New Delhi, Dec 19 (IANS) The musicians of yore were simpletons who put their music before themselves. Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan once asked then president Rajendra Prasad to pass a resolution in parliament that "everyone should protect the purity of raga Darbari Kanhara".
"As a badshah (president), please protect and preserve the sanctity of raga Darbari Kanhara. I had learnt the raga from the torch-bearers of Mian Tansen's family, who created the raga," Hafiz Ali told Rajendra Prasad during a meeting at Rashtrapati Bhavan.
He expressed concern that musicians were "taking liberty with the ancient raga", recounted sarod maestro Amjad Ali Khan about his father's naivete as a man of the world.
Ethos, time-zones and socio-political realities separated the "guru" and "shishya" - Hafiz Ali Khan and his illustrious son Amjad Ali Khan. But their music was a continuum down the generations since the mid-1700s, when the first of the Khans came from central Asia and settled in Gwalior.
The bloodline of the Khans - Mohammed Hashmi Khan Bangash to Amaan and Ayan Ali (Amjad Ali's sons) - has been a 400-year-old pledge to honing the traditions of "sarod", an instrument that could have been a fusion of the "rahab", "chitra veena" and "sursingar" - three traditional string instruments.
"Abba would relate with vivid details how Mohammed Hashmi Bangash, a horse trader from Afghanistan who frequently visited India and who ultimately settled in Rewa, was largely responsible for the fusion of the binaries of the rustic tradition of the 'rahab' and the classical tradition prevalent in India in those times," Amjad Ali Khan remembers in a new auto-biopgraphy, "My Father, Our Fraternity: The Story of Hafiz Ali Khan and My World (Roli Books)".
The book is a tribute to Hafiz Ali Khan (1877-1972) with reminiscences and archival photographs. Hafiz Ali was the fifth generation descendant of the Bangash gharana. Amjad Ali Khan and his sons are the sixth and seventh generation respectively.
The maestro said the "the diaries that I kept during my foreign travels were the basis for the book".
"I had thrown the notes in a dustbin thinking they were not good enough. But my sons retrieved them from the bin and printed the pages," he said.
Looking back, Amjad Ali Khan said the basic difference between Hafiz Ali and his descendants "was time and mindset".
"My father was not ambitious; he was afraid of flying and so did not go abroad. Today's ambitious musician would play anywhere, even on the moon. I have become choosy about where to perform...This year, I have refused to conclude the prestigious Dover Lane music conference in Kolkata, unlike the previous years," the maestro told IANS.
The way of teaching was different in my growing up years, Amjad Ali Khan recalled.
"All the senior people of the house - brothers and uncles - would teach something while I practised. Whenever, my father wanted, he started teaching. There was no fixed time for teaching. Vocal was very important. While teaching music at Stanford last summer, I named my module 'Indian Music: A Way of Life'," the maestro said.
But Amaan's and Ayaan's teaching time was for two hours in the afternoon. "Those two hours were different from mine," Amjad Ali Khan said.
"There was age. I was a slightly younger father to my sons than my father. I was a patient guru - unlike my father - who could take in 'besura (out of tune)' and 'betala (not in rhythm) music. My father was not in the habit of listening to 'besura (out of tune)' music; he would throw the musician out. The older generations were not school teachers...," the maestro said.
The tradition of guru-shishya (teacher-disciple) has a different meaning from that of the teacher and that of the student, the maestro said.
"The one who serves the guru like the domestic help can learn. A guru first tries to kill the ego. Then the lessons begin. Only those students who have no ego can stay with the guru. My father lodged several students at home," he said.
The tradition of gurukul has been diluted over the years because the educated "disciple is suffocated by the discipline", the maestro said.
Ruing the commercialisation of culture, the maestro pointed out that "no one was bothered about the fact that we were losing on our character, roots and history".
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at madhu.c@ians.in
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