Requiem in Raga Janki

by Neelum Saran Gaur

  ‘Just a minute, sahibji,’ she interrupted. ‘Do I understand you right? You wish to pay bed-money for my daughter, who is yet a child, and be her first client? You take my breath away, sir. We are insulted. But we are prepared to overlook this injury. Let me hear no more of this nonsense! And please, do not darken our doors again, we beg you.’

  He drew in his breath. ‘You are insulted by an honourable offer, say you, malkin? Do not forget your place, my lady-whore-madam, and put on airs unseemly to your standing.’

  ‘What did you call me?’ she cried. ‘We are no street women, you gutter-slime. We are performers of music!’

  ‘Yes. Performers in the divan-khana, and the couch chamber too!’ he scoffed. ‘Don’t put up your price, my clever bazaar-crone. I know she is a twelve-year-old virgin. State your demands. I can meet them and let’s have none of this warm-up alaap.’

  ‘Why so desperate, babuji?’ Manki taunted him. ‘Benaras is full of courtesans. Each more tuneful and warm of flesh than the last. I advise you to go to Dal Mandi and look up at the overflowing balconies. That’s the place for you. This is the place for musicians and discerning connoisseurs.’

  ‘I do not want any old singing harlot,’ he retorted. ‘I want this girl alone.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Manki.

  ‘You know why. Do I have to spell it out?’

  ‘Because she is a peerless beauty? Because she is a virgin? And a singer of matchless excellence and you can pimp her about and live off her takings when you are done with her? Ah, I know the likes of you!’

  ‘Listen, woman. Don’t try my patience. I am a sipahi in the angrez police fauj and a high-class Dvij Brahmin. Were it not for your daughter, I’d have plucked out your foul tongue from the root and cast it into the cesspool!’

  She put her hands together in mock farewell. ‘Please’, she said, ‘let us not detain you any more, my brave babuji. Beni Prasad, show babu sahib the door. And please do not sully our chambers again. I warn you, sir, and for sure we here shall not mourn your absence.’

  He left that day but was back the next evening. He even made a farmaish, a request for a song, asking for Janki’s most popular number ‘Maza le le rasiya nayi jhulni ka’.

  ‘Come here, girl.’ He beckoned to Janki when she finished the song she was singing to the gathering. And when a trembling Janki, frail and delicate, came and seated herself in front of him, he asked her to take off the earrings she wore. Uncomprehending, she obeyed.

  ‘Put them in my hand,’ he commanded.

  She did so, puzzled.

  Then he produced from his achkan pocket a jewel case and asked her to open it. She gasped in surprise when she beheld the contents—the most gorgeous jhumka-and-jhoomar set, complete with forehead pendant, exquisitely worked in gold.

  ‘Fair exchange.’ He smiled blandly at her. ‘You give me yours as a keepsake and I give you these.’

  Janki was trained in professional coquetry, well rehearsed in rejoinder and repartee.

  ‘You are an unwise trader, sir,’ she remarked in coy wonder.

  ‘No, but I am ready to trade my iman for that little ring you wear on your nose, lassie.’

  She well knew his meaning and lowered her eyes, flushing. For a man was propositioning her in full view of the mehfil.

  The nose ring, as you must know, was the prepubertal courtesan’s mark of virginity, surrendered to a carefully chosen volunteer as soon as she came of age, which is a polite way of saying that she menstruated for the first time. The nath-removing feast in the courtesan household was as splendid as a wedding, and for the next few weeks or months the little girl received sexual training from a much older man. It was a sort of apprenticeship, an orientation into a way of life. Also a compliment to the man chosen for his virility or prudently accepted for his wealth and generous endowment to the household for the delectable function of deflowering a virgin. There was room for terror, for cruelty and pain, for delight and, who knows, maybe even for romance in the transitory connection between a small girl and a seasoned man.

  That day Manki called her daughter sternly from the doorway.

  ‘Jankiya, come here immediately, bitiya!’

  And when Raghunandan Dubey was leaving, she barred his way to the staircase.

  ‘I shall trouble you, sir, not to trifle with a child’s unformed heart. Janki is too young and untried to fathom your ill intentions.’

  ‘She is to be tried sometime or other, no?’ he asked, leering.

  Something in his insolent air provoked her beyond the limits of discretion. She drew herself up and called into the music room—‘Paraga, bring me a mirror, girl. And bring Janki with you. Now Jankiya, take this mirror and hold it up to this fine babu sahib’s face.’

  Which Janki, trembling, did, not daring to lift her eyes to look the guest in the face.

  ‘Repeat after me.’ Manki’s voice was imperious. ‘Babu sahib, I have danced the Shagun-Nek for the angrez laat sahib at the raja of Benaras’s kothi. And I am the famous beauty of the city of Benaras that people come from distant places to behold.’

  Manki intoned the words like a high priestess pronouncing an incantation, pausing after each clause. Poor Janki, red with shame, repeated each segment of Manki’s scornful declaration in a timid monotone.

  ‘Tell him—I am the disciple of the glorious Hassu Khan Sahib of Gwalior and Lucknow and the venerable Koidal Maharaj, and I shall be empress of the world of music very soon. But you, sipahiya, what are you? Look at your face and tell me. A mere jamadar in the police fauj.’

  It got too hot for Raghunandan to take. With a mighty blow he struck the mirror out of Janki’s hand. Brow steaming, a nerve pulsing wildly in his temple, he gathered the spittle in his mouth and spat with such force into Janki’s face that she staggered back against the wall, the gob of spit spattering her cheek, streaking a trail down her betel-reddened lips.

  ‘You dare hold up a mirror to my face, gutter-slut!’ he shouted, his voice cracking in rage. ‘You will never ever be able to hold a mirror to your own! I promise you that, on oath, or my name’s not Raghunandan Dubey!’

  And with that he thumped down the stairs and was gone.

  He slipped into the courtyard one afternoon when Manki was on the terrace, minding the pickles and the papads, and Shiv Balak out on one of his wrestling events, and Lakshmi asleep in her kothri. Janki, busy applying henna to her feet, froze at the sight of him. She’d heard a buggy drive up and the door creak on its hinges, and she thought it was Beni Prasad back from flying his kite. Then she turned and saw Raghunandan. In his hand he carried a sword.

  This is how Janki might have wanted posterity to imagine the episode. We cannot change the events of our lives but we can script them differently for our peace of mind, internalizing our fictions until they turn into our irrefutable realities. She wanted to be remembered as a famous sought-after beauty, an irresistible object of desire.

  For this business of beauty and ugliness is an old one in the domain of art, falsely divided as it was then into sacred and secular, temple and durbar. And because her kind of music was saturated with the sap of sensuous love, soaked through and through in longing and desire, it became as much a celebration of the heart’s finer moments, a flourish of the body as a flight of the soul. Janki, scarred, ordinary, had to contend with her disfigurement in the full glare of public gaze and turn it into a strength. Though, I’m sure she didn’t quite manage to outgrow a sadness till well into middle age, by which time she had finally managed to convince herself that music wasn’t just a performance but a soul mission.

  It couldn’t have been easy and it was a problem that women performers had to handle. No one minded an ugly male maestro but a woman had to be easy on the eye. The beauty of songstresses is something even Amir Khusrau was constrained to write about as part of his durbar duties as head librarian at the court of Jalaluddin Khilji. We can see them, strumming instruments, singing, telling anecdotes and jokes, playing chausar and chess, riding, dancing.
Their names have come down to us: Dukhtar Khasa, Nusrat Bibi, Meherafroz. I don’t know if Khusrau enjoyed writing verses in praise of the beauty and winsome affectations of these durbar nymphets but he entered into the spirit of the thing, celebrating shringar with shringar.

  Whenever Hassu Khan, in his expansive tales, went overboard with his stories about the celebrity songstresses of Muhammad Shah Rangila’s court, Janki flinched inwardly and sulked. She did not know whether he was provoking her to greater efforts or giving way to senile ecstasies of male adoration. The lovely names promised visions of bejewelled, gauzy, tuneful houris in a glittering durbar tipsy with music: Noor Bai, Ramjani, Mani Chakmak, Gulab, Uma Bai, Tanno, Zeenat Bhajji. But he looked at her crestfallen face out of the corner of his eye and added that of them all only Rahiman Bai of Charkhari’s stunning looks remained in historical memory—of the rest, only their skill. In fact, said Hassu craftily, nothing is said of the appearance of the two most famous songstresses at Muhammad Shah Rangila’s court. Panna Bai and Kamal Bai were urbane and soft-spoken and artists par excellence, not tawaifs. And since he was on the subject, there was a child prodigy, a singularly unattractive little girl, daughter of a singer at the Jaipur court in the nineteenth century, who was trained by the famous Bairam Khan, quite as meticulously as she, Janki, was being. The little girl grew up to win the title of Bharat Kokila Gauki Bai and was one woman widely respected even by the greatest of ustads. Here and there a name might crop up of a singer who was also a famous beauty. Like Nanhi Bai Khetriwali, disciple of Tanras Khan, court poet and musician to Bahadur Shah Zafar. And another one, the same Rahiman Bai Charkhariwali. And the celebrated Chandrabhaga Bai, royal favourite of the Scindias of Gwalior, but she is remembered more as the mother of the well-known Bhaiyya Sahib Ganpath Rao, illegitimate son of Jiyaji Rao Scindia, though some said he was the son of Daulat Rao himself. What Janki had to remember, said Hassu, was the great tradition of female maestros to which she belonged, and Hassu recited the roll call of names that set Janki’s pulse beating. Chitra Bai, Imanbandi, Sukhbadan Nartaki, Gulbadan Nartaki in Benaras in the early half of the nineteenth century. In Agra Khursheed Bai and Chanda Bai; in Kanpur that mistress of khayal and thumri, Amani Jaan Gayika; in Rampur Zadi Gayika and Mammi Gayika who were specialists of the tappa. Forgive me, Hassu cleared his throat in an access of emotion, we old lore-masters get carried away. I love the very names, the scent of them, the sound, so bear with me. I could recite them from memory like the syllables of a new musical raga: Sundar Bai and Latifan, both sisters of Rahiman Bai. Sharfo Bai and her mother Sedhu Bai. Jeesukh Bai, Dhooman, Kamla Bai, Hira Bai, Khajur Bai, Bandi Jaan and Lazzat Baksh and Jaan Baksh and Ballo and Vazeeran Dhrupadwali.

  Janki wished to ask whether in this rain of names there were any who were ugly like herself. She put her question with timid deference: ‘Are there any pictures in any nawab or badshah’s tasveer-khana, sir?’

  Hassu just might have divined her trouble for he hastened to add that all he knew was that they were women maestros of khayal, dhrupad and tappa, not just the thumri, and respected as maestros, not as durbar women alone, for even God and His angels must surely honour music, Allah forgive him this impiety!

  Janki’s brain plucked its own consolations and turned them into personal parables. At the monastery at Sarnath where the Buddha preached the worthlessness and impermanence of the body, she’d heard a bhikshu tell a story and never forgot it. There was, say ancient Pali chronicles, a maestro named Guttil who lived at the time of the Buddha in the city of Ujjaini. Once, smitten by the overpowering beauty of a kul-vadhu, a city courtesan, he approached her handmaidens with an amorous proposition. Now, those ganikas were high-profile women of great class and affluence, enormous style and sophistication, and so an ordinary musician’s overtures made no impression on the lady, who scornfully turned down the maestro’s offer. So Guttil picked up his been, which is a string instrument and ancestor of the veena, and began serenading the haughty beauty. The music worked such enchantment on the lady’s senses that she forgot herself and sped down the steep staircase in the direction whence the outpouring melody came. In her haste she lost her balance and fell through an unbarred window, plunging to her death at the musician’s feet. Thus much the pride of the foolish body before the power of music!

  And at the temples of Benaras Janki had heard pandits discourse on form and name and essence. And how that celestial minstrel, Narada, maestro to the gods, learnt bitter lessons on the truth of the body and the truth of music. Once, singing and making merry, he found himself in an unfamiliar city, a city of palaces and the most beauteous citizens, all lotus-faced and clad in divine raiments. What was most puzzling to him was that, prepossessing though they were, they were all deformed in some way or other. Some lacked feet, some had no thighs, some were without a waist and some were throatless. There were hunchbacks, toothless faces and beautiful bodies without arms. Struck by the spectacle of so many lovely forms in such a dire state of mutilation, Narada addressed them with great reverence: ‘O marvellous beings of divine beauty, lotus-faced and divinely dressed, who may you be? Be you gods, gandharvas or rishis? You sit immersed in song, playing on celestial instruments, but how came you by this mutilation? Who ruined your sweet forms and brought you to this sorry pass?’

  Said the divine creatures: ‘Sir Sage, our bodies live in great affliction. Whither shall we betake this pain? Who shall relieve this suffering? Sir, we are ragas and raginis and our anguish has been occasioned by a certain Narada, son of Brahma. This Narada, rapt in music, breaks all the rules. He sings dhrupad all wrong, he wanders singing all over the earth. He sings with scant regard to the time of day, the rhythm and the season. It is his lawless ravishment of the rules of music that has broken us.’

  Narada was astonished and penitent and requested: ‘O esteemed ragas and raginis, where may I learn the proper rules? The proper timing, rhythm, notes? Who shall teach me? This I do ask in all humility and hope that I may, at some foreseeable future, when I am better schooled in music, heal your injuries and make you whole.’

  Thereupon the ragas made reply: ‘Not we, not we, O Sage. Only Saraswati, she who is the goddess of music, can instruct thee.’

  So Narada travelled to the great Shubhra Mountain in the high Himalayas and sat in meditation, invoking Saraswati. For a hundred years he practised austerities, neither ate nor drank, until the goddess, appeased by the rigour of his devotion, appeared before him and instructed him in the ancient rules of music, the ragas and their families and their lineage, their countries of origin, their notes and proper paces and the fifty-six crore variations and their countless internal subvariations and modulations. And from this learning did music heal the disfigurement of the ragas and restore them to beauty and wholeness. For beauty of the flesh is a contingent thing, only the apsaras and the nymphs of the waters and the sylphs of the air possess its constant blessing. But Saraswati, in her alabaster light, awakens that other dimension, that blessedness which heals and makes whole. The mirror of the perfect note shall show you the truth of the soul, not your face.

  To see the image of your truth in the slow waters of a river, something like the Benaras Ganga at dawn just after the Brahmamuhurta, when your solitary voice arches like a dark- dispelling early bird and descends into the stream and flaps its wings in joy and takes off again, ah, that was music, the riyaz that Hassu prompted with stories that thrilled Janki. The swara was the ultimate mirror, said Hassu, the shining, immaculate, perfect note, held in absolute, unwavering stillness. And this, mark you, is not the mirror that mere vanity preens itself at. This transparency comes from utter fidelity to the inner forms which exist, who knows, in dimensions beyond physical sound, as do the peaks of the Himalayas in realms beyond. That sort of thing happens in a rare and luminous moment sometimes but an artist has to strive a lifetime for it. It comes unexpectedly but it is enough to keep him or her going on the chosen path even if it is a hard and thankless one.

  I have had it happen to
me and I have heard it told of others far more famous. There was an instant when Abdul Karim Khan Sahib appeared to freeze upon a certain note and no sound seemed to emerge from his throat. The tanpuras went on playing, the fingers of the tabla players continued galloping on their tablas and those in the audience held their breath in wonder. And Khan Sahib’s voice seemed to have just vanished. It had merged so purely, so perfectly with the tanpuras and harmoniums that an auditory illusion had been generated. Swarsiddhi—that’s the word for it, to be a siddha of the swara, an adept of the note, one who has perfected the miracle of self-disappearance at a magic moment of transfiguration.

  And those that have the good fortune to take this holy dip in the still waters of primal swara come up washed and sanctified like prayerful pilgrims drenched in grace. Then even an ugly woman shines with a radiance that touches us with exaltation.

  It’s said of Roshanara Begum, niece and disciple of Abdul Karim Khan, that she was fat and dark of skin and her most fervent admirers wouldn’t have dreamt of calling her beautiful. But when she let loose the power of her lustrous voice, its smooth suppleness and overpowering strength of throw and depth, all produced with an expression of perfect tranquillity on her face, she’d turn into a transcendentally beautiful woman. That’s what music did in Janki’s case. So that, eventually, after the trouble had been wrestled with and conquered and dismissed, at the end of many years, she could tell the maharaja of Rewa: ‘Funkaar ka imtahan soorat se nahin, seerat se liya jaata hai, huzoor.’ The test of an artist is the art, sir, not the face.

  But that story will have to wait for later. Let me retrace my steps, feel my way back along this alphabet of notes to where I can pick up again a different flight of this same raga.

  3

  But there’s this third account of Janki’s stabbing. Only Raghunandan Dubey’s name figures in it but there are other unexpected players. It emerges from the evidence of some contemporaries that Raghunandan Dubey was no musician but a junior sipahi of the police force. He used to visit the shop in the mornings when he knew that only Lakshmi and Janki were there. They had a house with a shop in front, a tiny mithai-and-puri shop belonging to Shiv Balak, the milkman-wrestler, tucked away in the narrow lanes of Barna ka Pul in Benaras, close to the bridge on the Varuna river.