On March 9, 1951 in a hospital in Bombay, a son was born to Bavi Begum. After two days, when she brought the baby home to their one-room tenement, she asked her husband to recite the call to prayer (azaan) in his firstborn son’s ear.
He proceeded to recite the bol — mnemonic syllables from a tabla qaida (a complex expansion of a taala or rhythmic cycle). Bavi Begum upbraided her husband Allah Rakha Qureishi (1919-2000), and he responded that the tabla was his lifeblood and his prayer. He was a devout Muslim who, not unlike many co-religionists, did not see a separation between deen (faith) and duniya (the world).
They named the baby Zakir Hussain, who breathed his last on distant shores in San Francisco on December 15, 2024. Zakir’s obituaries full of accolades flooded the global news and social media. Zakir’s story compels age-old questions about the expression of genius and destiny, as well as nature and nurture.
Ustad Zakir Hussain, who passed away on Dec 15 in San Francisco, was a tabla virtuoso and humanist who changed the face of Indian music
To understand what made Zakir who he was it is essential to understand Ustad Allah Rakha, his father. The legendary tabla maestro was born in Jammu State to a Muslim Dogra soldier. Drawn more to the tabla than to militarism or farming, the adolescent Allah Rakha ran away to Lahore and trained as a tabla player with Ustad Kader Baksh of the Punjab gharana (a stylistic school).
The Punjab tabla gharana has at least four distinct aspects. The first is its closeness to dhrupad and consequent gymnast-like elasticity and use of rhythmic space. The second is the sonorous use of the bayaan (the round drum played with the left hand — for a right-handed person). The third is the Punjab gharana’s use of tihai (repeating a rhythmic phrase three times) before landing on the ‘sam’ — the first beat of the rhythmic cycle. And finally, its openness to a layering and fusing of regional and more popular practices with those bound by more formal rules.
Unarguably, the Punjab gharana shaped the foundations of Allah Rakha’s and Zakir Hussain’s oeuvres.
Well into the late 1950s, tabla players were viewed as accompanists who provided the percussive/rhythmic (taala) support to the vocalist’s or instrumentalist’s exposition of the melodic (raaga) content of North Indian and Pakistani music. Allah Rakha, who understood that a good accompanist must immerse himself in the ‘ocean of raagas’, had taalim (the term used for training in North Indian music) in khayal from Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan of the Patiala gharana (also Farida Khanam’s ustad).
Allah Rakha mastered the first three aspects of the Punjab gharana with such vivacity and virtuosity that, by the 1960s, he could command the stage playing a tabla solo. In large measure, he was aided by his long partnership with Pandit Ravi Shankar (1920-2012), whose wizardry with rhythm stemmed from his training by Ustad Allaudin Khan (1862-1972) in the dhrupad tradition.
Zakir, who could match and outsmart a musician from any tradition, said that there were times when he was flummoxed or even missed a turn (which kept him up at night) when playing with Ravi Shankar or Ali Akbar (1922-2009), Allaudin Khan’s son.
In a conversation for this piece, sarod maestro Alam Khan, Ali Akbar’s son, now khalifa of Allaudin Khan’s Maihar gharana, talked about what excited him most about Zakir Hussain’s collaboration with his father.
“As an accompanist, Zakir bhai enhanced and electrified something in Baba, giving an energetic charge to his playing,” he said to me. “Together they took unpredictable and adventurous exploratory risks, like jumping off a cliff, where the sam would, seemingly, disappear — such was Baba’s internal sense of rhythm, and Zakir bhai’s genius made it possible for him to do this.”
Zakir learnt from his father, Abba Ji (to his children and disciples), the importance of understanding the moods and practices of the musicians he accompanied, and to not try to take command of the stage.
As a toddler, Zakir’s father would recite the bols of the complex qaida to him but, as he grew older, Allah Rakha turned away. Zakir felt abandoned by a father who was at work for film studios, the radio, playing concerts and teaching his students, with no time for his son.
Zakir’s mother, with dreams of her son becoming a doctor or an engineer, had him enrolled at the English-medium St Michael’s High School in Mahim (Bombay). Unbeknownst to her, still at nursery, Zakir had determined another path. He heard with concentration his father practice — and he practiced, and he practiced — on tables and utensils and different surfaces. Before long, he started performing at school concerts.
Zakir was seven when his father heard him at a school performance. That evening, Allah Rakha explained to his son what it means to be a musician. Music was an unforgiving task master, he told him: it required not merely good intentions but long hours of riyaaz (practice) and, “total immersion until there was no difference between your body, soul and the tabla.”
Tabla became Zakir’s body and soul. It was, however, his mother’s insistence that he go to an English-medium school and on to St Xavier’s College to do his BA, which made it easier for Zakir to communicate across multi-lingual India and the world.
Zakir was 19 and playing a concert in Germany when Abba Ji fell ill on tour with Pandit Ravi Shankar in the US. Pandit ji telephoned Zakir and asked him to fly across and join him in his father’s stead. After a memorable tour, Zakir reckoned he had to head back to India. But the stars had something else in store.
Ravi ji told him that the University of Washington, Seattle, wanted him to join them as an assistant professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology. Zakir was nervous and unsure — but accepted the challenge.
The move to Seattle was a seismic shift. Like others in Indian music circles, Zakir thought Indian music, with its 5,000 years-old tradition, had everything to teach the world. Exposed to other equally complex and old classical and popular practices — from places as far flung as China, Japan, Indonesia, and Africa — Zakir awakened to world music and gained a PhD. An irresistible offer from Ali Akbar Khan sahib to teach at his College of Music, took him to San Rafael, California.
This was a time when flower power, popular music and jazz were blazing the trail of anti-(Vietnam)war movements for peace, political dissent and love. It was in California that Zakir met the love of his life, Antonia Minnecola, an Italian training in kathak, the classical Indian dance form with rhythmic intricacies in footwork and bhava (communication of emotion through bodily and facial expressions) as the touchstones of virtuosity.
Zakir realised that fusion of cultural practices and musical traditions was as old as the idea of India and not restricted to his country. In the late 1960s, the concept of ‘World Music’ was being born — a world where it may well be impossible to challenge Ustad Zakir Hussain’s kingship.
John Mclaughlin, the jazz guitarist with whom Zakir formed the group Shakti in 1973, bade farewell to Zakir in these words: “The king, in whose hands rhythm became magic, has left us… RIP my dearest Zakir.”
Zakir Husain is survived by his wife, daughters Anisa Qureshi and Isabella Qureshi, brothers Fazal and Taufiq Qureshi; and sister Khurshid Aulia.
The writer is a historian, a screenwriter, a translater and musicologist
Published in Dawn, ICON, December 29th, 2024
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