doordarshan, spoke of the unstinting support of her mother, Ambabai, during her learning years. Ambabai, a Carnatic singer, would not only notate what her young daughter, hardly more than 12, was learning and oversee her practise; she also gave up singing herself. “It is something she should not have done,”
Winning accolades
Gangubai said thoughtfully. “She told me I was too young to be able to keep the two genres separate. She must have thought, if she continued to sing Carnatic, I would be tempted to as well. So she stopped. And she said, this art is part of the family tradition, I can always teach it to you later.”
Gangubai’s guru dakshina to her mother, her first guru — who then took her to Kulaguru Krishnamachari (a disciple of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan) and then to the great Sawai Gandharva — was paid in ample measure, as the gentle singer with the stentorian voice won accolade after accolade across the country. Asked if her mother was disappointed that she did not take up Carnatic music, Gangubai reiterated that, on the contrary, she was happy. But this was a trait of musicians of the old guard, it would seem. Abdul Karim Khan himself encouraged the young Gangubai, “Eat well, sing well!”
Musicologist and writer Jyothirmaya Sharma, who knew her well, reiterates the bonhomie between Gangubai and her contemporaries. He recalls that once when she and Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, her gurubhai (as he was also a disciple of Sawai Gandharva) were both performing in Baroda, Joshi exclaimed, “That Dhaivat is not from any scale. It is from God.”
Her Dhaivat, says Sharma, “was quite legendary — the way she used to play with it.”
Zestful spirit
Gangubai, zestful and childlike, could also be firm. Sharma recounts that Bhimsen Joshi, having fallen on bad days brought on by alcohol abuse, was at one time barred from performing at the Sawai Gandharva festival of which she was the guiding light. But Joshi one year appeared at the festival declaring in Marathi, “I have come, and I will sing.” When he did sing, it was with such beauty that Gangubai exclaimed, “When this (expletive) sings, he really sings well!”
Her simplicity and honesty have been well documented. Susheela Ambike, a close friend of the entire family, remembers Gangubai telling her how she felt on stage to receive a prestigious honour. Hearing the citation being read, she felt she was a child lining up for a prize. On the whole, though, recalls Ambike, she was impatient with words. Ambike lectured with Gangubai at Spic Macay events. Introducing the students to the concepts of Hindustani music, Gangubai’s Kirana gharana..., she found Gangubai getting restive. “Why do you have to talk so much?” she would ask, confident that her singing would do.
However, she was not in the least arrogant. “She never behaved like a big artiste,” says Ambike. Sharma recounts a singular conversation when someone asked Gangubai how her concert had gone. “It went well,” she said, “Except that bedbugs in the mattress were a bit troublesome.” Here was a much awarded artiste who gave a concert of over two hours seated on a mattress with bedbugs. Which artiste, renowned or otherwise, would accept such conditions with such humility?
If Gangubai’s humility was disarming, her diminutive size took admirers by surprise when they set eyes on her for the first time. She recalled with a laugh that, before she became well known, she once travelled to Madras for a concert, where the organisers garlanded a stouter and taller woman who got off at the same station, convinced this must be the woman with those admirable vocal chords.
Over the past few months, irreversible time has been robbing us of so many of the artistes who helped India regain confidence in itself and step on to the world stage as a great nation with a hoary culture to back its modern ambitions. The younger generation of artistes, by common consensus, falls far short of the stalwarts. But even if they have not managed to groom disciples — Gangubai’s daughter and disciple Krishna tragically predeceased her mother — they have all left a legacy. Gangubai’s musical legacy, apart from her musicality, is her voice. That the buland awaaz, notes Sharma, has come to be accepted for female singers is part of Gangubai Hangal’s legacy too.
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