Remembering Kumar Gandharva

Kumar Gandharva — to some the enfant terrible of Hindustani music, to others the most orthodox and authentic singer of them all — would have been a hundred years old had he been alive today. As the spate of recent events celebrating his memory will testify, there is so much flying around in the swirl: the nostalgia of old admirers who have heard him live, the ardent enthusiasm of new listeners who haven’t, and the casual interest of bystanders who worship others in the Hindustani pantheon. Then there are those belonging to the inner circle: family, disciples, and their disciples, pulled irresistibly into the fray, sometimes sincere, sometimes passionate, sometimes forced and distant, sometimes intimate and critical; all grappling with ways to make public their personal connections with Kumar Gandharva. One can almost picture the man at the eye of this storm: Kumar Gandharva, seated between his tanpuras, watching the world spin around his memory with the same piercing gaze he held his audiences with — proud, intense and critical.

. Scholarship tradition

. My father Satyasheel Deshpande and I belong in this world too. He studied with Kumar Gandharva for many years and continues to hand what he has received down to me and his other students. But he also hands down another tradition, that of seeking critical intimacy through passionate scholarship, a tradition passed down to him as much by his musicologist-father Vamanrao Deshpande as much as by Kumar Gandharva and Prof B R Deodhar, Kumar Gandharva’s teacher. There are old, intricate connections between these protagonists. Vamanrao and Deodhar were friends, mutual admirers, even partners in crime. Both erudite scholars of music, they wrote the prefaces to each others’ books on music, and each was a pillar of support to the other’s scholarly pursuits. In the 1930s and ’40s, the child Kumar would often carry messages between them: once, as he waited for Vamanrao to write a response to Deodhar’s missive, Vamanrao noticed that Kumar’s manner of standing was just like that of his teacher’s and said so. He would often recall how this comment caused the child to break into tears and to swear to himself that he would never stand or behave like anyone else henceforth, and that he wouldn’t sing like anyone else either.

. A couple of decades later, a similar mimesis, a similar enthrallment of student by mentor, would repeat itself somewhat. Satyasheel was around 10 years old then, in the early ’60s, and Kumar Gandharva was a frequent guest at our Walkeshwar Road home in Mumbai. He had already picked up a number of Kumar Gandharva’s compositions and would sing them for visitors on Vamanrao’s request. Ramubhaiyya Date, king of connoisseurs, was one such visitor. On hearing the young Satyasheel sing, he said to Kumar Gandharva, in his typical style, reminiscent of impassioned Urdu shayari, “Kumar, this kid doesn’t only sing like you, he even starts looking like you when he sings!”.

. Vibrant home

. But Kumar Gandharva was not the only great Vamanrao was close to. Indeed, Vamanrao’s circle of musician-friends was vast, and contained within it many icons–Bhimsen Joshi, Hirabai Badodekar, Mallikarjun Mansoor, Kishori Amonkar and the latter’s mother Mogubai Kurdikar who Vamanrao was learning from at the time. Vamanrao was writing his acclaimed book on the Gharanas of Hindustani music at the time. Translated into English later as Indian Musical Traditions, the book was a pioneering attempt to theorise the aesthetics of the various gharanas of khayal singing, and the endeavour involved inventing language to discuss music with the scholarly nuance and rigour that was missing in the writing of the time. Vamanrao would invite musicians to his home and read chapter-drafts out to them, and there would be debate and argumentation, usually expressed through song. The young Satyasheel was witness to all this and the seeds of musicianship and scholarship were both sown in his mind.

. But from among this constellation of stars, Satyasheel chose to go to Kumar Gandharva to study this music in earnest. The fact that this was a conscious choice, made at the age of 21 from among many possible options, marks it significant. As he would go on to write many years later, while he was an admirer of most musicians his father was friends with, he was able to grasp the method behind their spontaneity in performance. While he would need years of practice to be able to sing like them, he was able to grasp what it was that they were doing. Not so with Kumar Gandharva. He remained a mystery: there seemed to be no clear, simplistic logic to his improvisation, no easy way to map the trajectory of his creative leaps while in performance. It was to unravel this mystery, to solve this problem, that he chose to go to Kumar Gandharva.

. Subtle expression

. In the time Satyasheel spent with Kumar Gandharva in Dewas, he learnt to see music making as a way of life rather than a profession. Bandishes were organisms that took on a life of their own in the hands of a singer empathetic to them, and would return the favour by taking on the colours of his temperament. Kumar Gandharva opened up for his disciples a world of music that was not limited to his personal idiom–he taught them to listen to each musician through the lens of the culture she belonged to, and to draw at leisure from each. He gave them the clarity and precision of the raga-grammar he had inherited from his own teacher, and showed them how vast and subtle the world of artistic expression with which to flesh out the skeletons of grammar is. But he never imparted to them a formula for performance. Wielding this material to wrench applause out of the faceless mob in a cold auditorium was never on the curriculum.

. What Satyasheel came back to Mumbai with after three intense years in Dewas was, instead, a renewed urge to broaden his horizons even further, a thirst for more repertoire, and a desire to forge his own music through more exposure, and more scholarship. This led to the creation of Samvaad Foundation, the institution Satyasheel founded, under the aegis of which he spent more than a decade documenting the music of many less-known but important custodians of raga-vidya, including an ageing Deodhar himself.

. It is this comportment that Satyasheel passes on to me and to his other disciples, and forces us to reflect as we perform, and to perform as we reflect.

. Pt Satyasheel Deshpande the Hindustani musician and scholar demystifies the music and memory of guru Kumar Gandharva through song, speech and the playing of rare recordings at BIC next week. Srijan Deshpande who joins him on stage provides a glimpse into how the session will unfold.

. (The author is a scholar and performer of Hindustani khayal music and is a disciple of Pt Satyasheel Deshpande)

Remembering Kumar Gandharva

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