Desert Island #10: Nikhil Banerjee, Hem Behag

Between roughly the ages of 17 and 30, I went through a protracted Nikhil Banerjee “phase”. I collected every recording I could find. I followed up on every scrap of trivia. I began translating his biography into English (I abandoned it after a couple of chapters because the Bengali original is one of the most atrociously written books I have encountered). I took the train up to Berkeley every Friday to sit with Steven Baigel as he worked on his NB documentary. In short, I was a fan.

This phase slowly passed. Nikhil Banerjee appeared less and less in my playlists. I started listening to other sitarists with increasing intellectual appreciation, even if their music rarely held the same immediate appeal for me. And vocalists further extended their hegemony.

Yet NB remains a soft spot. This Hem Behag (Discogs entry) was the first recording of his that I owned. It lacks an alap and is incongruously tabla-heavy. Kishen Maharaj could be accused of going completely overboard with the constant improvisation. Yet in some strange way it works, partly because of the compositional genius of Allauddin Khan, and partly because the sitar treads a light path between restraint and whimsy.

Nikhil Banerjee passed away in 1986 at the age of 54 (cf DI #9). When I was given this recording, I was told that it was played on loudspeakers in Kolkata after his death. Many years later, I was in a taxi inching through peak Durga Puja traffic between Ekdalia and Singhi Park when I heard it again, floating above the rooftops, far above the milling crowds. Kolkata, that incurable romantic among cities, sometimes finds an impeccable sense of timing.

Desert Island #9: Sharafat Hussain Khan, Chhaya Behag

Sharafat Hussain Khan, who passed away in 1985 at the young age of 55, was a master of the long format khayal. In this 75-minute performance of Chhaya Behag, he starts with the vilambit composition “saba nisha jAgi” (who knows if he sang alap before this or not!). A lengthy phase of relatively unstructured raga elaboration is followed by increasing layakari, including some terrific addha bol-baant heavily stressed on the first syllable, creating a sequence of off-beat bha-gana/dactylic feet. More bolkari follows. After a solid hour of this, he finishes with the self-composed drut “kala nAhi pAv”. Shitty recording, shitty harmonium, but a singer very much in the mood. I have returned to this recording over and over again since my teens.

A few comments about the raga. Rajan Parrikar describes it as Behag plus the P-R swoop of Chhaya. The Ramashreya Jha recording he provides illustrates this view: it is literally pure Behag plus an awkwardly inserted (PR),G line. Radhika Mohan Maitra’s beautiful half hour piece has a Behag-heavy alap but with a different (and more attractive) insertion of Chhaya in the poorvang including considerable attention to the rishabh. The gat opens with a heavier dose of Chhaya focusing on the rishabh and gandhar, before bringing in the GMPNS of Behag in the uttarang and reverting to a wholesale reunion with Behag in the taans. The Agra Chhaya Behag appears to be a third Chhaya-heavy beast altogether, but with a deconstructed and reshuffled PNSMG-(RS) of Behag in the poorvang this time. Purnima Sen’s reference recording adds some subtleties not easily observed in SHK’s version, but it also suffers a bit more from multiple personality disorder. Perhaps SHK’s particular genius is in extracting the most coherent-sounding melodic progression out of this mess. Colour me confused. Perhaps some more knowledgeable listener can shed light on this menagerie?

Desert Island #8: Mallikarjun Mansur, Bhairav

Mallikarjun Mansur was known for being a “one raga, one bandish” singer. Even though he had a large bandish repertoire, demonstrated privately, he virtually always sang the same song in a given raga, for a given tempo, in public performances. Bhairav was an exception. He has publicly performed at least three vilambit compositions: “nAm e kareem”, “eri mAi”, and today’s feature: “dukh door kariye”. Equally unusually, he has even sung a half hour alap in this raga.

Mansur was a devoutly religious man, and this is a devoutly religious song, written as a prayer. The heart-rending ascent to the komal dhaivat must be one of the greatest opening lines ever composed in its emotional synchrony between tune and text. Even to the irreligious among us (I count myself), there is something profoundly moving about its appeal, a universal plea to be relieved of the sorrows of the world. The nishad is applied with the lightest of touches, to avoid distracting from the dramatic upward movement and to give the dhaivat a certain raw intensity. Mansur’s energy in layer upon layer of rising passages is backed by pitch-perfect linking of meends in this uttarang-heavy presentation, which slowly give way to characteristic aakaar taan work.

Sadly, these elevated thoughts come to an abrupt end with the decidedly fleshy sentiments of the drut. The listener is urged to kindly adjust. Kishori Amonkar (13:10) seems to be adjusting quite happily.

Desert Island #7: Yeshwantbua Joshi and Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Hameer

This is a double-bill and hence technically cheating but sucks to you. I spent some time trying to figure out which of these very different versions of Hameer I should list, and in the end gave up and decided to post both in one go. The two gents can have a nice time arguing about it wherever they’re whooping it up in the afterlife. Hameer simply doesn’t get any better than this, but even within “best” there’s a lot of scope for variety.

Yeshwantbua Joshi: chameli phooli champA with the sam on the pancham. A serious, sustained masterclass of the Gwalior style.

Bade Ghulam Ali Khan: e miyAn maindara yAr, a beautiful Punjabi composition sung as, well, only BGAK could.

Coffee? Toffee? Coffee! Toffee!
Whatevs. Melody hai chocolatey.

Desert Island #6: Rasoolan Bai, Bhairavi

Rasoolan Bai, 1902-1974, lived in interesting times. Born in the year of the first gramophone recordings of Indian music, she was also among the last of the great tawaifs, or courtesans, whose music comprises much of the early recording history of India at a time when few “respectable” ustads agreed to have their voices “sucked out by the machine” or sold over the counter. Her career spanned three decades before and two decades after Independence. Her status as (in my opinion) the supreme thumri singer of all time was complicated by issues of gender, religion and class. The stories are well known: that she self-deprecatingly considered herself a “true bai” (unlike the more sophisticated Kesarbai, who sang khayal), that she was shattered and never sang again after a mob burnt down her house during communal riots in Ahmedabad in 1969, and that she died in penury running a tea stall next to the Allahabad radio station she had once broadcasted from. Little survives of her beyond recordings of her glorious voice, deepened by age, and fragments of a complex life reduced to these brief vignettes. An interview by KCD Brihaspati consists mainly of the man talking non-stop and the woman politely giving brief answers.

This recording of Rasoolan Bai singing Bhairavi is noteworthy enough that an entire documentary film (Saba Diwan’s “The Other Song”) was made about it. Apparently, after a righteous Victorian morality rode the winds of social change and overran her musical community, Rasoolan (and everyone else) always sang the song with karejvA (heart) replacing jobanvA (breasts). A single recording of the original text, circa 1935, was rumoured to have survived and was eventually unearthed. In it, we hear a much younger and more edgy Rasoolan Bai, a very different character from the warm, deep, infinitely sad voice of her old age. (For an example of how her singing changed over the years, contrast these early and late versions of the same tappa.) Her voice and technique are at their peak: the taar saptak taan right at the end is a slightly obvious exhibition.

Many singers have sung many great Bhairavis: the tune is in our blood. Rasoolan herself has many other songs in the raga recorded at different times. I spent my teenage years listening to her much later recordings: sombre masterpieces such as this. Yet if I was stranded on a desert island, I think I would like to be reminded of Rasoolan Bai at the height of her abilities, a powerful, sensual and direct singer whose effortless artistry transcended the mere sociopolitical narrative.

Desert Island #5: Ali Akbar Khan, Chhayanat

If Mallikarjun Mansur had a somewhat mystical connection with Ramdasi Malhar, then Ali Akbar Khan certainly had one with Chhayanat. This made him a little bit of an iconoclast amongst instrumentalists, since for the better part of the last century this has been principally a vocalist’s raga, with the occasional exception generally proving the rule. To a good approximation, there is no other memorable instrumental Chhayanat, and it is not commonly heard in concerts. Most efforts either get caught up in the intricacies of the raga at the cost of the larger architecture, or mimic but not match vocal presentations. In the absence of a text, the melodic structure itself appears to stifle the imagination and narrow the scope to permutations of standard motifs.

Not so for Ali Akbar. In this recording, he is clearly having a good day. In his hands, the raga becomes a probing, pulsing thing, repeatedly pushing into the darkness through ever-changing upward movements before catching its breath in huge downward arcs such as the characteristic P-R. It largely eschews the romantic RGM[DP]M(G) phrase. It treats RGMnDP with caution and explores the space around the dhaivat. It stresses the gandhar. These choices constitute a deliberate rejection of Chhayanat’s overtly sentimental elements, in favour of a darker, more purposeful imagining of the raga. The result is a beast quite unlike any other Chhayanat on record.

Funnily enough, I don’t care much for the subsequent madhya gat in any of Ali Akbar Khan’s recordings in this raga. It is a staccato, hard-edged, presumably traditional composition that acts as a pressure-release valve, and I don’t mean that in a good way. I am happy omitting this gat from the desert island.

Desert Island #4: Mallikarjun Mansur, Ramdasi Malhar

The editor of an online list of great performances wrote: “In case anyone wonders why I do not appear: frankly, my tastes are very very narrow; if I had my way, I would simply put Mallikarjun Mansur beside each entry and be done with it!”. I too find this a strong temptation. That said, some Mansur specials rise above the rest. There is a brief section in the Films Division documentary on him where he is singing Ramdasi sitting on some random verandah presumably in Dharwad. There is little or no accompaniment, but his voice simply soars across the darkening sky. The repeated madhyam-pancham, the curving rise through the two nishads, the swoop down from the taar Sa via the komal Ni through more intricacies back down to the rishabh, lay the compositional groundwork. But it needs the scratchy voice of a man in the grip of some rain-soaked fever to imbue it with a sense of Wordsworthian epiphany. We do not know what Mansur saw when he sang Ramdasi Malhar, but no one has presented the wind-swept monsoon landscape with more compelling urgency and charged intimacy.

Desert Island #3: Bhimsen Joshi, Yaman Kalyan

There are approximately 5 trillion recordings of Bhimsen Joshi singing Yaman Kalyan. Having listened to each and every one of them (alternative fact, honest), I can confirm that this is the best of the lot by some distance. Contains (a) that voice, (b) inspired ragadari and (c) a screaming child. Unbeatable.

For the full effect, give it a good set of speakers that won’t crack on the bass.

Calcutta, 1960s. Harmonium: Eknath Thakurdas. Tabla: Gulam Rasool. Vocal support: Ramkrishna Patwardhan.

Desert Island #2: Faiyyaz Khan, Jaunpuri

It is very difficult to single out a Faiyyaz Khan recording for this collection, not least because most such tracks suffer from being “deathbed songs”, recorded in poor health and only hinting at what he must have been like at his peak. This 78rpm Jaunpuri is perhaps an unusual choice, yet for me it is the true representative of his singing: aochar, bandish, bol banana, gamak/halak taans, layakari, a liberal sprinkling of thumri ang postures, and the occasional colloquial interjection (“arrey!”). All of this is packed into 3 minutes with poise, grace, emotion, proportion and power. What remains to be said of Jaunpuri after this?

Desert Island #1: Kesarbai Kerkar, Chandni Kedar

I’m going to try listing a small set of HCM recordings that I’d like to have in the event of being stranded on an actual desert island or at a modern Amjad Ali Khan concert. Here goes (in no particular order).

This won’t be the last Kesarbai on this list. There is simply nobody who has delivered bandishes like her. Her extended raga elaborations never reached the same heights. But in the matter of translating composition to song, no one else has brought a comparable combination of voice, inflection and romance to an interpretation. As a result, her renditions serve as reference points for the affective experience of a raga as expressed through a bandish, such as the haunting darkness of this Kedar.