Every day is Ashura Every Land is Karbala
BISMILLAH KHAN - A Mystic Union
courtesy
BISMILLAH KHAN - A Mystic Union
A steady, rythmic thudding fills the air as hundreds of young Shias who have marched in the procession to the ziyarat of the martyred Imam Hussein in Varanasi - a replica of the shrine in Karbala, Iraq - beat their chests and sing a dirge. Bismillah Khan, who is part of this alam ka juloos stands at the entrance to the tomb, holding aloft the alam (Hussain’s standard) in the memory of the slain grandson of Prophet Mohammed. He tries to join in the song but his mouth quivers and he starts to sob openly, wiping his tears with corners of the flag. Veiled women in black weep as the lengthening shadow of the neem tree brings in the evening. Aya hai karbala mein gharib-ul watan koi, the mourners sing, sub kuchh hai is jahan mein lekin mere karim, bhai ko zibah hote na dekhe bahen koi (let no sister ever suffer the fate of having to watch her brother slaughtered). On this special day of prayer and mourning, Khan Sahib has already spent two hours at the shrine which includes replicas of the rauzaas (tombs) of Fatima Zehra, the Prophet’s daughter, and Hazrat Abbas, Hussain’s younger brother. He has visited each site, dressed in a white kurta and pyjama, offered incense and prostrated himself in adulation. As he completes his rounds, stopping finally at the rauzaa of Imam Hussain, he reads out the names of the 72 shaheeds (martyrs) of Karbala, who were butchered in the 7th century A.D. when Hussain refused to assent to Yezid’s Caliphate. His head bowed, arms streched out in supplication, Khan Sahib mutters a prayer: “You gave me everything. You gave me your life. Ya Khuda, Ya Rahmatkaar. My tears are the tears of gratitude.†When finally the long evening turns into dusk, he washes his feet and settles down on arthritic knees, swathed in heavy bandages, to two hours of namaaz - a lonely, beatific figure doubled over in pain and ecstasy.
“Music, sur, namaaz. It is the same thing. We reach Allah in different ways. A musician can learn. He can play beautifully. But unless he can mix his music with religion, unless he strives to meet God, he will only have kalaa (art) but no assar (mystical union). He will always stand at the ocean and never reach the heights of purity.â€
Khan Saheb is soaked in religion. It is his sustaining life-force. But it is this same religion that damns music, condemns it as an act of rape. For the Shias, music is haraam (taboo). But for the man who took the shehnai out of the wedding processions and naubatkhaanaas - the shehnai player, traditionally was to be heard and not seen - and who was able to weave patterns of dazzling intricacy into his music as he brought it to the centre-stage of classical respectability, his instrument is also his Quran. Where others see conflicts and contradictions between music and religion, he sees only a divine unity.
“When maulvis and maulanas ask me about this, I tell them, sometimes with irritation, that I can’t explain it. I feel it. I feel it. If music is haraam then why has it reached such heights? Why does it make me soar towards heaven? The religion of music is one. All others are different. I tell the maulanas, this is the only haqeeqat (reality). This is the world. My namaaz is the seven shuddh and five komal surs. And if this is haraam, then I say: aur haraam karo, aur haraam karo (if music be a thing of sin, sin on).â€
“I was once in an argument with some Shia maulavis in Iraq. They were all well-versed in their subject and were making several effective arguments about reasons why music ought to be damned. At first I was left speechless. Then I closed my eyes and began to sing Raga Bhairav: Allah-hee….Allah-hee….Allah-hee…I continued to raise the pitch. I opened my eyes and I asked them: ‘Is this haraam? I’m calling God. I’m thinking of Him, I’m searching for Him. Isn’t this namaaz? Why do you call my search haraam?’†They fell silent.
Each year, on the eighth day of Muharram, this devoteee of the Shia faith who refuses to touch the reed of his shehnai with his lips unless he has offered his namaaz before sunrise, engages himself in his own private drama of religious apostasy . Dressed simply in white, he leads a procession, like a mischievous Pied Piper of rebellion, playing a silver shehnai reserved specially for the occasion. The procession winds its way through Varanasi’s Byzantine lanes to the rauzaa of Imam Hussain. Here, just inside the gate, he sits cross-legged on the dusty ground in the fashion of a mendicant street ministrel and play for hours, weeping copiously all the time, while the audience pitches coins into his lap.
This is simple man. A man of tenderness, a gentle private man, yet given to unbridled display of emotion. When he laughs, the ground shakes. At 70, he is an immensely handsome man with a princely beard and eyes which glint with boyish mischief, his only “bad habit†he apologises, is smoking Wills cigarettes which he puffs with obvious relish. There is nothing about him that bespeaks his fame - his honorary doctorates, his Padma Vibhushan, his concerts in almost every capital around the world, his dozens of best-selling record albums.
On India’s first Republic Day ceremony it was Khan Sahib who poured his heart out in Raaga Kaafi from the Red Fort. On a more pop level it was Khan Sahib who composed that magic film number ‘Dil ka khilauna hai toot gaya’ for the film Goonj Uthi Shehnai. He has made money but spent it just as fast. He supports nearly 100 relatives, including 10 children.
His house in Varanasi, in Sarai Harha, is an ample but decrepit structure. His living room which also serves as guest room, is sparsely furnished with creaky wooden benches and a large takht on which, at given time of the day, his children perform namaaz, oblivious of guests and visitors. Still in incessant demand as a player he travels by train regularly with his troupe, often by second class. He hates to fly. And when travel arrangements are being made, the house buzzes with activity as instruments are laid out, ancient steel trunks and torn British Airways flight-bags are packed with clothes and lunch boxes stuffed with rice and samosas. The shehnai player, whose name is familiar even to the international jet set as that of Ravi Shankar, travels by cycle rickshaw. And as he wheels down the city’s streets at the head of a caravan of rickshaws, smiling at well wishers, he looks as happy as a British Lord in a Rolls Royce.
Until Bismillah Khan burst upon the centre-stage of Indian music with his strange little instrument at the All-India Music Conference in Calcutta in 1937 at the age of 20, the shehnai was considered an instrument reserved for wedding processions or Hindu religious rituals. His ancestors were court musicians in the princely state of Dumraon in Bihar. His uncle, the late Ali Bux ‘Vilayatu’, was a shehnai player attached to Varanasi’s Vishwanath Temple. Khan Sahib remembers him as a hard task master, “who may not be able to conjure up the rain with his playing but would bring you to tears in a minute.â€
“I was never interested in studies. While others were at their books, I used to sneak out and play marbles or blow on Mamu’s (uncle’s) shehnai. He always knew I would be a shehnai-player.â€
Even as a devout Shia, Khan Sahib is also a devotee of Saraswati, the Hindu Goddess of music. And at the age of 12, he recalls, he received a signal - a peculiarly Hindu signal - that his sadhana had been rewarded. He recalls:
“Mamu used to do his riyaz (practice) at the temple of Balaji (an avtaar of Vishnu) for 18 years. He told me to do the same thing. I would begin my riyaz at the mandir at 7 pm and end at 11 pm during which time I usually played four ragas. After a year and half, Mamu told me, ‘if you see anything just don’t talk about it’. One night as I was playing, deep in meditation, I smelled something. It was an indescribable scent, something like sandalwood and jasmine and incense. I thought it was aroma of Ganges. But the scent got more powerful. I opened my eyes - and when I speak about it I still get goose flesh - when I opened my eyes, there was Balaji standing right next to me, kamandal in hand, exactly as he is pictured. My door was locked from inside. Nobody was allowed to enter when I did my riyaz. He said ‘play, son’. But I was in cold sweat. I stopped playing.â€
“He smiled, and disappeared. I unlocked the door. I thought a faqir may have come in. I took a lantern and searched all streets. They were empty. I ran home, ate quickly and slept. Mamu had understood what had happened. But he teased me, pretending he knew nothing, But as I blurted out the experience, Mamu slapped me, because he had asked me earlier not to talk about anything that might happen to me. Then he kissed me and asked me to go and buy vegetables. Mamu always told me ‘never look back, keep going forward’. Even now I go to Balaji’s mandir alone, at night and play all by myself. When I play before others, in my heart I’m listening to my gurus. In my heart, they clap for me at the appropriate time.â€
“In music, the sur is a clean thing, it is a pure thing. It cannot be deceived and it cannot deceive anybody. It is like a mirror in which you see the world, in which I see my own face when I play. When I start playing, the mind wanders here and there and takes me with it. But all the time I am striving for the assar. But when that comes, when the sur clicks, it is like I am unconscious and the heart has taken over. Sometimes I don’t understand who is playing. Or I feel that I am playing at the mazaar, or in front of ancient sages. And all I can think of is ‘he mere maalik tu mujhe lele (God, take me away), tu hi nirankaar, tu hee phool aur phal mein (God, You alone are formless, You alone in flower or fruit).’â€
“I am getting old now. Not in my heart. But in my body. The heart yearns to go on and on but this body sometimes tires and these wretched knees start aching after four hours of playing. And I now have that all-too-human worry. Thirty years ago, I used to think I had conquered or was about to conquer the world. What foolishness! Now I say, Bismillah, you haven’t reached anywhere. The world may know and listen to your ragas, but Bismillah, life will soon finish and your yearnings will still remain. This music is still an ocean. I want to cross it. But I have barely reached the shore. I haven’t yet even taken a dip in it.â€
Khan Sahib has not groomed a disciple. He teaches students when he has the time but there is no special heir. Of his six sons - Mahtab, Nayab, Hussein, Famin, Kazim, and Nazim - the youngest, Nazim, plays the tabla.
“The days of adaab (old world manners) are gone,†he says. “Musicians now go to school. They do not do sadhana with gurus. Thay want instant results. But the great old masters who did their penance - Fayyaz Khan, Abdul Karim Khan, Onkar Nath - died poor. No one knows about their sacrifices. Consider Swami Haridas. He produced Tansen. But no one knows Swami Haridas. They had no time for their own lives. No time for their families, their children. They are very few in this age who can do the real riyaaz. You have to have the ability to wipe yourself out. You have to get up before sunrise on freezing mornings, offer namaaz, go to the mandir, and begin practice. These days musicians want to rise at 10 am to go to music schools. But which music school has produced a Fayyaz or an Abdul Karim Khan? I say, leave those schools aur aao maidan mein (and come out into the real battle). But you have to have the discipline and the tenacity. Someone like me can give his time to a student, but the taker has to be willing to take, to wrest that time from his guru. He must find the time for his own tapasya. I remember when I was a boy and often my guru, tired from the day, would retire at 4 am. I would be awake. I had been waiting for him. I used to go to his bedroom and begin pressing his tired feet. He would look at me and he would know what I wanted. He would shake off his slumber and come alive. He would give me his shehnai and tell me: ‘all right son, start playing.’â€
Posted on RMIC by Rajan Parrikar 18 Nov. 1997
I have never see a Momin like the Late Usrad Bismillah Khan..This is my tribute to him, through my blog post on Ashura in Old Lucknow.
Posted by photographerno1 on 14 May 2007
Filed Under: marsiya, ustad bismillah khan | No Comments »
