Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  NEELUM SARAN GOUR

  REQUIEM in RAGA JANKI a novel

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  Glossary and Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  To the memory of my father, Sitawar Saran, and his guides,

  Ustad Rehmat Hussain Khan of Etawah and

  Pandit Purushottam Mishra of Allahabad,

  and all those ragas, stories,

  that formed the soundtrack of my childhood

  ‘If there’s a book you want to read and it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.’

  —Toni Morrison

  1

  You want me to talk about her after all these years? So be it. Maybe you can get a book out of all this. Me, I’m content to turn this raga into a requiem. Isn’t that what Vilas Khan did? Tuned his Todi to a note of grieving, sang it to the corpse of his father, Tansen, and the corpse raised its hand in benediction. Some years back you might have heard that raga on All India Radio every time the country went into state mourning for a leader. What, another story? Patience, it shall come. Somewhere in my rambles when its time is ripe.

  And since it’s my stories you’re after and since you are my patrons, promoters and paymasters, I’ll let loose some on you right away. But please don’t think me your chattering relic. I’m no hireling of your museum, understand this. I am an artist and we artists had our pride. Let not our shifts and rags mislead our hosts into imagining that we were subjects of lesser empires, for the sovereignty of excellence was our cause, that others could only gawp at, yes, even the most powerful, excuse my grandiloquence. This I learnt from Rajab Ali Khan Sahib, a friend of my family who used to be durbar musician at Dewas.

  He once received Rs 2500 from the maharaja of Indore. This Rajab Ali Khan was a man of whimsies, famous for the way he dealt a severe shoe-beating to a tonga-wallah who had cruelly whipped his horse and then commanded the man to drive to a mithai shop, bought two seers of jalebis and personally fed them to the whipped animal. A rare eccentric, the story ran in my family. One other weakness he had, apart from music, and that was itr. How many of you have experienced those Kannauj perfumes? Inhaled the ether that rises out of those cut-glass vials of floral oils, those visitations of rose water and rajnigandha, mimosa or acacia, sandalwood and camphor, musk or first-rain-on-parched-earth? By all accounts, an expensive taste for a mere musician, you would say and I would agree. A taste for the raees, not the poor artist. But the money that warmed his shervani pocket, earned by an evening of music, had kindled his longing. So he hailed a tonga and told the tonga-wallah to drive to the best itr shop in Indore on his way back to Dewas. He chose the best perfume. The shopkeeper looked doubtfully at him, his humble clothes, his well-worn shoes, and sized him up. When Rajab Ali asked the price he received the surly answer: ‘It is much too expensive for you, sir.’ Rajab Ali was stung. He well understood that fine semitone of disdain in the merchant’s response, he who dealt in the tiniest shifts of inflexion in a human voice.

  ‘I asked to know how much it is, sir?’ he repeated in a louder voice.

  The merchant felt the bristle of indignation and said: ‘It is Rs 150 a vial.’

  ‘And how many vials have you in stock?’ asked Rajab Ali.

  ‘Ten, sir,’ was the baffled answer.

  Rajab Ali took the banknotes out of his pocket and laid them before the dealer. ‘Then,’ he said, taking off his battered footwear, ‘be so kind, janab, as to take the whole accursed lot in your shop and pour them into my shoes!’

  Pray do not gasp. I have heard this searing shocker narrated many times in our courtyard. And there’s more of the same for you. Can you endure another one? Then listen. There was a poverty-stricken Lucknow maestro, Haideri Khan, whose only demand of the unknown raees, who’d driven up in his carriage to his dank and lowly lane with a request for a song, was a filling meal of malai and puris, enough for him and his wife, when he finished the recital. He was taken away in the carriage to an opulent mansion and the poor fool didn’t realize who his host was. Yes, none other than the heir to Nawab Saadat Ali, Ghazi-ud-din Haider himself! Later, when he’d become a court performer, at the beck and call of the young prince, he gave his employer such a piece of his mind that it thrills my heart just to remember and repeat it. The prince had summoned him on a caprice and commanded: ‘Sing to me, ustad. Make me weep today. I am in a mood for plenteous tears. Sing, and if my tears should fail to flow, be assured you shall be beheaded, make no mistake.’ The terrified maestro sang and was relieved to behold his patron’s eyes moisten and presently overflow. When he finished he was asked by a mellowed master: ‘That was stirring, ustad. Speak. How may we reward you?’ ‘Then, huzoor,’ replied Haideri Khan, ‘I beseech Your Highness never to lay such conditions on me. If you did commit the folly of rashly beheading me, think what a loss it would mean to your state. A mere princeling like you, when dead, is easily replaced, but never an artist like me.’ I can still hear Janki’s dense, throaty chortle as she removed the hookah from her mouth to laugh at this one.

  When I work myself up into a state of flaying contempt they fall over their feet to soothe my ruffled feathers, bring paan and supari for me, fuss around with rooh-afza or chai. ‘Sahiba,’ says one of the organizers, ‘what we pay you is a small token. Who can ever calculate the worth of what we receive from you?’ Sahiba! That’s quaint. As though I am an antique Baiji, kohled and hennaed and betel-chomping, my voice squelching with grainy tunes and my manner as imperious as that of an ancient mistress of a music chamber. A Baiji I am emphatically not, never was like Janki, though like her I am subject to fits of ungovernable fury, so mind your step, sirs. I am, by your leave, that other thing that you historians make so much of, a lore-mistress of the mehfil. We’ve got you cheap, sahiba, they slaver at the institute’s office. For where else shall we ever get to hear all these fine accounts? What a service to posterity this shall be. I relent, nod graciously, switch on my benign old woman’s smile. We know the threadbare truth of the situation. Like shrewd tradesmen we have been measuring our outlay and our profits. If I tell them five more stories now, it shall consume an hour and earn me this week’s allowance. I sing for my supper, yes, even as I seem to scorn payment, but it’s my stories that make up my song.

  However I must warn you that at my age things crowd in unbidden. Memory overreaches reality. And there’s something like false recall. Memory is its own insular dimension. Alauddin Khan Sahib—God rest his soul, sage that he was—in his old age lost his earthly memory and wandered about the alleys of his inner chronologies. If asked his age he answered with great simplicity that he was fifty thousand years old. Artificial memory might just be imagination intensified. When I start telling one story I often end up telling another. I may begin on one and end up telling a score. Because I carry in my memory not just the stories but the ancestors of stories too. Is that hard to understand? That stories have their parent stories and grandparent stories? I have lived long enough to have known many generations of stories with the same bloodlines, so when I tell you one I must tell you its kindred ones.

  But they are keenly interested in it all, they’ve assured me. They want to record it. They want information about a forgotten woman that only I
seem to have. They might even get a respectable institute publication about her at the end of the exercise. What is my stake, you might ask. In the old days royal musicians were gifted a gold anklet for the left foot by their patrons. A thousand rupees an hour every Tuesday and Thursday for three months is my allowance. Privately I cannot pretend I don’t need this cash. I am not like Janki who squandered her earnings on others. Or like our venerable Bande Ali Khan Sahib, that carefree anchorite of the veena, who often gave away all that he received. From the maharaja of Nepal he once received a divan made of solid silver (the same divan on which he had sat in the durbar and played Raga Sankara), gorgeous silken robes and gold mohurs. All of which he distributed among his pupils and relatives and friends. There were those two dhrupad maestros, Shadi Khan and Murad Khan, who were given a dais strewn with silver coins, a lakh and a quarter of silver coins, and everything covered with a costly carpet, and an elephant provided by the maharaja of Datia to carry away this largesse. But our two merry maestros (cap-exchange brothers, for when two musicians were the greatest of friends they exchanged their caps to seal their friendship, becoming topi-badal brothers), riding atop the swaying elephant, had lifted handfuls of coins and tossed them among the scrambling populace! And further back in time, at the court of Kumarapala, there was that celebrated musician, Solki, who was gifted 116 gold coins for his magical singing and who went and spent it all on sweets for crowds of children he met on the way. The relation between artist and patron was a delicate one, a duet of competing vanities. Two different registers of gallantry. The patrons weren’t amused but the maestros always had ready answers. Shadi Khan sweetly pleaded the cause of the deserving poor and his own mission of spreading the good word about the maharaja’s spectacular generosity. (Which elegant argument earned him a further Rs 10,000 from his impressed patron!) But Solki was banished and his home and property attached and he had to earn back his king’s favour. Far and wide did he perform, in other kingdoms and courts, earning enough money to purchase a pair of elephants, which he then humbly offered to his estranged king and was forthwith received back into his good books. Does all this extravaganza of gold and silver strike you as overly medieval? The stuff of fairy tales? It wasn’t. I have personally witnessed Janki seated on a platform beneath a peepul tree in a crowded Attarsuiya square, singing, and in a very short while the concrete platform was completely hidden beneath heaps of silver coins. They said the silver amounted to more than Rs 14,000 and the event came to be called her ‘chaudah-hazari’, event of the fourteen thousand. But she didn’t appear to be happy. She seemed ineffably weary, sad. This I have seen. I was a tiny child then.

  I should have written all this down but I didn’t. Music took up all my time. I’m pushing ninety now. There was a time when I could hold a high note without a tremor for as long as it takes a man of ordinary stride to walk across the Naini Bridge from end to end, but that was a long time ago and breathlessness overcomes me. Still, if they think my shambling tales worth this much, if I’m to be paid a thousand rupees an hour for my fuzzy memories of her and others that I have known or heard of, then so be it. My brain is sagging under this overload and it’s getting hard to carry them to the summit or the pit, whatever lies ahead. Time to offload this weight. I have given away my porcelain and my furniture, though the china was discoloured and the wood warped. I have given away my silks and georgettes though the fabric was falling apart. Burn down my costumes for their gold or silver thread, I say—as Janki’s were. Four seers of gold and seven seers of silver they got out of her lehngas and drapes and embroidered peshwazes. My own jewels I sold long ago. It’s my stories that will not fade. Take them. Help yourselves, feel free. By the grace of Saraswati and the Sayyad of Mausiqui, I am here to share what I remember of things told to me by my ustads and their ustads. Stories of musicians and songstresses and conquerors and patron benefactors. Of love and art and betrayal and loneliness and God, and especially of this woman, Janki Bai, whom I feel such an affinity with, who lived in this city exactly a hundred years ago. I will tell you what I know. Bear with me, please. I am a rasika of the remembered word and a hoarder of treasured tales. Do not nudge me awake if you see my eyes close upon a mood. But should you find the story arresting, then let us go with the flow, meandering along the modulations and variations, wandering into the unexpected and the contingent and the serendipitous, like listeners lost in the ample labyrinths of an Indian raga.

  2

  Her name lingers in certain locations still—Bai ka Bagh, Liddle Road, Rasoolabad. There is a godown on the Jawaharlal Nehru Road that is used to store Magh Mela tents and other equipment. There is a large field at the Police Lines. And a crumbling monument in the Kaladanda cemetery called Chhappan Chhuri ki Mazaar. I will tell you what I know of her and also what I guess and imagine.

  Chhappan Chhuri was Janki’s nickname—she of the fifty-six knife gashes. I don’t think that that figure, fifty-six, is to be taken literally. She herself wrote somewhere that the number of stabs far exceeded the proverbial fifty-six which was a mere metaphor, an attractive alliteration endorsed by confusion and inaccurate reportage. With time it assumed other cloaks of innuendo so that ‘Chhappan Chhuri’ suggests someone armed with many weapons of assault, a woman of lethal witchery, of potentially heart-piercing beauty—such the devilry of words. But really she was none of these. She was just a woman who’d survived a murderous attack and who carried on her body dozens of scars which would become her signature of identity, conjoined to her name, Janki Bai.

  There are three different accounts of the stabbings and no one knows which the authentic one was, and Janki’s own account is a carefully constructed fiction, challenged by other concurrent versions. In one account a crazed fan, spurned, worked his rage on her. But that does seem unlikely. She was barely eight, according to this account, when it is supposed to have happened and her protective mother could not have turned away a besotted lover from her mehfil simply because she hadn’t started entertaining audiences that way. That’s just one of those romantic stories that attach themselves to people as image enhancers for posterity. It seems that Janki herself initiated this account in the introduction to her diwan of verses, little realizing the transparent inconsistency of it. I can understand her reasons, though. She was a marked woman, quite literally, her skin torn in crumpled gullies of stitched together flesh, lines which the decades had failed to erase. That was the very first thing people saw, the disfigurement. It followed her everywhere. I can’t say if she ever really accepted it. It’s possible that it had sunk into the grain but it did not surface in her voice as any obvious ache. Nothing so trite. Rather, there was the powerful swell and soar of overcoming. But for purposes of history some subterfuge was in order, especially in times of circumspect and censored telling. And especially in situations of family shame. What is stated as an authentic truth is not so much a deliberate lie but a carefully composed face-saving fiction to answer the disquieting personal questions that are bound to crop up. Like all the plasters of lentil paste, soaked and buried in earthen pots, the unguents of sandalwood and turmeric and flour, the masks of clay-of-Multan and honey and lime, the story doesn’t quite camouflage or convince.

  But desperate efforts to conceal what has clearly remained unhealed must be respected. There was a second version in circulation, that she was attacked by a rival singer whom she had outsung at a durbar soirée organized by the maharani of Benaras. There is even a name to this shadowy assailant—Raghunandan Dubey. She was eight years old, a singing prodigy, and she defeated a much older and far more established singer, and consequently she was the victim of a jealous attack. She did not die but underwent treatment generously paid for by the maharani, who took an interest in her. And when she recovered, her mother, afraid to stay on in Benaras with all its vicious intrigues and rivalries, brought her to Allahabad and they made a life for themselves quite different from the earlier one.

  Let me first recount the concocted history, the version invented by Jank
i as preferable to what did happen. Let us place it all as Janki would want us to, the music chamber, the crowd of connoisseurs, the shy loveliness of the little songstress, who’d trained under Koidal Maharaj of Benaras himself, rendering ‘Jamuna tat Shyam khelein Hori’, and the man who came as just another one in the crowd, accepted the paan, acknowledged the itr and the proffered wine and lolled back on the bolster and listened intently. He wasn’t old and he wasn’t young. They noticed him the very first time when he produced two banknotes from his achkan pocket and beckoned to Janki. She had only just finished a song. Obligingly she slipped up to him, smiled and sank to her knees in a graceful swirl of silk and tinsel and a cascade of tinkling anklet chimes. He circled the notes around her head and tossed them into the ornate silver dish that lay alongside his bolster. They were all taken aback at the amount though they did not show it. Janki raised her jewelled fingertips to her brow in a salaam, a shy flush playing on her young face.

  He raised the standard of payments, that much was sure, and for that Janki’s mother Manki Bai was grateful. Other visitors were obliged to offer larger amounts as nazrana in virile competition and Manki counted each evening’s takings with satisfaction, tucking away the wads of money, the gold mohurs, the ropes of pearl, the rings, in grain barrels and rice urns and old chests and quilt linings. But then he sought an interview with Manki and came up with the most outrageous suggestion.

  ‘Malkin,’ he said, ‘it cannot have escaped your attention that I am taken with your daughter. I know she is yet unripe and has not had her nath-uthrai and I would like to present myself to you as a nath babu. I’m in no hurry. I can wait till she comes of age. It can’t be long now. She must be twelve . . .’

  Manki’s surprise had stupefied her temporarily but she soon recovered her wits.