Ustad Ali Akbar Khan
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A backgrounder: Of Chandranandan, and more
Suanshu Khurana, February 19, 2023: The Indian Express
At the Capital’s Shri Shankar Lal Concert Hall inside Modern School, Barakhamba Road, California-based sarod player Alam Khan opened the headlining act with Chandranandan, a raga created by his father and guru Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. “Smaran”, the concert, organised by SRF Foundation, with industrialist and music impresario Arun Bharat Ram at the helm, was the finale of the two-day festival in December to celebrate Khan’s centenary. In a space that can usually hold 1,000 people on any given day, there were about 75 people in attendance, mostly comprising those who had heard Khan until he passed away in 2009, and were curious about his 40-year-old “half-American” son and if he could live up to the illustrious legacy.
Alam sat quietly, his head bowed down, eyes shut, as he entered a meditative alaap of this luminous evening raga, bearing a reminder of Khan’s demeanour. With the strumming of those first notes, Alam was home. With no acrobatics — the new normal in sarod concerts today — he focused on the raga with intricate playing and the meends (slide of the notes), so delicate and tender, that it reminded one of the musical times that have now become the stuff of lore. “This is the baaj (playing) of the old times. This is the blood talking,” said Anita Singh, vice-chairperson and director, Indian Music Society and member of Executive Committee and Governing Council, INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage), after the concert. This was one of the year’s best concerts and it was strange how it was the most under-attended. Most likely because the heavyweights had already performed and not many knew about Alam, Khan’s son.
“I am sure he (Khan) would be happy that we are trying to carry on his style. It’s our job to maintain that ethos, that feeling behind the note, that love, despite new trends in classical music. We try to find beauty in those one or two notes. I have come to realise that it’s better to play a couple of notes in tune, with feeling, than a thousand without,” said Alam, before diving into Chandranandan.
The story of Chandranandan’s creation goes back to the 1940s and to the HMV recording studio in Mumbai’s Fort where well-known musicologist and the company’s legendary recording executive, GN Joshi, threw a curveball. He asked Khan, then an emerging sarod player, to record something he hadn’t heard before. “I felt he was insulting my guru, my father (Ustad Allauddin Khan), by asking me to play a raga that he had never heard before… But he meant it another way…maybe my father taught me something that (he) hadn’t heard. He wanted something unique for the recording. I was angry, but I was also in a good musical mood. So, I was nervous for a second, then I remembered my teacher, my father, and said I was ready to record. I played a few notes, little alaap, little gat (melody),” Khan said, in US-born music historian and musician Peter Lavezzoli’s book The Dawn of Indian Music in the West (Bloomsbury, 2006). He spawned a new raga, created by blending notes from the family of the Kaunsi ragas (Maalkauns, Kaunsi Kanada, among others). At a time when a raga was performed for hours to find its colour and nature, Khan gave the feeling of a new one in three minutes (the time Khan had on the disc). The idiomatic framing was majestic and yet sombre. “When you blend a raag together you must blend the flavours like a punch… you can’t taste the individual flavours, but some new taste is there,” Khan adds in the book.
In between the recording, Joshi and Khan took a cigarette break and stepped out of the studio; the moon was shining brightly. Khan would thus call the raag, Chandranandan (meaning moonstruck). In the years to come, that recording would go on to find much attention and affection among rasikas in India such that the audience would holler for it at Khan’s concerts. “But I had forgotten which notes I’d used… I had to buy the record and listen for six months to understand the ascending and descending line,” Khan had said.
Years later, in 1965, after immense popularity, a 22-minute rendition was re-recorded for the LP titled “Master Musician of India”, which still remains one of Khan’s most significant recordings.
According to Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri, 77, who, besides Khan, accompanied a long list of artistes including Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Vilayat Khan and Pandit Nikhil Banerjee for decades, recalls how he’d often get lost in Khan’s alaap on stage. “All our senior musicians are great in their own way and their style of music is different. But if you look at Khan sahab’s style, there is something very haunting and magnetic. It kind of grabs you, is devotional, melodic, sentimental and meditative. I’d often forget that I was playing with him. It’s the same story with other accompanists. You would become a listener in that moment and would want to imbibe that learning experience. A raga was never repetitive. Every time the same raga showed a different path,” says Chaudhury, who divides his time between Kolkata and California.
It’s compelling how Khan’s musical story is so aligned with that of the phase when Indian classical music went global; he was a major contributor to that. But it is also a story that got overshadowed by charismatic personalities in music, popular rivalries and colourful personal lives. In this, Khan became the “emperor of melody”, one of the finest, but never the most popular.
Khan was born in Shibpur (present-day Bangladesh) to Ustad Allauddin Khan — the founder of Maihar gharana and court musician in the palace of the Maharaja of Maihar — and Madina Begum. Ustad Allauddin was an exacting father, who would tie Khan to a tree and beat him if the notes went wrong.
Khan’s debut was at 13, in 1936, at a music conference in Allahabad. Though a strict guru, Ustad Allauddin was also a doting father. After one of Khan’s early concerts, he came back home and sat quietly in a corner. His student and well-known sarod player Sharan Rani asked him what happened. He didn’t say anything but welled up and said, “Aaj kya kar diya isne (how he played today!)”. He was proud of his son’s music, the bent it had acquired, and the direction it was taking. A couple of years later, Khan gave his first performance at All India Radio (AIR), Mumbai.
At home, Khan would learn from his father, parked at his feet, as he sat on his wooden takhat (day bed). There were other musicians, too, including the other well-known student, the gifted Pandit Ravi Shankar, who would marry the other musical genius in the house, Khan’s sister, Annapurna Devi. Khan and Annapurna were always close and had a very similar approach to music.
Shankar and Khan left Maihar in 1944. While Shankar moved to Bombay, Khan joined AIR, Lucknow, becoming its youngest music director. Khan was also appointed as the court musician in the palace of Umaid Singh, Maharaja of Jodhpur. After the Partition, Khan moved to Bombay and began working in the Hindi film industry. He composed for Chetan Anand’s Aandhiyan (1962), Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) and Tapan Sinha’s famed Kshudhita Pashan (Hungry Stones, 1960), which won him much acclaim. The story goes that Lata Mangeshkar, who sang the title song for Aandhiyan, didn’t take a fee as a mark of respect to Khan.
Unlike Shankar’s acclaim, Khan was seeing a slower rise. He taught Mickey Hart, drummer of the Grateful Dead; opened the “Concert for Bangladesh” with Shankar in 1971; and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on the invitation of legendary violinist Yehudi Menuhin in 1955. Menuhin called him “an absolute genius… perhaps the greatest musician in the world.”
“Ravi ji was an extrovert, while my father was this quiet person who was told what to do. But when he played, it was like, ‘oh my god, this was classical’, and he wanted to continue teaching Dadu’s work and make sure that the legacy was alive. While he collaborated with a few brilliant but lesser-known artistes, he also shied away from many others,” says Alam.
In 1956, Khan founded Ali Akbar College of Music in Calcutta followed by one in Berkeley which later moved to San Rafael, California, USA. Khan spent the last four decades of his life there, teaching, playing, with performances that were few and far between. By the time he had turned 50, Khan felt that he had finally touched the tip of the iceberg. “They (musicians) are performing, making money and they want a name… Nowadays, to take my instrument and play is a punishment. I hate to play when I think that I am playing for you. When I see the audience, when I walk towards the stage, it feels like a punishment… I think I am a rat or a chicken… But when I start the music, I myself become the audience. I enjoy that,” Khan told Lavezzoli in his book.
When he wasn’t bent over his sarod, eyes closed in surrender to the Almighty, he was reticent and quiet, never commanding an interview or a conversation. In fact, one had to goad him to talk. His reticence probably came from his relationship with his father, one that was run with an iron hand.
However, Khan made sure that he was gentle with his own children. “He was clear about one thing — he didn’t want that life with me, the kind he had with his father. He never pushed me to learn. He would tell me to do things that made me happy. It eventually became my own calling. I came to it,” says Alam.
Khan married three times and had 12 children. Alam, his brother Manik and his sister Madina are the children of Mary Khan, Khan’s third wife. His other children Ustad Ashish Khan and grandson Shiraz Ali Khan (son of Dhyanesh Khan), also play the sarod. But the comparisons with Alam are inevitable. “There is no getting away. When you play well, people say ‘oh it’s expected’ and ‘it’s the genes’. If you play badly, ‘it’s your fault’ and they say that the apple has fallen far from the tree,” says Alam.
After suffering from kidney ailments for a long time, Khan passed away in June 2009. His centenary year, which ends in April this year, also went by rather quietly, like he would have wanted — without any fuss — with a few concerts organised by his students and cultural organisations who celebrated the genius of an artiste, who found much affection and appreciation among musicians, rasikas and those who value classical music, but not from the masses. He was averse to turning the spotlight on himself.
“For him, music was the ultimate. He never even thought of fame or headlines, or what people thought of him. I remember clearly, on so many occasions, where he’d be in such a deep reverie that you’d see tears falling down his face. He was enjoying himself. That music he had was enough for him,” says Chaudhuri.
