Ustad Vilayat Khan: Interview - 2

This article is a part of the small attempt to consolidate all the interviews of Ustad Vilayat Khan, so that his fans and followers get to know more about his musical views and ideas, in his own words.

THE eleven-year-old was all tousled hair and crumpled clothes. From his home in Calcutta it had taken him ten days on several trains to stow away to New Delhi. Sneaking past the Pathan watchman the urchin entered the All India Radio Station with a sitar in his hand. That is where programme assistant Zafar Husain found him. Exhaustion coul not keep out the ringing pride in th boy's voice. "I am Vilayat Khan, son of the late Inayat Khan Saheb."

"Beta!" cried Husain as he folded the boy into a fierce hug. 'Are you really my guru's son? What brings you here? Alone? In this state?" But neither to Husain nor later to AIR's director-general Z.A. Bokhari would the boy admit anything more than that he was a truant. "If you try to send me back I'll run away again." With that he broke into sobs. Bokhari was no run-of-the-mill bureaucrat. He decided to care for the fatherless child, to nurture and enrich his musical talent. After all, young Vilayat Khan was the scion of the Ittawa gharana whose stalwarts traced their line back to Tansen of Akbar's court. Bokhari not only provided shelter, clearing a garage for the child's quarters but engaged him as an AIR artiste at Rs. 10 a month. This was after he answered the question, "Can you play the sitar you are carrying around?" with an immediate burst of Bhairavi. Staff members gathered to listen. Senior sitarist Hyder Husain Khan of the Jaipur gharana exclaimed, 'Arey! Inayat Khan is still alive! Here, in this boyl" The director also allotted two radio recitals a month to Vilayat's paternal uncle Wahid Khan (sitarist in Hyderabad) and maternal grandfather Bande Husain Khan (vocalist in Nahaan) to ensure their regular visits to Delhi to coach the boy Thus the youngster was trained simulta- neously to sing in the romantic khyal mode and to play the more traditional dhrupad ang in the instrumental style of the sitar and surbahar. He himself gave vocal and sitar recitals with equal felicity. "So you see, the khyal entered my head naturally and influenced my sitar playing. I also revelled in the whole gamut of light classical thumri, tappa, tarana, chaiti, barsati....... Father Inayat Khan had died too early to have trained son Vilayat (born 1928) though the child had learnt enough to accompany him on the stage. But the father left a fire, constantly stoked by mother Bashiren Begum, daughter of a family of eminent vocalists in Saharanpur and Nahaan. A sprightly 68 now, Vilayat Khan loved to indulge in the virtual reality of memories, of a past which anchored his growth, inspired his creative departures. "Too much tradition makes for dead wood. But I don't want so much progress as to lose my identity," he laughs as he details the changes he wrought on his own style and instrument through the patient years, until he made his strings replicate the vibrancy, versatility, continuity and the emotive range of the human voice. Did he strike a new path because he was dissatisfied with the instrumental (tantrakari/gatkari) mode of his ancestors? "No, no," Khansaheb intervenes quickly. "Only Abdul Karim Khan was my father's equal in laydari (rhythm) and surilapan (sweetness). Till today I've not been able to play as perfectly as he did. Perhaps that's why I had to make my own style." When friends and relatives jeered, "I vowed to myself I would not return until I proved to be a worthy son of my father." Khansaheb dashes a hand across his eyes as he recalls the pain of his father's death. It forced him to forge his path alone. With that he becomes the caring host of a winter morning on the lawns of "Surbahar" (MelodyGalore), his home in Dehradun. "Look beta, your tea is getting cold." A birdcall arrests his hand-behind ear attention. "Such a tiny bird wit such a piercing song. It's asking "where are you?" He repeats the call in musical notes and taps the rhythm of rustling leaves. "I am lucky to have this beautiful, quiet retreat for four months in a year after tours in India and abroad. Ho long will it stay unspoilt? Already have more pollution, tourists, lorries .... the woods are gone." "Surbahar" is bursting with life. Besides his disciples and younger so Hidayat, there are daughters Yaman, Zillah and toddler grandson holidaying in the Doon Valley. Puppies, kittens, chicks, ducklings and little serving boys scamper in and out, all managed by the placid Zubeida Begum, his second wife. The estates produce grain and oil, include a dairy, poultry farm, orchard, vegetable and rose gardens. Vilayat Khan's facade of simple contentment hides a volatile temperament, artiste's ego, creative frenzy, eccentricity, and an astonishing range of interests from carpets and shawls to Mughal miniature paintings. Visitors are stunned by his collection of guns, pipes from England, China and Japan, crockery from the Czar's and the Kaiser's tables, iridescent cutglass from Venice, Turkey and Bohemia, chandeliers painstakingly assembled by the ustad himself. In his younger days Khansaheb had been an accomplished billiards player, horseman, swimmer and ballroom dancer. He picks up a curiously shaped perfume bottle and inhales deeply. He opens his eyes - there are tears in them. "This belonged to an Egyptian queen of 2000 years ago. Here, smell it, aren't you in a different world now?" Khansaheb may not remember what he played at the Festival of India in Britain (1951) but he is still wistful about the Jaguar XK 1 5 0 he brought back from that tripl And about every single car he ever owned. "When I was young I was mad about speed and had many near-fatal accidents. I don't like to think about it now. Loud clothes, big talk, craze for fame, fast driving - all these are signs of shallowness, of bad taste." This self assessment is part of his musical growth. The old reviews reveal his penchant for showmanship. "He feels it in a sensitive manner but argues it out loudly," says one. But the natty dresser confesses, "I tried to wash out the bad parts, become clean, look good!" He did arrive at a mature, multishaded, subtle delicacy and lingerin grandeur. "Whenever he managed t express exactly what he wanted, he would look heavenward," noted a later critic. The tributes came pouring in for "playing from the heart and singing through the sitar." Sitarist Arvind Parikh, friend and disciple of 50 years, recalls the difficulties, and the humiliation Vilayat Khan underwent in crafting his original style." A Films Division documentary shows the unsure, pockmarked teenager, but there is nothing hesistant about his music. It was so advanced, the sounds he produced with his left hand were so unusual, that people denounced him as a thumri player, mistaking inventiveness for light music, intensity for virtuosity." Vilayat Khan reacted violently to the jibes. Once at a recital, he called out a senior critic by name to say, "Now let's see what's stronger - your pen, or my plectrum." Those misunderstood essays were the beginning of Vilayat Khan's unique contribution to Indian classical music, the style of sitar playing now called Vilayatkhaani baaj. This is the gayaki ang or full fledged vocal style, which he innovated, perfected and passed on to a school of disciples. He wrought a total change in the dimension and impact of the music by modifying the base, frets, bridge and strings of the sitar. Only then could it handle the tremendous power of the right hand strokes, the long intricate oscillations, the lyrical fluidity, the itiurkis of khyal as well as the thuniri, exactly as the voice produced them. In short he gave a new direction to Hindustani music. Khansaheb gets visibly enthused as he explains how he did it not in clinical terms but in bursts of singing ("Chandan phool banke daroon garwa"), interposed with "Suno!" (listen) and "Samjhe?" (got it). Grandfather Bande Husain Khan's phrases were resplendent with glides, contours, modulations. His taans were labyrinths of superspeed where each note was looped with a tiny glide. The old techniques were incapable of replicating such vocal feats. And so Vilayat Khan crafted alternatives. While remaining an unwavering traditionalist, Khansaheb absorbed everything that could enhance melody. He could refract in his Bhairavi gleams from the saxophon score of a Hollywood film ("Bathing Beauty") he had watched the day beforel He drew easily from folk music and the fervent Baul songs of Bengal. Vilayat Khan slips into the vivid past again. Great artistes came to his father's haven in Calcutta. Abdul Aziz Khan from Patiala played the veena, so did Venkatagiriappa from Mysore. Alladiya Khan and Faiyyaz Khan sang, Shombhu Maharaj did abhinaya, and Balasaraswati danced to mother jayammal's song. "Oh, it was divine, Look, look at them! All enjoying the music and the food, some a swig of bhang in the corner. They are thrilled to be together. No one wants to show off, each become more humble. They bless me, they tweak my car as I imitate their music....... His first memory of music?" I go back to 1932, to Albert Hall in Calcutta. My father enters, everyone rises to applaud him, even the British governor and his splendid retinue of lords and ladies. What a challenge to match Abdul Karim Khan who had sung before him. But my father casts a new spell. I fall asleep though I keep opening my eyes to see yellow, yellow every- where. "Silly childl" said my father to me the next morning. "That was the colour of raag Basant." Failing thrice in class three, little Vilayat decided to stop schooling and play the sitar. The red eyed father roared, "Don't you know the sitar is a scorpion.?" But the boy got his way. Here Khansaheb breaks into gleeful English. "Never I got shout after that. Never I got shout for the sitar!" His native gifts were burnished by the family tradition of fanatical practice. The mood changes after lunch indoors. Vilayat Khan launches into a tirade against compromise and adulteration of music. The ustad had made dramatic exits when the audience got unruly. He refused to allow speech making by the President of India in the middle of a concert. "Let him do it at the start or finish. Music is not so cheap. I don't play for people who can't take my music. I don't want to play the Moonlight sonata or "We shall overcome" or some film song!" The ustad knows that younger musicians have to grapple with steep falls in taste, but will not condone playing to the gallery. "Let them go to film music and make more money there than in classical music," he growls. (His own scores for Satyajit Ray's 'Jalsaghar' and Merchant Ivory's 'The Guru' have been adamantly classical). Then he repeats his boast, "I am the highest paid musician in this country." This childishness goes back to the fears and insecurities of his growing years. "Your soul will abuse you if you indulge in fusions of American and Indian orchestras, join rock festivals, pretend to invent new raags to fool the people, or play on two violins with a single bow," he adds. jugalbandis were all right if done sportingly. As for his own bitter, competitive, revengeful displays with Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan, "I shudder to think of them." He decries showy drumming for the same reason. 'All this sawaljawab razzmatazz which Ravi Shankar introduced, why, the sitarist performs, the drummer perl'orms, even the audience performs! Alla Rhakhaji and Zakir Husain dare not do it with me. If anyone tries tricks. I make him sweat. Once Kumar Bose said that playing tabla for me was death. He could not give the beat for a simple gat I played in teen taal!" Radio and television are denounced next. "They club us with snake charmers and bear baiters as entertainers. They spend a fortune on cricket, give a pittance to musicians!" He boycotted AIR in protest against its audition policy. He refused every award from the Indian government, rejected the Sangeet Niitak Akiidemi award at age 37 because its selections were "arbitrary, indiscriminate and based on considerations other than merit." It is but natural for Khansaheb to cry out against institutional teaching of music with its diplomas and degrees. In other words. passports to jobs which degrade the art and listeners' taste. Khansaheb as a teacher? laughs Parikh: "Don't expect system and method. If you are alert you can unlock Alladin's treasures. He would stop you and say, "You haven't fixed the sa and you go to pa ' , Don't say "I felt like it." In music everything must be reasoned out." Or he'd suggest "Use the middle finger to stress the glide. Draw the ma from sa for Malkauns. from ga for Bageshri..." Son and sitarist Shujaat Khan's response blends gratitude and resentment. " 15 times you play a phrase and go wrong once, he'd still whack you across the knuckles until you wanted to throw the sitar and run away. Many did just that. The pressure was unbearable." The father would tell family stories of comniitted riyaz - of how grandfather Imdad Khan did not get up till he finished his practice of paltas even when he heard his daughter had died. Such tales did more to terrify than to inspire the student! Among disciples who survived are brother Imrat Khan, sons Shujaat and Hidayat, nephews Nishat, Irshad and Shahed Parwez, as also Arvind Parikh, Benjamin Gomez, Kalyani Roy. Nikhil Banerji and Rais Khan came for classes. Purvi Mukherji and Shubhra Guha are his students of vocal music. We are on the terrace now, with low clouds flitting through the lissom trees around us. The ustad breaks into raag Gaarii on request. Melody flows like liquid gold. And you wonder. with a lump in your throat, why he ever gave up singing which seems the most natural thing for him to do. Don't his audience long for those snatches of song in his concerts, not quite being able to tell when voice ends and strings begin ' When he replies, the tone is tremulous with a grief of long ago. "I could do things with my voice that could never be done on the sitar. That's when my mother stabbed me to the core. She said I must give up singing. I obeyed unquestioningly. Years later she disclosed the reason. "I come from a clan of vocalists. If you become a singer I would have been condemned as disloyal to the family of instrumentalists into which I married. How could I face your father and grandfather in the next world(' So you see... Earlier she had banned the family instrument - the surbahar - for him, reserving it for younger son Imrat, who needed that concession from his more gifted elder brother. Khansaheb is lost in a reverie. Who knows what images cloud his mind - of himself training his younger brother, their duo performances for decades on sitar and surbahar, until an iron wall grew to block all contact between them. Rebel son Shujaat Khan, now reconciled with his father, is rueful about it. "Father is a genius, the lion's share of the "wah-wahs" went to him. This must have hurt my uncle. Moreover, father demanded complete submission. I remember the good times when father, uncle, myself and cousin Nishat played together before a delighted Calcutta audience. But in the last ten years the estrangement between the brothers has been total. " Shujaat discloses that Khansaheb demands sycophancy from family and friends, and control of everyone's orbit. He could be as possessive as he was loving and generous. "That's why his first marriage broke up. My mother Monisha was a college educated brahmin, too independent to kow tow to the great man. Presumably she fell in love with his good looks and winsome ways onthe dance floor. She left him after three children and years of bickering... " It is in keeping with his nature that Vilayat Khan should insist on staying an unflinching purist, and still yearn for the mass addition showered upon his lifetime rival Ravi Shankar 'As a gharana musician with mastery of technique and outstanding creativity, Vilayat Khan is aware he stands head and shoulders above every living musician today," says Parikh. "flow can it not gall him that Ravi Shankar has greater national and international recognition? One-upmanship and acrimony have marred their genuine respect for each other." Shujaat agrees but gives other reasons. "Father admits that but for Ravi Shankar, who was there for him to practise to excel? Their rivalry charged and spurred him to greater heights." The slanting rays paint the sky in twilight hues. The birds return to make garden symphonies. Lighting a bidi from his ornate silver box, the sitar samrat hums a pahadi dhun, free from the burdens of celebrityhood and the safety mask. That's when you ask him, "What are your happiest moments at home," Catching sight of the little boy clearing the teii things he says, 'At night all these garhwali children from the servants' quarters come to my room. We talk, laugh and sing together. What we gharana musicians take an hour to build up - that same raag and ras, why. these children can do it in a split second, just like that! I feel a rapture then..." That is Vilayat Khan, unpredictable, quicksilvery. In whom elegance vies with ruthlessness, kindess with aggression. A life long rebel who cannot tolerate other protestors. Guardian of his heritage, and innovator supreme. A musician's musician. The future will rate him as a great son of' fndiii who epitomised his country's living culture in an uncompromising search for excellence.

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Audio recording of Ustad Vilayat Khan's BBC Interview, recorded by Ramprapanna Bhattacharya :

http://www.esnips.com/doc/bbc7b5cb-0799-48f7-976e-0c822e515266

Youtube Video recordings of Ustad Vilayat Khan interview, originally recorded from TV by Ramprapanna Bhattacharya:

Part1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inElNJh6at0

Part2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MBcDnEJS_g

Part3:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD6Ns79mOyw