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Journalism of Courage
When the Lahore bus diplomacy was dominating the headlines, Khumar Barabankvi died quietly in Lucknow after a brief illness. There were no obituary notices, to my knowledge, not even in the Urdu Press.
Khumar would not have been aware of Andy Wahrol’s excruciatingly honest statement that civilization has reached a point where many of us will be famous for fifteen minutes, but he was sensitive enough to know the difference between low key recognition, which he had, and the star system, which he shunned.
In the forties and the fifties, when every Urdu poet was charging off to Bombay to eke out an existence writing film songs, Khumar was ahead of every body else. In fact, he was the first choice for music director Naushad. The most popular lyrics sung by K.L. Sehgal in his unlikely role as Shahjehan were written by Khumar.
Discipline, drill and deviations demanded by the film industry required a quality of endurance which Sahir Ludhianvi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Shakeel Badayuni, Shailendra and Kaifi Azmi had. Majaz Lucknavi, the finest talent among those listed above (he was Javed Akhtar’s maternal uncle), could not cope and died in penury in a Lucknow country liquor shop.
Khumar, too, was fish out of water in Bombay. The nostalgia for his "adda" in Barabanki was too compelling for him; never was it more true of anyone else: you can send the boy out of the country, but you cannot send the country out of the boy.
Decades ago Jigar Moradabadi died on the same day as Pandit Govind Ballabh Pant. Again Pant’s death was banner headlines and Jigar was relegated to a news-in-brief. Compared to Khumar, Jigar was much the greater poet. In those days, Ramana was the most outstanding sub-editor we had on The Statesman. I approached him with my little plaint about Jigar having been slighted in news display.
Ramana was very honest. He had never heard of Jigar or, indeed, any Urdu poet. The only cultural controversy he had ever taken an interest in was the effort by some groups in Tamil Nadu to place Swati Tirunal along side the great trinity of Thyagaraja, Muthuswamy Dixitar and Syama Sastri.
That was the first time I realized that in the realm of Indian aesthetics there would always be pockets of recognition. Even those hailed as national icons have actually climbed on that pedestal by the sort of hype invented in Madison Avenue. For example, Zakir Hussain is hailed as God’s gift to Indian percussion. However, anyone born below the Vindhyas would tell you that there are at least half a dozen Mridangam players in the South, who would run rings around Zakir Hussain in the sheer mathematics of Laya.
The distribution of our cultural elite across regions also explains, I suppose, why international recognition sometimes precedes national recognition. There are other reasons for this apparent distortion, some of them embedded in our colonised obsequiousness, but the absence of an internal consensus on artistic greatness leaves London and New York with considerable weightage to identify our greats.
It is possible that Satyajit Ray’s greatness would have spread on its own outside Bengal by some process of osmosis, but the fact of the matter is that the greatness of his Pather Panchali was first beamed at us in 1956 from the West.
Ravi Shankar’s Bharat Ratna can be attributed to the fact that he understood this cardinal principle ahead of any Indian musician. Unlike most Indian musicians moulded in the limited culture of Suiwalan or Mylapore, he was exposed to cosmopolitanism as part of his brother, Uday Shankar’s troupe across Europe. Yes, he had the advantage of being trained by the great Alauddin Khan, sarod maestro Ali Akbar Khan’s father. His friendship with Dr. Narayana Menon, a musical intellectual who spanned several cultures, brought him close to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, at that stage deep into yoga and Indian aesthetics. Their joint proximity to Lord Harewood, in charge of the Edinburgh music festival in 1963, gave Ravi Shankar exposure to the West at the time when he was in his prime.
His overambitious plan to capture the West tempted him to play with the Beatles. Even though as a consequence, the sitar strummed by George Harrison in Norwegian Wood’ has traces of the raga Bageshwari, the Beatles’ association detracted from his credibility when, totally alien to crowd behaviour at Indian concerts, audiences made love at Woodstock even as Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha performed.
Anyone with any knowledge of music would inform you that Ali Akbar Khan is much the greater musicologist and that the Sitar will never sound better than it did in the hands of Vilayat Khan. Ravi Shankar grapples with his instrument; Vilayat Khan makes love to it. In fact, for sheer touch and control on the frets, the late Nikhil Bannerjee was much finer a performer than he has been given credit for. But none of these players had that quality of cosmopolitanism, which marks Ravi Shankar’s personality.
Bharat Ratna, I like to imagine, has been awarded to him because he has been both: a musician and a musical ambassador. There are better players and singers around.
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