A true Bharat Ratna in times of cricket
http://www.newindpress.com/sunday/sundayitems.asp?id=SEC20040320074823&eTitle=Columns&rLink=0
T J S George
Vilayat Khan died at the wrong time. Not just because he was only 76. (Bismilla Khan is 88, M.S.Subbulakshmi 86 and Ravi Shankar 84; may they live for ever.) Vilayat was unlucky because he died at a time when his country had no time to notice it. It had time only for cricket.
Vajpayee noticed. He is a poet after all. Virtually no one else seemed to realise that one of the greatest innovative classicists of Indian history had moved on. How can they? The bulk of those who presume to lead our country are vulgarians who equate the wondrous sweep of culture with the narrow confines of religion.
One of them, sitting in the culture minister’s chair in Bhopal, recently objected to naming a music school after Allauddin Khan. His reason was that the great Ustad was a Bangladeshi. What he meant, but did not have the guts to say, was that he was a Muslim and therefore unworthy of recognition by self-appointed champions of cultural nationalism.
(The minister was abominably ignorant. Firstly, there was no Bangladesh when Allauddin was born which makes him as Indian as those born in Karachi in the 1920s. Secondly, Allauddin was a lifelong devotee of Saraswathi and was known to insist that his pupils begin their day with Saraswathi Vandana. In his cultural essence, the Ustad was a better Hindu than many a militant protector of neo-Hinduism.)
Vilayat Khan was a Bangladeshi too, born in Gouripur almost half a century before Bangladesh was born. But biographical notes list him as a resident of Dehra Dun, Mumbai and Princeton (USA). When he died in Mumbai, it was to Kolkata that his body was taken _ to be buried beside his father.
That was a key to understanding this universal man. His father was a sufi mystic. The father died when Vilayat was very young, but the elevating, enlightening spirit of enquiry that distinguishes sufiism stayed with him. In any case, he flowered as a child; his first public performance was at the age of 6, his first recordings at 8.
Those who bloomed at that age in the West (Mozart for example) were hailed as geniuses. Vilayat Khan’s genius found expression in musical inventiveness. He developed the gayaki ang (singing strings) style by making the sitar produce sounds almost identical to vocal inflections. He also created a unique technique of bending the string in different delicate ways after it was plucked. It was as though gentle, swaying, sonic booms were chasing his fingers wherever they went.
The feeling that his original contributions to musical culture never received the recognition they deserved haunted Vilayat Khan. All the publicity went to Ravi Shankar, tom-tommed as the friend of the Beatles, Yehudi Menuhin and so on. (It is a measure of the power of publicity that in the “New Penguin Dictionary of Music” Ravi Shankar is the only Indian musician listed. There is no Vilayat, no Bismillah, no Amjad Ali, no Ali Akbar, no Thiagaraja, no MS. And this is billed as a Dictionary of Music, not a Dictionary of Western Music. So much for cultural imperialism.)
Another aspect of the power of publicity was also underscored by the contrasting maestros of sitar. Ravi Shankar went on to accept Bharat Ratna. Vilayat Khan rejected the Padma Shri (1964) and Padma Vibhushan (1968) saying that government judges were not competent to judge artistic creativity. Very true. And cricket will one day be replaced by baseball as ordained by the superpower. To civilised people uncorrupted by governments and cricket, Ustad Vilayat Khan will always remain Bharat Ratna, Pahela Varg.
