'A Voice Like A Buffalo Calf With A Cold'

 One should be thankful to Providence that in this age of musical poverty, Bhimsen Joshi is still alive and seems to sing better than ever within the limitations forced on him by age and illness. With a fractured tailbone, which never healed properly, and a brain tumour behind him, this octogenarian sits at public recitals, dangling his legs from a chair, and hits their epicentre with a power that can turn singers half his age sick with envy. That his taans, which he could take at electric speed till the other day, have become a lot slower makes no difference to his drut khayals. He would be the first to deny that he has a sweet voice, but he has attained swar-siddhi.  

I heard him first in the Jhankar Music Circle at the residence of Jnan Prakash Ghosh in Dixon Lane in the Fifties. Pahadi Sanyal, the elderly star of Bengali films, was sitting next to me. ... As a listener, with his timely daad in polished Urdu, he stood out among Bengalis who were not acquainted with the musical climate and culture of the north. On this occasion, after Bhimsen Joshi finished his recital, Pahadi Sanyal asked for the name of the last raga sung by him. Bhimsen came over and touched Pahadi Sanyal's feet and said 'Isko Chhaya kahke seekha hamney (I learnt it as Chhaya).' 

The confusion in our mind was due to Bhimsen dwelling on the nishad in the ascending scale, which neither Pahadikaka nor myself had ever heard in Chhaya or Chhyanat. Fifty years ago, Bhimsen was a young musician who had already made a mark in Calcutta while Pahadi Sanyal was a well-known ageing film star. That Bhimsen touched Pahadi Sanyal's feet was not particularly unexpected but noticing the embarrassment on Pahadi Sanyal's face he said, 'I don't think you have spotted me, Sahab, I am the same Bhimsen who came to you for training when you lived on Raja Basant Roy Road.'

'Good lord!' said Pahadikaka after the usual pleasantries were over and Bhimsen left us. 'I can't believe it is the same boy. He came to me all the way from Poona to learn music. He had a voice like a buffalo calf with a cold. I told him he had no future as a singer but I might be able to find him a petty job in the New Theatres Studio. He lived in my house for a while. I would pay him a tenner or two for running errands and then he suddenly disappeared one day. Good heavens! Astafullah! How can this man be the same Bhimsen?'

In his wanderings, Bhimsen went to Lucknow, Gwalior and finally to Rampur to learn from Ustad Mushtaq Hussain, the then court musician and Guru of Nawab Raza Ali. The penniless boy from distant Maharashtra got precious little out of the venerable ustad although Joshi stayed with him for nearly a year. He ran errands for his teacher as well, shopping even for meat, taboo in Marathi Brahmin households. In Lucknow one would find him sitting in a teashop run by D.C. Dutt, otherwise a sought-after singer of geet and ghazals, who drew the highest fee of seventy-five rupees for his radio recitals in those days. On his recommendation, Bhimsen became a regular artist at Lucknow radio station, singing bhajans for fifteen rupees. All this did Bhimsen Joshi a world of good. He heard all the great ustads of the north, and absorbed a lot, traces of which are noticeable in his gayaki. ... Bhimsen Joshi's entire khayal, even the vilambit portion, is rhythm-based. Which is why he prefers ektaal and the vilambit teentaal to the elongated jhumra or even the extremely slow ektaal that Karim Khan preferred when accompanied by Shamsuddin.

Like Amir Khan, Abdul Karim, in his vistar, did not wish to be disturbed by the conventional demands of the accompanists for saath-sangat. Bhimsen Joshi, on the other hand, seems to have imbibed the Jaipur ghrana's approach of singing regular rhythmic beats.  (In an interview with him for the 'Charcha' series arranged by Jalsaghar at the Ramkrishna Institute of Culture in Calcutta, I played the records of Rahmat Khan, Abdul Karim, Sawai Gandharva, Hirabai Barodekar and Sureshbabu Mane, together with my comments and analyses. In the course of the interview, he did acknowledge the influence of more than one singer from the past and they included Amir Khan on the one hand and Kesarbai on the other, representing the two extremes of the spectrum.) As a result of the influence of Jaipur gayaki, Bhimsen's slow exposition of the raga is knit in a compact and coherent design and never becomes unwieldy or ponderous.

I also have a recorded tape of his Maru Bihag sung a decade ago in the house of the late Mohan Surraiya, where Latafat Khan, Ravi Kichlu and I were present. No doubt our presence encouraged him to indulge in bol-taans and layakaari in the true Agra fashion, which he did better than anybody else. Ulhas Kashalkar tells me that Bhimsen once demonstrated to him the bahlawa of the Gwalior gayaki. This was a natural thing to do, after his one year stint at Rampur with Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan. All this, however, has not turned his music into patchwork, which would have been inevitable with a lesser artiste. He has absorbed the features of more than one gayaki and made each his own, while owning steadfast allegiance to Kirana. Chetan Karnavi, in his book Listening to Hindustani Music, writes:

' As Joshi once told me with a twinkle in his eye, he had processed all these borrowed commodities in his Kirana factory -- he has added to his borrowed stuff a certain emotional aura and meditative touch.'

Like that of his famous predecessors, his music is introspective, even meditative. Very often, friends and admirers sitting in front of him would make loud appreciative noises, but it would be obvious from his glazed eyes that they did not register as external stimulus. His dazzling fast taans were triggered by short volleys in the style of Agra, and he preferred rhythmic weaving around three or four notes, culminating in a crescendo in the upper octave where falsetto comes into play. He crashes down to the tonic, invariably with a sapaat, like Amir Khan's. His use of pukars, which calls for hitting the notes in the taar saptak in full-throated lower register, has tremendous dramatic impact, somewhat reminiscent of Fayaaz Khan's. Bhimsen Joshi's music has drama -- never the melodrama of Pandit Omkarnath Thakur and Jasraj.

Some hard-nosed critics fail to discover the cerebral content in his music. Fortunately, I am not one of those who perceive any dichotomy between aesthetic and intellectual appeal. Yet another group of critics finds his limited repertoire of ragas boring. In the days of Abdul Karim and Fayaz Khan, listeners wanted to hear the elongated version of the ragas which, rendered in 78 RPM records, had contributed to the popularity of the singers. In the days of LPs, cassettes and CDs, it is not unreasonable to expect a bigger repertoire from artiste.

I remember an evening in the Sixties, when I persuaded Bhimsen Joshi to sing Bihag, Kedara and Shankara, not uncommon ragas by any means, but which I had never heard sung by him. On the tanpuras were Ravu Kichlu and I. The audience consisted of my wife and Buddhi, my cocker spaniel. There was no tabla-player. Suddenly, Amjad Ali walked in wearing a tee-shirt and jeans. He was still in his teens when he had made his presence felt in Calcutta with his distinct sarod baaj.

His handsome face, open smile and perfect manners had made him a darling of the crowds. Those days, he would put up at the Broadway Hotel at Ganesh Chandra Avenue, not too far from my flat in Esplanade Mansions. He happily agreed to be at the tabla accompanist that evening. But as the AIR station was only a few minutes' walk away, a phone call brought over Jnan Prakash Ghosh, along with V.G. Jog, and Amjad Ali was replaced.

I remember with some disappointment that Bhimsen Joshi's handling of those ragas, which fell outside his repertoire those days, was not marked with usual fluency and ease, nor did they fit into his usual graceful Kirana gayaki. However, there is more to Bhimsen Joshi's music than the usual critical response. He may not be a pundit or an ustad with a bagful of ragas and bandishes, but his open voice and ability to hit the notes right in the middle with the kind of abandon not uncommon among the ustads of pre-microphone days, have tremendous impact. So does the pianissimo-fortissimo effect of his voice-throw-- wrongly called modulation by Indians. Above all, he has the supreme ability to get lost in his own music with no thought of pleasing the audience. I cannot say the same about anyone since the death of the great Abdul Karim, except Ustad Amir Khan, who took the Kirana tradition to unexplored heights.

Extract courtesy, Penguin Books India

Also See:

• Bharat Ratna Bhimsen Joshi
• Emperor Of Note
• With Music Do Us Part

And outside this site:

• A Films Division film on Pt. Joshi (select Movie titled Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, 73 minutes)
• Youtube
• His profile and three recordings at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy
• Sample the treasures online free of cost at musicindiaonline.com