I had been slowly moving towards the middle of Netaji Indoor Stadium all night long. It was an overnight charity concert and the stage faced one long side of the oblong floor in Kolkata. A bunch of us college-going friends had volunteered as ushers to listen to the who’s who of Hindustani and Carnatic music. The lineup included Bhimsen Joshi, Balamurali Krishna, Jasraj, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Amjad Ali Khan, Ajoy Chakraborty and Sunanda Patnaik. But I was waiting for one artist, Rashid Khan, and wanted to be within his earshot when he came on.
Here was a man just a few years older than us, who had mesmerised his way into the greying pantheon of classical music. We had been hearing his first two albums over and over again — Behag, Lalit and Desh for Sagarika, and Hamsadhwani, Yaman and Puriya Dhanashree for Music Today. We were transfixed. But not everyone agreed yet that he had earned his plumes to be called an ustad.
When Rashid came on, I was facing the stage. He first sang Saraswati, which he had released a few weeks earlier. As soon as the claps died, I blurted out, “Hamsadhwani, please.” As if on perfect cue, he started on Laagi lagan prati sakhi sang. An enraptured hush descended on the stadium.
As a young boy, Rashid Khan didn’t dream of becoming a singer. His mother had passed away when he was four and he was more interested in ghazals. His maternal uncle, Ghulam Mustafa Khan, took him to Mumbai, enrolled him in an English-medium school, and trained him a bit. But he didn’t quite fit in and was sent to train with his ‘Babu Abba’, Ustad Nissar Hussain Khan, in Badayun.
The great ustad, who is credited with having perfected the tarana, went about training by old-school methods — stressing just a few notes for more than a year. The restless child got bored and used to stay away from gurukul for months. Nissar Hussain trained him just enough to pass the test at Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata, a residential training centre. This is where, under the guidance of A T Kanan, Malavika Kanan, Vijay Kichlu, Ajoy Chakraborty and Dipali Nag, Rashid found his voice.
What made him give up his reluctance to get into classical music? Rashid told me it was a fear his uncles that had struck in him. They had pointed to some of his cousins in Badayun who were training to become qawwals, and said it’s the fate that awaited him. He didn’t like it and made up his mind to go through the slow grind of becoming an ustad.
We were in his south Kolkata home — a sprawling compound named ‘Shree’ — almost a decade and a half ago. His son Armaan, then of the age his father was in Mumbai, was fiddling with his gaming console across a glass wall. Rashid’s wife Joyeeta was chiding him to start with his riyaaz. “Like father, like son?” I asked. Rashid said, “He’ll come around when it’s time.” Not only did Armaan come around, but blessed with his father’s timbre, he is on his way to becoming an ustad in his own right.
I asked whether he had had any brush with Carnatic, given that he sang raags such as Hamsadhwani, which Amir Khan had first popularised in the Hindustani repertoire. He said with a chuckle, “Their notes sway a lot.” Yet, a few years after this conversation, he collaborated with T M Krishna in Pune, kampaka gamaka notwithstanding.
His openness to other forms is one of the things that made Rashid Khan accessible to a wider audience. It led to filmy hits, too. But as @stereotypewriter noted on X.com, “Introducing Ustad Rashid Khan as the ‘oge Jab Tum singer is akin to introducing Sachin Tendulkar as the guy who appeared in RO commercials.”
The conviction in his voice drew a line between gamak and gimmickry. His choice of bandishes — Dekh dekh man lalchaye for Sohini, or Kanha re Nande nandan for Kedar — set a different mood than the same raag rendered by most others. His gharana Rampur-Sahaswan’s style of launching into a khayal without much alaap made the casual listener sit up before being lulled by a slow build-up.
He was steeped in traditions, yet had an aura of modernity. Once the future of Hindustani classical, the ustad is today a part of its illustrious past.