‘You will have to ask the lady, Janab,’ quipped Akbar. Turning to Janki, he questioned most playfully: ‘What say you, Baiji? Shall we allow him into our mehfil?’
Janki was unaccountably flustered. ‘It is not for me to say, sir,’ she said. For an instant the usually composed Janki had been rendered speechless.
‘Then, stay, Vakil Sahib, since the lady has no objection. For with women you know as well as I, when the decree is nay, the meaning is aye, when the answer be evasive, consider it persuasive.’
Suddenly Janki was desperate to get away but Akbar had queries about music that her song appeared to have kindled.
She spent the next hour discussing Raga Malhar with him, its many forms and shades. Megh Malhar, Sur Malhar, Gaud Malhar, Jayant Malhar, Ramdasi Malhar, Birju ka Malhar, Meera ka Malhar, Mian ka Malhar. She told him of Tansen’s contribution, the kanhda-ang, the andolit or wavering gandhar. The story of the Gujarat courtesan who was given to dropping her nose ring into a well and then singing Malhar to bring on the rains until the waters of the well brimmed over and her nose ring appeared. The story of Meera, Naik Gopal’s daughter, who made the waters of the Indus flow upstream with her Malhar. She sang snatches of Mian Shyam Rang’s famous composition ‘Aaye badra kare kare’ that he’d sung for Muhammad Shah Rangila. For his part he told her of the article he had read about how Helmholtz had taught himself to hear the pitch of incredibly high frequencies, the ultrasonics, which were known to create fog, smoke and rain. Haq Sahib sat, quietly listening, in engaged silence.
It was almost an hour later that she left. To the basket of guavas that she had brought him as a gift he quipped, his eyes twinkling with roguish merriment: ‘I used to say that this city holds nought but Akbar and guavas, madam. Now I must allow that it holds Janki Bai too. Khuda Hafiz.’
But when she asked if he had a telephone he crowed: ‘My misfortune it is, Baiji, to need one. Ummeede-chashme-murowwat kahan rahi baqi / Zariya baton ka jab sirf teleephon hua.’
13
Hassu, on one of his visits from Lucknow, brought the tantalizing news that the angrezes had invented a talking machine. ‘You shout out your song, loud enough to rouse the dead in their graves, into a conical, bugle-like thing. Your bawling voice makes a needle go round and round and it cuts grooves on—whatsitcalled?—ah! Zinc or wax, I’m not sure which. Their ships carry off your voice like the farishtas bear away your rooh—to their karkhanas in Germania, and there they are pressed into flat, round plates the size of a medium-sized thali, only made of shellac. You put that on another flat plate, like you put a pot on a hob, and you wind up the contraption with a handle. And wah! You can hear your own voice! You hear yourself sing and at the end you hear yourself bellow out your own name: “My name is Hassu Khan.” Or “My name is Mian Shyam Rang.” Or “My name is Tansen.” Except that neither this Hassu Khan nor that Mian Shyam Rang nor Tansen would surrender to the indignity of reducing their khayal to a niggardly three-minute cheez!’
But though his brother Haddu Khan had first refused to have anything to do with the infernal instrument and had cursed it with brimstone and fire, it had survived and thrived, and he’d had to relent. A Gaisberg Sahib and a Hawd Sahib had recorded hundreds of songs by Calcutta singers—Miss Gauhar Jaan, Miss Sushila, Miss Rani, Miss Binodini and also a few men. Records and phonographs had begun finding a market in Calcutta, advertised by British manufacturing firms like Western Trading Company, Harold and Company, T.E. Bevan and Company. There were even some Indian ones like Dwarkin and Sons and M.L. Shaw. They’d been selling cylinders and phonographs for houses like Pathe, Edison and Columbia. But the giant among them all was called GTL, short for the Gramophone and Typewriter Company Limited.
It was a stirring experience to be able to hear your own voice that way, thought Janki. Onstage, during riyaz and during mehfils, you generated the song, birthed it, you lived its breath and heartbeat. To watch it from afar, delivered, to be able to hold on to it, to be able to return to each note’s immaculate, irreducible moment, was an unimaginable prospect. She broke the news to Hassu that she too had recorded for the Gramophone Company he spoke of. She played him one of the first recorded songs. He sniffed, shook his head.
After a discreet interval she telephoned Akbar Sahib to fix up another meeting where, she explained, she could enjoy the slings and arrows of his criticism of the poems he might have had the generosity to peruse. He bawled back at the top of his voice, almost deafening her, that she was welcome on the coming Sunday when the district court would be closed and the sahibs resorted to their churches to redeem their sins and avert their entry into jahannum. She asked why he found it necessary to shout. He answered, cursing the Satan-begotten instrument, black as its progenitor, the telephone, that he, Akbar, was not Janki Bai Ilahabadi whose voice was said to carry all the way from the Police Lines to Rasoolabad. She replied that his voice had the power to condemn a man or to acquit him, as Khuda’s voice could. He answered with a bristling couplet: ‘Speak not to me of Khuda, Baiji: Rakabiyon ne rapat likhwai hai ja ja ke thane mein / Ki Akbar naam leta hai Khuda ka is zamane mein!’ She laughed and responded with an impromptu couplet of her own: ‘Kiski jurrat ki Judge Sahib ko koi giraftar kare? Jinki zabaan se har daroga, har thanedar dare.’ She heard him chuckle with merriment, then he said: ‘I shall await your august presence at ten on Sunday morning, Baiji. Itwar ko dus baje aapke aane ki muhurat hai, Baiji Janki jinki door-door tak shohrat hai.’
And that’s the way it started, this remarkable comradeship of wit and repartee, stanza and song between Janki Bai Ilahabadi and Akbar Ilahabadi. On the appointed Sunday she was gratified to find that he had gone through all her poems and was primed up with scorn for some and grudging approval for some.
‘This, Baiji, that you call your Diwan-e-Janki, has all the promise of an unripe mango on the bough, fragrant and sharp, but it awaits a good summer storm to release it from the branch and fling it on the bruising cobblestones of life.’
‘What good a scarred fruit, sir?’ she asked.
‘Only a turbulence of nature or of fate can deal the wound that educates the pen. You would not reveal your age the other day, Baiji, when I asked. Time is what these verses need. I spent . . .’
‘I do remember—forty years,’ she put in. ‘Must I wait forty years for the fruit to ripen, sir? When like Aurangzeb’s beloved, Hirabai, I would much rather leap into the air and pluck the mango on the bough than wait for it to fall into my lap?’
‘Then, madam, pickle your unripe fruit in the spice of affectation and convention and hope your Diwan-e-Janki does not sicken and mould over in the fullness of time. For this I do predict: neither a Diwan-e-Khaas or a Diwan-e-Aam is it going to be . . .’
She started laughing at the Diwan-e-Aam pun.
‘Your own poetry, sir, is both khaas and aam,’ she observed. ‘You excel in both, so far as I can judge.’
‘Well said.’ He beamed. ‘Different compartments of the mind, as in these benighted trains that the angrez has brought us. Some of my poetry travels in the second class and some in the first class. Much of it travels intermediate.’
A tonga had driven up, horses’ hoofs clopping on the stone flags without. There was a rustle and stir of the curtains, a movement, and someone entered the room, gently inclined his head and salaamed Akbar Sahib, and turning in her direction, salaamed her as well. She started. It was the intruder of her earlier visit.
‘Ah, Abdul Haq Sahib come again!’ greeted Akbar heartily. ‘I might have known. I might have guessed.’
‘May I make bold as to ask how and why?’ Abdul Haq had a deep, suave voice.
‘Your appointed hour was five in the evening. What magnet draws you here at ten?’
Abdul Haq smiled mysteriously. ‘Urgencies of a case, huzoor,’ he intoned in a low, bashful voice.
‘Can you perchance have forgotten that Baiji was to call at ten and your own appointment with me was at five? Come, come, this senile Akbar is not so far gone in foolishn
ess as not to know what brings you here, in such unholy haste, at ten! I see that I have underestimated you, Haq Sahib. I knew you to be a man of the courts. But that you are as subtle in paying court comes as a surprise to me.’
Janki flushed, quite out of her depth. Abdul Haq acknowledged Akbar Sahib’s witticism with a gentle bow and a laugh.
‘Let us then assume that it is music that is the magnet.’ Akbar lifted his eyes to gaze solemnly at a fixed point above the skylight, his typical stance when he was creating a provocative verse. ‘I swear it is her song that draws me to her lane / But mayhap it is her sweet self that beckons me again.’
There was something in this playful exchange, this male coquetry, that rather incensed Janki and, not to be outdone, she broke in with a protest: ‘Nay, gentlemen, the voice shall be silent and the sarangi and drum / In my lane of music no stranger can come.’
That was when Abdul Haq turned and looked her full in the face. He thought an instant, then responded in his deep, suave voice: ‘When last the lady sang, she beheld no danger / In my unworthy self she saw no stranger.’
‘Wah, wah!’ cried Akbar, ‘You outdo yourself, janab!’ He repeated the couplet in ecstasy: ‘When last the lady sang she beheld no danger / In my unworthy self she saw no stranger. Kya khoob!’
Janki could have sworn it was all a cultured social game of riposte and repartee, words and verses.
‘You have written a couplet, Vakil Sahib,’ remarked Akbar with a whimsical croak of a laugh. ‘Who could have credited you with the secret of consorting with the Muse, sir?’
‘It is the first—and only—couplet of my life,’ confessed Haq.
‘That calls for a reward. A first couplet! And Baiji shall be gracious enough to vouchsafe it to you, I daresay. A song, Baiji, a prize for Sheikh Abdul Haq Sahib!’
So she sang, without accompaniment or forethought, some of her recently recorded songs.
A full five years after the very first recordings of Indian singers were done in Calcutta by Gaisberg and Hawd, a letter had arrived for Janki from a certain Mohammad Aslam Saife of Lucknow, introducing himself as one of the directors of the newly formed Hague, Moode and Company, Lucknow. He wrote not just on his own account but offered to put her in contact with the representatives of the Gramophone and Typewriter Company Limited (GTL), William Conrad Gaisberg and George Walter Dillnutt. The result of the ensuing correspondence between them was a journey to Delhi in March 1907 and twenty-two recordings. Of these, seven titles were initially released. Produced by Deutsche Grammophon, A.G., Hanover, they were re-pressed at Sealdah by GTL. Janki had been paid Rs 250 for the first lot of single-side discs. She had been amazed to learn that the total number of these single-sided discs sold was 2408. These sahibs had come, wearing their tropical suits and pith helmets, unacquainted with Indian music and uninterested in it, but with a shrewd eye on the possibility of the money to be earned, using Western technology to carry music from the mehfil to the Indian market. And they made big money. Later she did too—by the standards of the times. Her first records were reissued as double-sided concert records again and again until the number rose to 12,825 pieces sold by 1911 alone. Out of these the first seven discs alone accounted for 3746.
When she had played the first one released—‘Mere hal zaar ki ai buto tumhein kya kisi ko khabar nahin’—to herself in the privacy of her divan-khana, she had felt faint with the unfamiliarity of this new excitement. It was as though she was meeting herself the very first time, her ideal self, not the musty, workaday companion-self she knew within herself but a finished and perfected being in which all that was possible and potential, all that was promised her in her best moments, had converged in a magical manifestation. It wasn’t, it couldn’t be her, and yet it was. The cool, half-laughing proclamation at the close: ‘My name is Janki Bai Ilahabadi,’ sealed her incredible claim to this miraculous avatar of self, and she had played and replayed the entire set dozens of times.
She sang four of these that day for Akbar and Haq Sahib: ‘Chubh gayi jiyabeech pyari chhab tihari’, ‘Janeman jo nazara na hoga’, ‘Rum-jhum badarwa barse’ and ‘Ram kare kahin naina na uljhe’. She sang without accompanists or lyrics in front of her, out of the fullness of her elation, and when she finished she was surprised to see her audience of two, for she had quite forgotten their presence, and overcome with embarrassment, she apologized for being carried away and having imposed on them more music than they had bargained for.
‘On the contrary, madam, you do us great honour,’ murmured Akbar, ‘for you offered us the true voice in its original splendour, not the one that rises from a wound-up machine. I hear there was a stampede in Johnstonganj when these songs of yours were played and the police had to be called from the Kotwali to restore order. I do not wonder.’ But like Hassu he frowned and sniffed.
Abdul Haq Sahib, however, wanted to know where he could acquire a gramophone. She replied that a shop in Johnstonganj was said to have provided some aficionados, that she could write to Mohammad Aslam Saife Sahib or Dillnutt Sahib and arrange one from Lucknow or Calcutta.
‘Madam is most kind. As for me, I am prepared to go to Calcutta to buy one, Bai Sahiba, believe me,’ said Haq Sahib gallantly. He looked about to add something but stopped short. Akbar shot him a piercing look.
It was around this time that a new addition to their ensemble appeared in Janki’s house—the harmonium. Naseeban’s household had held a harmonium but no classical musician worth his salt would stoop to use it. Janki had heard of the charismatic Bhaiyya Sahib Ganpatrao, love child of Jiyaji Rao Scindia and the beautiful Chandrabhaga Devi, who was an absolute wizard on the harmonium but she herself had some reservations about the instrument. Initially she found it outlandish but Chandra Bhan Dutt argued in its favour with such persuasive ardour, sang so meltingly as he plied the bellows with his left hand and rippled the keys with his right, that she was won over. Chandra Bhan Dutt was not a musician but a dealer in musical instruments and had a shop in Chowk Gangadas. When she pointed out that she found the harmonium too firangee, altogether too European for her liking, that it could not be tuned onstage and that it was impossible to play a sliding meend on it or a tremulous andolan, he drew the gleaming new instrument towards him and after ceremonially seeking her permission, launched into a trilling Punjabi ballad that took his voice into the most terrifically intricate tappa tremolos:
‘The gallant Siddha Bhog Dutt, who assumed the title of sultan, made Arabia his new home.
There he was called Meer Sidhani.
He worshipped Brahma and was a devotee of the Holy Five.
He offered his head for the sake of Hussain.
Rahab’s seven sons laid down their lives for the love of Hussain.
O descendants and followers of Hussain, do not ever forget the Dutts . . .’
Janki was impressed. ‘I did not know you are such a good tappa singer,’ she observed. ‘But what is this ballad you just sang?’
‘It’s a folk song sung in our Dutt homes during this lunar month of Mohorrum, Bai Sahiba.’
‘But aren’t you Hindus?’
‘Brahmins to the core. But there used to be a centuries-old saying about us: Dutt sultana, na Hindu na Mussalmana. And a legend about Dutts having a vision of Hussain’s horse during the days of Mohorrum. My own grandfather did, though the vision has now left us, it seems.’
Janki was keenly interested and asked about the legend. A Brahmin community, cherishing its interior lore, belonging to two faiths without abdicating either. This was an idea that had been growing on her lately.
‘It’s said that we are descended from Ashwatthama, Dronacharya’s banished son,’ Chandra Bhan told her. ‘We are traders. Business took us to Arabia in the seventh century—to the port of Al Hera near Basra. We were admirers and supporters of Imam Hussain, though we were orthodox Brahmins, and some of us fought in the battle to avenge the death of Hussain. My grandfather told me the name of the Arab general on whose side the Dutt Brahmins fought but I c
an’t remember it now. Later our families turned east and migrated back to the Punjab over a period of time and settled down in large numbers near Sialkot and in Rajasthan. There are plenty of us here in Allahabad and Benaras.’
‘Well, Dutt Sahib, your singing and your story far exceed the attractions of this newfangled harmonium that you have brought, which can never, never compete with the sarangi. I am sure that neither Makhdoom nor Ghaseete will approve.’
‘Madam,’ argued Dutt, ‘take my word for it—the harmonium is the instrument of the future. It is loud enough for a large concert hall. It is easy to learn . . .’
‘Rubbish,’ said Janki, silencing him. ‘Since when did something loud and easy endear itself to audiences over real art?’
‘Beg pardon, sahiba, you are about to see that happen. With the coming of the gramophone your music has already left the mehfil and the kotha and moved into family courtyards and living rooms. Soon good wives and dutiful daughters will begin singing and they will need something easy to learn.’
‘Ah, I see our days are done, if that is what you are threatening me with.’ Janki laughed. ‘You are a true trader, as you must surely be if your ancestors were traders in Arabia. All right, awful though this tuneless, braying creature is, I shall buy one, for the sake of your song, though I dread the look on Makhdoom’s face when he sees it.’
After he had salaamed and left, she tried running her fingers over the keys while trying a rhythmic motion on the pleated bellows and regretted the rash purchase with all her heart. It was Dutt’s song which sank to the bottom of her mind and lodged there. For though she never thought of it again, bits of the conversation must have taken possession of some empty recess of self.
It must have been around this time that she first contemplated converting to Islam. Initially it was not so much a spiritual impulse as a matter of social belonging, of espousing and making official a comfort zone of the mind. Inhabiting the music world in cities that possessed a culture of rich coexistence and exchange, the social category of the artist was somewhat irrelevant since the art itself was the faith. Still, faith often indwelt the art. Religion both mattered and did not matter. Hindu mythology had interestingly enough consigned performers to the Shudra domain. The Natyashastra, that divine textbook for actors, dancers and singers, conceived in the mind of Brahma as the fifth Veda and materialized through the agency of Bharat-muni, was taught by the latter to his hundred sons. But, goes the story, the sons, grown arrogant with time, took to ridiculing the rishis in their compositions and performances, whereupon the rishis laid a curse on them. Henceforth all this singing and dancing and acting would be the business of Shudras and women. Abul Fazl lists various musical sub-castes—Dhari, Qawwal, Hurakiya, Dafzan, Natwa, Kalawanth, Kirtaniya. Musical function defined a performer’s sub-caste. But religion was different. Tansen was a Kalawanth but whether he was a Hindu or a Muslim was an issue hotly debated for long. Whether he was the disciple of the Hindu saint Haridas or the Muslim saint Sheikh Muhammad Gaus was a question that provoked furious disagreement. He had two Hindu sons and two Muslim sons, but multiple marriages were common. But what’s more interesting is that he had two graves, one beside that of his pir, Sheikh Muhammad Gaus in Gwalior, the other in Vrindavan, and no one knows which, or if any, is the real one. It was latterly held that his real guru was Muhammad Adil Shah ‘Adali’. Some sources claim that he was a Brahmin from Gwalior, others that he was a Telang or a Gour. A compromise position states that Haridas was his kavya guru and Gaus his music guru. But whether he was Hindu or Muslim remains unproved and in musical tradition he is both. As to his funeral, it is not even known whether he was buried or cremated. The Persian word used in the Akbarnama is ‘supurdekhakh’, which only translates as consigned to dust.
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 16