The little boy passed a short test, and Nulo Gopal accepted Alauddin Khan as his pupil. A 12-year rigorous practice session (sur sadhana), and then he’d be taught “actual songs”. Disincentive enough? Well, the eight-year-old was only “overjoyed”.
Soon his days started at 2 am to the drone of the tanpura and the beats of the tabla. The day’s only meal was lunch — the free food offered to the beggars. Supper was a few sips of salty water from the Ganga. “Guruji was pleased with my attitude,” notes Khan in a handwritten manuscript that his great-granddaughter stumbled upon decades later and decided to piece together so as to come up with an exhilarating biography.
Sahana Gupta née Khan’s Boro Baba…Ustad Alauddin Khan teems with dramatic tales from the life of a titan classical musician who lived an incredible 110 years. The sepia pictures — all collected by Sahana’s late musician-father Dhyanesh Khan — add to the effect in this Roli Books publication. So colourful was the Hindustani exponent’s life (1862-1972) — artistic or otherwise — that browsing over its 127 pages is like viewing through a kaleidoscope.
For instance, Boro Baba — as the author, now a Bangalore-based techie, calls the ustad — would read namaz five times a day, but worship Sharada Ma too. That, after all, has something to do with his ancestry: five generations before him, Baba’s family was Hindu. A Raj-era hunt by the British only forced his great-great-grandfather, caught in piquancy, to convert to Islam. Baba, as a music-obsessed kid in his Shibpur village (of present-day Bangladesh), would frequent the nearby temple.
There, the bhajans of the sadhus wooed him; he kept skipping school lessons. The ‘trapped’ mindset provoked the child to run away — as far as Sealdah, where he was caught ticketless in a train. That Calcutta suburb was where he met one of his earliest masters, Nulo Gopal.
Into the third quarter of his initial 12-year regimen, Baba’s brother Aftabuddin Khan managed to track him down. The teacher gave the teenager a month’s break. His reunion with parents was succeeded by a big event: Baba married a girl, seven years younger to him.
On the nuptial night, something bizarre happened. When he saw Madan Manjari deep asleep, Baba took off all the jewellery in her body and left the house. Back in Calcutta, he found the guru’s house empty — Nulo Gopal suddenly died of high fever; the heirless man’s property had been attached.
“I felt my world had collapsed,” notes Baba, but he soon found another teacher, in the same city. That tutelage under Amrit Lal Dutta aka Habu Babu ushered in a stint of the leftie Baba learning various instruments. Not just the sitar, flute, shehnai, pakhawaj and dholak, but Western instruments too. A temperamental Goanese bandmaster taught him the violin; another teacher initiated him to clarinet and cornet. It was the realisation of a childhood dream as Baba’s father Sadhu Khan used to tell him “Western classical is the perfect model for a true music lover.”
Habu Babu also exposed Baba to theatre — his tutor in that field was the legendary Girish Chandra Ghosh celebrated for his social dramas and quasi-historical plays. Baba became noticed in the troupe, but “drunkards and people of dubious character” led him to exit the scene — and dedicate his life fully to music.
As luck would have it, he soon met his life-altering guru. At a gathering of Durga Puja celebrations of some zamindars in Mymensingh (of undivided India), Baba was awestruck by a sarod rendition in raga Darbari Todi. The player, Ahmed Ali Khan, became his sarod tutor for the next three years. At the ustad’s Calcutta home, Baba took care of all the chores. One day, he was found practising untaught lessons. It incensed the ustad. Ahmed Ali eventually cooled down, but some of the goodwill for his disciple was eroded.
That’s what proved the reason for Baba to meet his next guru. Ahmed Ali himself took him to Mian Tansen’s descendant Wazir Khan, the court musician of Rampur. Nawab Bahadur Hamid Ali Khan was so pleased with Baba’s art that he gifted him a princely Rs 5,000. Baba added more money to it by earning from a string of performances at Varanasi for three months. Only to return to Ahmed Ali and offer him all of it — cash running to almost Rs 10,000! A remorseful ustad was egged on to use the money to build a house, which he did finally — under Baba’s full-time supervision.
Back at Wazir Khan’s place, it then took “years” for Baba to be inducted as a regular disciple. That, after the ustad came to know of a tragic tale: Baba’s young wife had attempted suicide, dejected with a lonely life. Finally, Baba got Madan Manjari back — and a (biggish) house too — after Maharaja Brijnath Singh of Maihar (now in Madhya Pradesh) noticed Baba’s genius and simplicity at the Tansen festival, and appointed him his guru.
More glory followed as Baba developed the Maihar gharana and, courtesy dancer Uday Shankar, became a globetrotter (which facilitated a pilgrimage to Mecca too — in 1935). A novel band he set up — they played a blend of Indian folk and Western — is now into its fifth generation, under the state government’s patronage.
Baba’s reclusive surbahar-playing daughter Annapurna Devi notes in the foreword that he never spoke about his performances. Neither did she dare to enquire his favourite ragas. Baba, nonetheless, wasn’t the old-school type. He was innovative, and even composed a few new ragas. Once when he found his eldest son, late sarodist Ali Akbar Khan, being corrected by Annapurna, Baba did not get offended. Far from it, he began giving her vocal classes. And if Pt Ravi Shankar, another of Baba’s eminent pupils (who, incidentally, married Annapurna first), strums the sitar in a different style today, it shows Baba’s eminence as a guru — he groomed each one in tune with his/her flair.
sreevalsan@epmltd.com
