With Music Do Us Part

The monsoon chased Bhimsen Joshi in Calcutta last week. The skies turned overcast and cried every time the maestro dug into Malhar or the Brindavan Sarang or a Marathi tune set to Bhairavi with his usual deep-felt abandon. It was like nature's paean to a genius, who, late one night, was singing to a sweaty and packed audience at the stylish Town Hall, and another day to an intimate posh gathering at a chic penthouse apartment. Concert over, Joshi chatted, sang some more, chewed tobacco with his friends into the wee hours of the morning, tired his hosts out, and then went to bed. All of this, after one of India's most famous Hindustani classical vocalists survived a lacerated ulcer, a benign brain tumour and an arthritic knee barely a year ago; he also underwent three surgeries in just seven months. It's a miracle, exclaims Bakul Bhavsar, a Mumbai-based businessman and a long-time admirer of the musician, who accompanied him to Calcutta, his will to live, his energy and his performance after going through all this!

Miracle indeed. For, this performance came after newspapers were awash with reports of the maestro's retirement last autumn: Joshi, after all, had not recorded in the last eight years, had mercilessly slashed his hectic concert schedule, and had been struck down by ill health. But listen to the maestro and all this is like much ado about nothing. He recounts blandly: My stomach, brain and leg needed some fixing, so he gave himself up to the doctors who fixed it all right. So, was he afraid, or feel close to death, and did the docs warn him that he might not be able to sing again? Bhimsen Joshi looks at you deadpan and spins off another aphoristic repartee: Well, at 77, I am not getting younger, am I? These things happen with old age. Of course, nobody told me that I wouldn't be able to sing again. That would be like a death sentence!

Asks Joshi, I am still not tired, so where's the question of retirement? The night before he took an early morning flight to Mumbai last week, the maestro was up chatting till midnight. When Jayanto Chatterjee, a Calcutta-based businessman, admirer and host, called him up in Pune, about the reports, Joshi shut him up, saying: All this is bunkum. When an agitated Chatterjee told him that he should protest against such trash, the maestro said: Am I not coming to Calcutta to sing? That will be my way of protest!

The protest, by all accounts, was well registered. Joshi sang effortlessly for some four hours through two crowded shows in Calcutta. The voice was booming and resonant as ever, packing in the passion and the power of a one-man chorus. His ragas were still leaving the audiences misty-eyed, the full-tilt bhajans were still making them delirious. He's already straddled the world of Indian classic music for more than five decades with effortless ease. Now, stepping into the sixth decade of his dazzling professional career, Bhimsen Joshi, with a slower gait and a shuffle and a ban on betel, spirits and driving, is alive and kicking pretty well.

Actually very little has changed for the musician. His undying love affair with cars, for example. There is a piece of lore about the curious seduction: in the early forties, Joshi bought himself a second-hand car to travel to concerts with his entourage, but when the driver fell asleep at the wheel and the old wheezer overturned near a bend in Satara, the musician decided to take over the wheel himself. (I decided to drive myself to death if need be, but not get driven to death by somebody else, he jests now.) Since then cars have been an obsession for him.

As for his roots in music, they didn't look all that firm to begin with. Bewitched by the popular sounds of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan, blaring from a musty record shop, while roaming the bazars of his hometown Gadag, Karnataka, and itching to learn music, Joshi picked up a quarrel over a trifle,he had asked for an extra spoonful of ghee with his meal, and was refused, goes the lore,with his music-loving mother Kusumbai, and left home at 11. For the next two years, between 1933 and 1935, the Madhva Brahmin teenager was on a search mission for that elusive teacher, hopping from one long-distance train to another, paying for his tickets by singing aloud to crusty ticket collectors. Not all collectors loved his music though: Joshi was thrown behind bars on a couple of occasions for travelling ticketless. He even slogged as a servant in households where he heard some musician lived.

In a particularly memorable episode, the young Joshi worked as a servant at actor Pahari Sanyal's house in Calcutta on a Rs 5 a month wage, because he heard that the actor was very fond of music. He quit after three months, because his boss never found time to listen to him. Years later, Joshi stunned the music-loving Sanyal at a music conference saying: I am the same Joshi who used to work at your place. Finally, the travel-weary prodigal son returned home to train himself under Pandit Rambhau Kundgolkar a.k.a Sawai Gandharva of the fabled Kirana school of music at Kundgol, the guru's hometown close to Gadag.

The rest is history: a recommendation from the legendary Begum Akhtar to take up a Rs 35 a month job as a staff artiste with the Lucknow station of the All India Radio; the first album, a 3.5 minute 1944 classical recording, brought out by hmv; the first major concert in 1946 to mark his guru's 60th birthday; his first long-play album in 1964 and a whirligig of frenzied concert touring and recording over the next few decades. The peripatetic musician was now clocking flyer miles as no other Indian musician had ever done: a Maharashtrian writer renamed him 'Hawai Gandharva' (The Flying Gandharva) in a take-off comparison with his much celebrated guru and mentor.

The twice-married Joshi has also been a maverick classicist: the first Hindustani vocalist to win a Platinum disc in the eighties, the first Indian musician to publicise his international concerts through aggressive poster campaigns in places like New York, one of the few classical musicians to cut film music, sing a popular national integration jingle which became the favourite of a friend's parrot, turn out for a controversial duet with Carnatic vocalist Balamurali Krishna, and even share the stage with a severely panned kooky sing-and-paint show with M.F. Husain. He never boasted of being an intellectual, says Basant Govinda Potdar, an actor who is researching on a book on Joshi. He has always given importance to entertainment.

All through this and more, the maestro's dry wit and joie de vivre remained intact. When Rajiv Gandhi offered him a Rajya Sabha nomination, the maestro reportedly quipped: I won't be able to do this. I'll have to tell too many lies.

Bhimsen Joshi's onstage persona, meanwhile, is once again in full bloom: the manic energy, the incredibly flexible voice traversing at terrific speeds, the famous grimaces, the sheer body language of a maestro drowning in his music. I'll be around, he assures you, till I lose my voice. No question about that.