Aur dhan jorti hain ri,
Mero toh dhan pritam ki poonji.
Kahu triya kin a laage drishti.
Apney kar rakhoongi kunji.
Din-din badhaye savayo, dyodho,
Ghatey na ekau gunji,
Baaz Bahadur ke saneh upar,
Nichhawar tan-man-dhanji.
Others amass wealth,
My lover is my treasure.
May no third covet my wealth,
In my hand shall I hold fast the key.
My wealth grows by the day, grows, doubles, multiplies,
Not a whit does it ever lessen.
On Baaz Bahadur do I shower my love,
Consecrate body, mind and wealth.
The songs remained songs alone, their words lost their charge, their promise faded.
In time she and Haq Sahib settled down to a rhythm of unquestioning ordinariness, unambitious about their love, exulting over nothing. At some crucial stage too her singing stopped existing for him and she came to accept that as well.
Beni reappeared most bashfully to deliver the message that Manki didn’t want to live on in Allahabad, especially on Janki’s property. She wished to go back to Benaras, open a mithai shop again.
‘Why can’t she open a mithai shop in Allahabad? Why Benaras?’ Janki wanted to know.
‘Because Benaras is her real home and Father might have come back,’ faltered Beni.
‘Also because she’d like to end her days in Benaras. Hindus who die in Benaras achieve moksha, she says.’
‘Since when did Amma become such a devout Hindu?’ asked Janki wryly.
‘Since you became such a devout Mussalman. The more devout one becomes, the other follows suit. Even to madness.’ Beni, the taciturn, had never delivered such a strong opinion before. Janki flashed him a look of amazement. She offered to finance the mithai-shop business in Benaras but Manki had refused to accept any more money from her. Beni didn’t repeat her exact words but they were to the effect that she wanted to go away and live somewhere where nobody knew she was the mother of the shameless Janki Bai. Still Janki pressed some money on Beni.
‘But how shall we repay you, Jiji?’ he asked her.
‘With a tokra of Amma’s mithai once in a while,’ answered Janki sadly. ‘It’s a taste my palate hasn’t known for some time.’
16
In early 1911 Janki recorded between sixty and seventy titles for T.J. Noble of Pathephone and was paid Rs 5000. GTL was hot on her trail and she obliged them with twenty titles for Rs 3000, promising their recording engineer Arthur Spottiswoode Clarke another twenty-four titles. Since 1911 was a hectic year, extraordinary in many ways, the promise could not be kept for another three years. A happening year for the country and for her. Allahabad was crowded with pilgrims when the Maha Kumbh Mela began in January. Thousands camped on the banks of the Ganga, ash-smeared ascetics from the great mutts of India, ordinary people come to meditate and do penance for a month, tradesmen, artists, acrobats. What made this particular Kumbh Mela special was that part of it coincided with the great industrial exhibition of the United Provinces (UP) held at Allahabad, designed to be the greatest Indian show of the century.
Janki was as excited about the crowning event of the exhibition as the rest of Allahabad’s citizenry. The 18 February event, when a Frenchman, Henri Pequet, would pilot a two-seater biplane across the Ganga, flying from Allahabad to Naini, carrying the first-ever cargo of airmail in the world! It would take off from Allahabad’s Polo Ground and land near the Naini railway station in a field cleared by convicts from the nearby Naini Jail. The event was highly publicized. Letters and cards addressed to locations all over the world were invited, to be stamped with a special magenta seal for 6 annas each before being dispatched to the sack of 6500 similar envelopes and specially designed postcards that would fly the ten-mile distance between Allahabad and Naini and earn the distinction of being part of the first aerial postal experiment in the world.
Janki sent three letters, one to Haq Sahib, one to Akbar Sahib and the third to Manki. The first one carried a love poem, the second her respectful salutations and a quip or two about what the world was coming to with gramophones recording human voices and letters flying through the air, and the third some words of deeply felt apology and appeasement to her mother and brother. She drove all the way to the Oxford and Cambridge Hostel near the grand university building being constructed on Church Road. Both the grounds of the Holy Trinity Church and the hostel were filled with crowds, eager to deposit their letters and see them stamped with the words: ‘First Aerial Post, UP exhibition, Allahabad 1911’. She knew William Holland Sahib and Wyndham Sahib somewhat, though she knew the former to be too pious to admit ‘nautch women’ into his social circle.
After its first eruption in the late 1890s, this ‘nautch girl’ business had raised its head again in the local papers from late 1910 onwards and only something like a flying postal service could temporarily eclipse it. But only temporarily. The great UP exhibition was a sort of trade fair, planned on a massive scale, an ambitious display of arts and crafts, farm produce, industrial goods and implements, and entertainment that would showcase the culture of north India. King George V was due to be crowned in June. Allahabad was milling with crowds, those who had come for the Maha Kumbh and those who had poured in for the UP exhibition. The city was one big fair, the papers bristling with criticism of the expense, the wastage, the mismanagement. When it had been a matter of a Congress meet, the papers argued, objections of order and hygiene had prevented the honourable sarkar from granting permission for any suitable site that was proposed. When it was a small matter of Tilak and Gokhale and Bipin Chandra Pal delivering a lecture to Allahabad citizens, all venues were cancelled due to technical reasons. Then in the matter of this massive jamboree, how was it that the entire segment of land extending just beyond Government House and Lowther Castle and all the way up to the Sohbatiya Bagh Tank had been requisitioned? Most outrageous was the matter of the ‘dancing girl’ celebrity, the papers stridently declared. Not just Allahabad papers but also papers from other cities of the United Provinces.
Janki followed the issue with mixed feelings, reading what the Prabasi of Calcutta said, what the Abhyudaya and the Leader of Allahabad said, and when her curiosity had been amply aroused she called for her phaeton on Sunday mornings and drove to the library in Company Bagh to read the Hindustani of Lucknow, the Fitna of Gorakhpur and the Saddharma Pracharak of Bijnor. How could the government and the organizers of the exhibition have the bad taste, the temerity to include a dancing girl’s performance in the list of special attractions?—screamed the papers. Was it only for cheap publicity and to raise funds to cover up losses incurred by gross mismanagement? Why were the young and impressionable students of the Muir Central College and the Anthony McDonnell Hindu Hostel being granted concessional passes for the performance of the said ‘dancing girl’? Would Mr Madan Mohan Malaviya kindly look into this moral issue, and what was Mr Motilal Nehru doing? And Sir Syed? Did Justice Iqbal Masud have any opinion at all? Most outrageous of all, the Leader decried, was the scandalous decision on the part of the citizens of Allahabad to present a gold medal to the said dancing girl, the star performer at the George Town Music Conference, the one and only Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta.
Janki read all this with interest and also—for she was only human—with some private sadness. It was so like the people of her city to fete the local artist with fulsome praise but to fall flat on their faces before a performer from the Big City. She knew Gauhar Jaan, had recorded alongside her in Calcutta studios and engaged in gajras, nok-jhonk and musical dangals with her at Patna and Lucknow. Gauhar was then the femme fatale of the music world. Her face appeared on matchboxes printed in Austria and on postcards in wide circulation. But by 1911 Janki’s own records were competing with Gauhar’s in every market.
Janki was generous and she well understood the power of the Big City and its easy opportunities, as well as the advantages of
a physically attractive personality. If Allahabad was offering Gauhar a medal, Gauhar richly deserved it. What hurt her pride slightly was that she, Janki, along with certain other performers of the second grade, was included in the performance in the capacity of filler artists. This, her own Allahabad that she swore by!
The letter to Akbar Sahib was delivered punctually and he rang her up and showered her with his ire.
‘I hold in my hand this aerial carpet, sahiba, that has flown through the air at the behest of an angrezi jinn. I thank you for it.’
‘Does it look different, sir, for having flown?’ she asked him facetiously.
‘Only as a note held in the beak of a pigeon would, a pigeon that has feasted on crumbs of angrezi cake for want of an Indian burfi and consequent to that unloaded his bowel-mush on this air-travelled missive!’
‘Sweetened for its flight, nonetheless, sir?’
‘As sweet as the knife-edged string of a kite, madam, that has slit the throat of every old-fashioned carrier pigeon in the land,’ he answered, gruff, though she knew him well enough to guess he was laughing.
‘There is a signature behind the letter,’ he said. ‘Henri Pequet. The Fransisi coachman of this air-carriage, I understand.’
‘You have scared away the British with your verbal onslaughts, sir. The French are now trying.’ Amazing how a bit of banter with Akbar could restore her good humour.
‘La haula wa la kuwate! We have plenty of Anglo-Indians in the city. Are we to have a population of Franco-Indians too? One of them is soon to descend upon us, did you know?’
‘I do,’ she answered. ‘But Gauhar Jaan isn’t French?’
‘She’s a number of things, or so I hear. She’s to sing at this benighted exhibition that has enraged me so much that I have written a poem about it.’
‘You must recite it to me when I visit next, Akbar Sahib. And I know about her show. I have been asked to sing in it too. As a supporting artist.’
He drew in his breath sharply. There was a silence at the other end of the line that made it clear that nothing was lost on him.
‘It is only befitting, sir. She is a guest of the city and I am a local. Also it is her that the city of Allahabad is giving a gold medal to . . .’
He erupted into a curse. ‘Not the city of Allahabad, Bibi. Only a few people who presume to speak for the city.’
‘But she is very good, sir. I have performed with her.’
‘I know, I know. Her mother Malka Jaan was good too. I know her well. The outrage of it is that you have been invited as a supporting artist. Could they not have avoided this gaffe, the kambakhts?’
‘I do not mind, sir. Not much. Only in the beginning . . .’ Her voice trailed away. But Akbar was speaking in a voice of rare sobriety, free from any of his usual perversity.
‘Remember this: you are not competing with anyone, no matter how others rate you. It is what I have learnt. Do you think I write only to plume myself that I am better than the next poet? No, none of this Ghalib Zauq nonsense for me, Bibi. I know why I write. I write because some things ask to be written. I write because some people read my verse. I write because some years remain to be lived meaningfully. Nothing more and nothing less, mark you. I write because the words find me before I find them. You would do well to regard your music likewise. Also, a prophet is never appreciated in his own country. Someone outside shall measure your worth better.’
She thanked him for his counsel, promising to call soon to hear his poem on the exhibition, and hung up, wondering what the operator in the telephone exchange made of their conversation. She remembered the time when Akbar had unloaded a particularly scathing verse into the telephone receiver and they had heard a distinct chortle and a muffled ‘Irshad’. Akbar had then launched into a lengthy monologue addressed to the invisible telephone operator about the indignity of his low calling, the ‘peeper into boudoir and privy’. She could always count on Akbar Sahib to lift her spirits.
Especially when what he predicted happened. Someone outside did measure her worth better. A letter in an official On His Majesty’s Service envelope arrived for her a few days after the conversation with Akbar. It informed her that on the occasion of the forthcoming coronation of His Majesty, the King Emperor George V, on 12 December 1911, at a special event at the forthcoming Delhi Durbar, she, Miss Janki Bai of Allahabad, had been selected to sing a song of felicitation in company with Miss Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta before the King Emperor and his royal consort, Queen Mary. The letter stipulated the kind of congratulatory song to be sung, its duration, the drift of its sentiment of allegiance and adulation, and requested an advance draft of the song to be submitted.
Excited, she wrote to Gauhar Jaan, respectfully proposing a bandish with the refrain: ‘Salamat raho, sultan-meherban’. She received a formal letter penned by Gauhar’s manager–secretary, Syed Ghulam Abbas Sabzwari, that Gauhar Sahiba wasn’t free to write back, that he had discussed the suggested song with her and regretted that Gauhar Sahiba found it below par. And that she desired that Janki Bai Sahiba be told that she, Gauhar, would choose or compose the song. Further, that she would be visiting Allahabad to sing at the UP exhibition’s event and to accept the gold medal which the citizens of Allahabad desired to present her with. If Janki Bai Sahiba was free then she, Gauhar, would take the liberty of training her in a morning’s rehearsal which would, she hoped, suffice to enable them to give a good account of themselves at the Delhi Durbar in December.
Quite crestfallen, Janki realized that under all circumstances Gauhar meant to upstage her, and she happened to mention the letter to Akbar Sahib when she called on him to hear his exhibition poem. He had declaimed the verse with zest: ‘Exhibition ki shaan anokhi / Har shai umda, har shai chokhi / Okhlidas ki naapi-jokhi / Man bhar sone ki laagat dekhi’, and she had applauded and laughed before she happened to remark that whatever the sarkari investment was, it was expected that tickets for Gauhar Jaan’s performance would cover a considerable part of the costs, and in her capacity as local artist she too would contribute her mite to the coffers.
He swore. And added, ‘I hear the maharaja of Datia took her down from her high horse, your Madam Gauhar Jaan, and so did young Faiyaz Khan.’
‘She is a fine enough lady. I have performed with her. Recorded with her.’
‘I do not doubt it.’
‘As her friend and fellow artist I shall invite her to my humble home. For a meal and then for some lessons in singing which she means to impart to me.’
He barked with raucous laughter. ‘Then, Baiji, you shall not grudge me the pleasure of inviting both of you to my humble home too. After she has taught you to sing, that is.’
‘I accept your kind invitation, sir, and I have no doubt that she will too.’ Janki smiled. The way he rolled his eyes might have given her some inkling that this would be no ordinary visit.
To her all he said was, with his drollest expression, ‘I shall now apply myself to writing a eulogium in her honour. And yours as well.’
So Janki wrote back to Gauhar that for her part, she was open to any supervision that Gauhar Sahiba might think fit. That she looked forward to having the pleasure of Gauhar Sahiba’s gracious company at her home in Sabzi Mandi on the morning of the day of her arrival. And that she took the liberty of accepting, on her behalf, a generous invitation extended to them both by the well-known poet Akbar Ilahabadi at his villa, Ishrat Manzil.
She received an equally graceful reply, albeit conveyed by Gauhar’s manager–secretary, Sabzwari, and in the next few days she set her household staff to preparing for the visit of the glamorous diva from Calcutta, Gauhar Jaan.
News of Gauhar’s impending visit, on the appointed day, seemed to have leaked out into the immediate neighbourhood. Glancing through the chinks of the curtains at her second-floor windows Janki saw clusters of people hanging about the lane in a state of suspense. It was the same in her own household. There was excitement in the air. Her musicians were tricked out in their festive fine
ry and so were her domestic staff. Sayyad Sahib and Makhdoom Baksh and Ghaseete were resplendent in freshly ironed silk shervanis while Rahimuddin, Mian Jaan and Ral Lal Bhatt had turned up reeking of scented hair oil and the ministrations of a fancy barber. Samina, Farida and Feroza dressed in their best, with flowers in their braids and an extra-abundant mass of shimmering glass bangles tinkling on their wrists halfway up to their elbows. Jallu Mian flitted about wearing a fur cap at a rakish angle and even the two bawarchis, Bhaggu Mian and Baddu Mian, wore fresh muslin kurtas and sashes befitting chefs of a royal entourage. Janki marvelled at the preparations her staff had made in order to make themselves presentable to their celebrity guest. She herself had chosen to wear a pale onion-pink ensemble embroidered with silver thread, a quiet, functional outfit as befitted a hostess.
Requiem in Raga Janki Page 21