Kishori
Amonkar Soared Despite Media Neglect Of Classical Music
Saeed Naqvi
As soon as I read that Kishori Amonkar
was no more, I called up Raghu Rai, the pioneering photographer. Raghu had,
with me in tow, done a remarkable photo feature on Kishori. Here was an
occasion to republish the photographs of our greatest classical singer.
Connoisseurs would place Ustad Amir Khan on the same pedestal, but I have my
own very subjective preferences.
Raghu’s response was something of a
shock: “Where is there any space for the arts in the Indian media?”
I had momentarily deluded myself that a
singer of such brilliance, would, in her passing away, generate fierce
competition between media houses to show the best of Kishori. I had forgotten
that, by and large, there is no hospitality accorded to culture in either print
or our burgeoning TV channels. And this is not a new phenomenon.
True, by the time of Kishori Amonkar’s
death, classical music had reclaimed sufficient audiences to warrant front page
coverage and reasonable obituary notices in the past 25 years. Amir Khan,
Bhimsen Joshi, Kumar Gandharva, Hirabai Barodekar, Mallikarjun Mansur, Ali
Akbar Khan, Vilayat Khan, Ravi Shankar, Nikhil Banerjee did not go into the
sunset unnoticed. The last three or four names were towering banyan trees in
whose shadow comparable talents – Abdul Halim
Jaffer Khan, for instance – were dwarfed.
The Hindu’s Friday Review did have Kishori on the cover.
What has never existed is a tradition of
knowledgeable music critics. During a seminar organized by the late Dr.
Narayana Menon, then Director General of All India Radio, Yehudi Menuhin, great
violinist, pointed to musicologist Nicholas Nabokov (brother of Vladimir
Nabokov, of Lolita fame) seated opposite him.
“I perform better when Nicholas is in
the audience.”
That level of art criticism the Indian
media has never aspired for. Professional dilettantes, not critics, has been
the order.
So, Raghu’s plaint stands. In fact when
we entered The Statesman on Barakhamba Road, in 1965 for our first journalistic
employment, the newspaper boasted of no regular critics for cinema, theatre,
music, dance, painting. And The Statesman was numero uno of Indian newspapers
those days.
Much before feminism became a vogue,
Amita Malik (Amy as we called her) burst upon the scene with her breezy,
aggressively Brahmo partisanship, always tipping the scale for the Bengali
particularly if there was a Punjabi in the bargain. This probably derived from
Amy’s unhappy marriage with a sophisticated broadcaster from Government College,
Lahore. She was India’s first cinema, radio and (when TV arrived) television
critic. She was, like all critics, not on the paper’s staff. Amy, made a
pittance, lobbying mostly with Lakshman, the News Editor’s secretary, to
inflate the column inches on the basis of which her cheque of a few hundred
rupees was delivered to her every month.
The cultural scene in the media was
dominated by a Hungarian of great elegance, Charles Fabri. Maurice Chevalier
could have learnt a thing or two from Dr. Fabri’s flirtatious style with some
of India’s greatest dancers. Once he turned up in the reporter’s room with a
brochure on Indian dance, placed his felt hat on a Remington typewriter and,
smacking his lips, turned the pages – “Damyanti
Joshi, Yamini, Indirani,……” closing the brochure, he looked at us triumphantly.
“I have kist them all.”
Fabri was a pioneer in building up the
capital’s art and theatre scenes as well. He died in virtual penury.
Kishori had begun to make waves but it
was her mother, Mogubai Kurdikar, who made a mark on Pandit Shingloo, The
Statesman’s Hindustani music critic. He was a tall man of aristocratic bearing,
a Java Dawson cigar from Trichy, between his teeth was as much part of him as
his long sherwani and matching cap which did not cover the silver-white
ringlets upto the nape of his neck. He walked into concerts armed with a pad,
pencil, rubber and a torch. No sooner had the “alaap” begun, than Shingloo’s
torch was focused on the pad balanced on his knees. His pencil would race along
until there was something resembling a false note. Instantly, the rubber was
brought into play, making room for more critical adjectives to be inserted.
Shingloo was the darling of the news
desk because at 10 pm sharp, at whatever stage the concert may have been,
Shingloo’s copy, precisely nine inches in a single column, was delivered to a
beaming chief sub, because it was well in time for the city edition.
For Carnatic music and dance, Subbudu
was matchless. During the winter “Season” at the music academy, Mylapore,
Chennai, a dancer of means would buy Subbudu’s up and down second class train
ticket and look after his board and lodging for the duration of what in my
experience is one of the world’s greatest festivals of dance and music.
Subbudu’s financier would, ofcourse, receive a puff in direct proportion to
favours done. But all other performances came in for critical scrutiny by a
razor sharp mind.
It did not matter that Subbudu was a
Lower Division Clerk in North Block. He was a quintessential Brahmin, steeped
in music – that is what mattered.
Negligible or zero priority accorded to
the music critic by the media magnates impacted deeply on Kishori Amonkar’s
emotional make up. Her tantrums became notorious. In fact her pain was deeper.
She could not forget the shabby treatment meted out by organizers in days when women
singers like Kesarbai Kerkar, Hirabai Barodekar and, above all, her own mother,
Mogubai, were shuffling themselves out of their “Bai” identity.
A genius like Kishori would have none of
it, almost to the point of being prickly. At a performance in which Chief
Minister Farooq Abdullah was present, the clattering of saucers, pans and cups
would not stop even after Kishori had taken the stage. She furrowed her brow
and held the Chief Minister in a fierce gaze: “You are not on a prostitute’s
terrace; you are in the Durbar of an artist.”
I would put it down as one of the more
difficult assignments, that interview with her. She would not open up until she
had reduced us to shaky amateurs. Eventually she psyched us down to where she
wanted us to be – as her “rasias” or devotees.
I do not know whether she kept up her
mother’s tradition to visit “gharana” guru Alladiya Khan’s grave for floral
offerings on March 14, his death anniversary.
As for her singing, there will not be
another. Momin’s couplet encapsulates it:
“Us ghairat e Naheed ki
har taan hai Deepak
Shola sa lapak jaaye hai,
awaaz to dekho”
(Each taan or ascending passage of that
singing bird is like the Deepak raga; her notes touch the upper octaves like a
leaping flame)
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