Making the sitar sing

My first memory of Vilayat Khan is the Ustad smoking a beedi and gently tapping it against a crystal ashtray. The setting was a private concert in the chic Calcutta apartment of Jayanta Chatterji. The recital was meant to end by dinnertime, but the Ustad had just told the audience that he would play through the night, albeit with intervals. As the audience was still figuring out how to contain its delirium, Khan kept his sitar down and, without stepping off the dais, segued into his first interval of the night by lighting a beedi . I was 10 years old; I couldn’t join the pieces: before me was the maestro who, I had been told, was the greatest instrumentalist alive and here he was, smoking a beedi, on stage , with a vacant look in his eyes. The crystal ashtray was the icing on my bewilderment.

He played till about 2:30am. I grasped very little of his music. I only remember he had played Gavati. That was 1994. The maestro lived for another decade. Each time I saw him on stage, as I moved through school and college, his persona continued to confuse me: grace, etiquette, charm, but from behind all of that, a subliminal voice, which always seemed to say to his listeners: today is your lucky day, you’re listening to Vilayat Khan .

He perceived himself as a blue-blooded sitar player; as the torchbearer of the ‘First Family’ of the instrument. His predecessors had been custodians of the sitar for five generations before him; with each generation, especially in the hands of his grandfather Ustad Imdad Khan, and father, Ustad Enayat Khan, who was the court musician of Gauripur (now in Bangladesh), the sitar evolved significantly in terms of its musical possibilities. In the hands of Ustad Vilayat Khan, though, the sitar took the most definitive leap in its development as a musical instrument. Khan not only re-engineered the physical dimensions of the sitar, but also introduced a style that has now become the gold standard for sitar music. Since Khan, hardly any professional sitar player, or for that matter, any professional Hindustani instrumentalist has been able to avoid his influence. This month, as we contemplate the decade we have spent without him, we realise his immortality is defined as much by the music he has left us, as by the widespread adoption of his style by maestros after him.

Vocal influences

The genesis of his playing style can perhaps be traced to the death of his father, when Khan was 11. He had received intensive talim from him till then, but for future talim , he was guided less by his uncle Ustad Wahid Khan, who was a sitar player, and more by his maternal grandfather, Ustad Bade Hassan Khan and his maternal uncle, Ustad Zinda Hassan Khan, both of whom were vocalists. The influence of Hindustani vocal music on Khan, especially of khayal, was tremendous. He has said in several interviews that he was so drawn to khayal that he wanted to be a vocalist. Had it not been for his mother Bashiran Begam, who reminded him that given his paternal lineage, his first duty was towards the sitar, he would have probably become a vocalist.

But his musical vision was infected by khayal; he could not forsake it. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all his work on the sitar — be it changing its physical dimensions or introducing a new style of playing — stemmed from his simple desire to sing through his sitar.

The instrument, as he had inherited it, was not built to accommodate the nuances of vocalised music, especially seamless multi-note meends (glissandi). As Deepak Raja, musicologist and close associate of Khan, says, “He wanted to express his vocal vision, but his instrument was a barrier.” So Khan set out to re-engineer the instrument in a way that would allow him to play vocalised music on the sitar: the ‘ gayaki ang ’ that informs, at least to some extent, all Hindustani instrumental music today.

When it comes to playing vocalised music on a plucked instrument (as opposed to a bowed instrument), the fundamental barrier is that the plucking results in, as Raja puts it succinctly, “discontinuity of melody”. The voice can sustain a sound over several seconds, but on a plucked instrument one has to keep striking the string to sustain the sound, resulting in the discontinuity. The only way around this impediment was to figure out a way of prolonging the sustenance of sound through a single stroke. Khan made revolutionary changes to the sitar to achieve this: among other things, he increased the thickness of the tabli (the wooden table on which the bridge is placed and the strings pass), strengthened the joint between the stem and the tumba (sound chamber), narrowed the width of the stem and reduced the number of strings. Nayan Ghosh, a rare maestro who plays the tabla and the sitar with equal command and whose father, Pandit Nikhil Ghosh, was one of Khan’s closest aides, says Calcutta-based instrument maker Kanailal was pivotal in executing the changes that Khan envisioned.

The most significant result of the changes was that Khan could now play meends covering five notes, unbroken by plucks of the string. This brought his music closer to vocalised music than any instrumentalist before him. Pandit Arvind Parikh, his senior-most disciple and lifelong friend, says that elements of vocalised music were not totally absent from instrumental music before Khan. “If you listen to the 1904 Surbahar recording of Jaunpuri by Ustad Imdad Khan, you can hear a small two-note murki.” Ghosh agrees and adds, “It’s not that instrumentalists never played any element of vocal music before Ustad Vilayat Khan. But Khansahib expanded the scope of the gayaki ang like never before. He introduced nuances, especially in his expressions derived from khayal and thumri, that no instrumentalist before him could imagine playing.” And as Khan’s son, sitar maestro Ustad Shujaat Khan says, “Today, no instrumentalist can imagine a performance of instrumental music without these (nuances).”

Khan took fierce pride in his lineage, but being a man of infinite contradictions, his music was not defined by the hidebound world of the gharana system. He openly acknowledged the influence of many vocalists: Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, Ustad Faiyaz Khan, Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan, Ustad Rajab Ali Khan and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. He had told Raja that he went to Hindustani vocalist Kesarbai Kerkar’s concerts not to listen, but to learn. And for Ustad Amir Khan, who was one of his closest friends and brother-in-law, the Ustad had said to Parikh that 25 per cent of his sitar music was influenced by the vocal legend. He also drew from percussive music, particularly from tabla maestro Ustad Ahmadjan Thirakwa.

His influences were not restricted to Hindustani music. Jayanta Chatterji once heard Khan play a Bengali folk tune that was not part of his usual repertoire. The Ustad told him that he was once a part of a music delegation that had toured Russia and the legendary folk singer Nirmalendu Chowdhury was a fellow delegate. “He was fascinated by Nirmalendu’s music,” says Chatterji, adding, “He told me, ‘When the Russian sopranos sang full throttle, I wondered if we could give a fitting reply. But when Nirmalendu sang, I felt yes, we’re giving it back to them.’” He had heard Nirmalendu sing the folk song on the Russia tour. He remembered the tune, but not the words. “He told me that I would somehow have to get him the words. I asked him for some clue and he just said, ‘Well, there is a boat, a tree, a boatman…’ I told him all Bengali folk songs have a boat, a tree and a boatman, but he couldn’t give me more details,” said Chatterji. Many months later, when Khan came to Kolkata and met Chatterji, he hadn’t forgotten the matter. So Chatterji invited Nirmalendu’s son, Utpalendu Chowdhury, to his house so that Khan could speak with him. Thankfully, Utpalendu could identify the song (Ore o re sundoira naower majhi). He sang it and Chatterji noted the lyrics. “What is fascinating is that, later that afternoon, he transcribed the Bengali lyrics into Urdu in his notebook. Such was his obsession with detail. And he performed it in the very next concert, with full acknowledgment to Nirmalendu and Utpalendu. Isn’t that humility? I don’t know why people saw him as arrogant,” says Chatterji.

Conceited?

It is surprising how those close to the Ustad avow that he was not arrogant, while many in the world of Hindustani music thought him to be so. Ghosh, who had seen the Ustad since the former’s childhood, calls him “authoritarian, not arrogant”; Raja calls him “aloof, not arrogant”; Parikh says, “he was a “gyan margi — he knew he was the centre of power, but he wasn’t arrogant.” His son, Shujaat, has an explanation for this dissonance. “He never bothered to explain himself. If you got him, well and good. If you didn’t, too bad. And he couldn’t care less about that. Also, he never allowed too many people to get too close to him. So, only few people really got to know him.”

Two other factors might have contributed to the way people perceived him: his disenchantment with democratic processes in Hindustani music and his discomfort with Pandit Ravi Shankar’s greater global popularity. He did not approve of the system of grading artistes on All India Radio. He thought it was bureaucratic and questioned the musical ability of those awarding the grades. Parikh recounts an incident when Khan was supposed to meet the I&B minister and was deliberately dallying. When Parikh asked him to hurry, he said, “Arre, unko baithney do na adha ghanta (Let them wait for half an hour.)”

All his life, he refused all government awards and yet was upset, according to his Bengali autobiography Komal Gandhar, when Pandit Ravi Shankar was given the Bharat Ratna before him. He says in the book, “(Shankar could have) been very good in fusion music, in dance, in Beatles music, in so many other things...” and in another place, “but I play the sitar slightly better than he does… and he knows that.” This was an ‘as told to’ autobiography and many of Khan’s close aides, Chatterji foremost amongst them, have discredited it. But it would be naïve to say that there was no discomfort between the two, an uneasiness that goes way back to 1952, when the two, along with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, had performed together at the Constitution Club in Delhi. There are many versions of what had happened that day — all broadly imply that Vilayat Khan overshadowed the others with his virtuosity — but it’s safe to say no one got off the stage in good cheer.

However, as Shujaat Khan gently reprimands me, “We should only be concerned with his music. And that is how we should remember him.” As far as that is concerned, even Khan’s worst detractors cannot question that he owned the sitar like none other. “There was not a single element of sitar playing over which he did not have complete control. And his superhuman virtuosity never came at the cost of an aesthetic or melodic compromise,” says Ghosh. Even in his fastest passages, where the mind refuses to believe what the ear is hearing, there is piercing beauty. Few other musicians could strike this balance.

Through riyaz that often lasted 14 hours, Khan had achieved what all instrumentalists aspire to, but few succeed: a state where the instrument ceases to be a foreign object and becomes an extension of the self, as easy and malleable a vehicle of expression as the human voice. The Ustad knew, perhaps too well, that he had conquered his instrument. Once, when he was listening to a playback of his recording that he had just concluded, he heard a portion in the alap where his finger had slipped. The recording engineer, music director Tushar Bhatia, gave him an inquiring look. The Ustad smiled and said, “Let it stay. People should know that it’s an insaan playing and not a farishta.” His indulgence notwithstanding, a decade after his death, Ustad Vilayat Khan remains the guardian angel of the sitar.

Arunabha Deb is a Kolkata-based lawyer and music writer

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