DAWN

My teacher, Ustad Wilayat Ali Khan, was a great admirer of Ustad Amir Khan who, though belonged to Indore and had a style of his own, sang the Kirana Gaiki. He always encouraged me to listen to Amir Khan and during my shagirdi, I devoted a lot of time listening to the legendary singer. At the same time, Ustadji had fond words for Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, the founder of the Kirana Gharana, praising this North Indian School of Kheyal Gaiki for its sweetness of tone and beautiful bandishes (compositions.)

Those who have heard both the above singers would tell that their voices were diametrically opposite to each other’s – Amir Khan’s kharaj (deep throated) to Abdul Karim Khan’s bareek (thin). Frankly, I was only partially impressed by Ustad Abdul Karim Khan – the great teacher who trained such stalwarts of classical music as Hirabai Baroadkar, Roshan Ara Begum and Sawai Gandharva.

Pandit Swai Gandharva (b.1886) was Bhimsen Joshi’s guru. In other words, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan was the guru of the guru of Bhimsen Joshi!

In 1980 at an open air concert at Dhobi Talo, Mumbai, as a slight drizzle came down, it was my good fortune to hear Bhimsen Joshi sing Mian Ki Malhar. My daughter and I sat glued to our chairs mesmerised by his singing.

Bhimsen was born on February 4, 1922. His father, Gururaj Joshi who hailed from Karnatka was a noted educationist; he was the author of a Kannada-English dictionary. Bhimsen’s mother was a good Bhajan singer. The boy who lived his early years in an environment of learning and scholarship, inherited his love for music from his mother.

But the true musical fire was lit in his heart when he heard the famous thumri sung by Ustad Abdul Karim Khan: Pia bin naheen aawat chaen composed in Raag Jhinjhoti. It became the turning point in the youngster’s life and his quest for learning the art took him to a number of cities in India famous for patronage and education of classical music: Bijapur, Pune, Mumbai, Gwalior, Delhi, Kolkata, Jalandhar

Leaving his home against the will of his parents, he wandered all over India in search of a guru and finally found one in a village close to home! He was Pandit Swai Gandharva, the most favourite and the most successful disciple of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan. The Pandit took the lad under his wings and started to unravel the mysteries of classical music to him.

Though Bhimsen’s first broadcast from All India Radio, Mumbai, took place in 1943 when he was 21, it was not before 1946 when on the occasion of his guru’s 60th birthday in Pune that he shot to fame, following an excellent performance. Expertly commenting on the highs and lows of his long singing career, famous Indian musicologist and critic Mohan Nankarni writes: “His kheyal exposition in slow tempo always had an excellent start. The melodic unfolding that followed often held out the promise of a perfectly integrated form – broad in conception with a judicious amalgam of alap and gamak, boltaan and taan.

“But the serene mood, created earlier, would get steadily vitiated, when the artiste would startle his listeners with a profusion of vigorous, cascading taans – at times even before the formal enunciation of antara… it was, as though, he was under compulsion to prove he had a voice that could be molded to do anything he wished… the new elements were totally incompatible with the character of the Kirana style.”

However, after this criticism, Nandkarni goes on to concede: “In late 1979 Bhimsen decided to abstain from drinking and tidy up his day-to-day routine in the interest of his health and professional career… the magnificent dimensions of his singing, strands from the styles of the great masters, those he tried to learn from in the course of his relentless ramblings were now found woven into his gaeiki and his music came to embody a rare fusion of intelligence and passion… powerful and dramatic, ornamental and virile, live and sprightly – all at the same time.”

The celebrated critic also notes: “In his drut (fast) singing Bhimsen reveals an uncanny amalgam of gaikis as diverse as those of Gowalior, Atrauli-Jaipur, Indore and Patiala Gharanas. For instance, amid the straight taan of the Patiala style, he will startle his listeners with a lightning array of intricate, odd-shaped patterns characteristic of the Atrauli-Jaipur gaiki. Then, again, a sarangi-like seemingly slippery flourish in the Kirana fashion… often grafted on to the laya-oriented Gowalior gaiki. Only a maestro of Bhimsen’s genius can achieve such a unique fusion…”

I chose to quote the above from Mohan Nandkarni because it would have been the height of dishonesty to convert such nice words into my own banal ones! Readers with serious interest in the subject are likely to get a clear idea of the art of Bhimsen Joshi.

Bhimsen was the only Indian vocalist to have won the Platinum Disc from His Master’s Voice and his first long play disc released in 1964 spread his name around the world.

An interesting fact about Bhimsen Joshi is that, like our famous sitar maestro, Ustad Rais Khan, he too was a man of many parts: “He was a yoga enthusiast, a stage actor, a swimmer, a football enthusiast, a connoisseur of art and a self-trained automobile engineer.” In the death of this icon, at least classical music has lost one of its pillars.