Rebel With a Cause

So she did,and became the first ever woman to play sarod. Her love for the instrument took the young Delhi girl to Kolkata and eventually to Maihar. “I went to Baba (Ustad Allauddinh Khan) and told him that I wanted to learn everything from him. He aked me why did I choose a masculine instrument when I could have easily played the sitar or be a vocalist. However,I persisted and he took me to Maihar,” she says in the documentary.

When she arrived in Maihar,Ustad Allauddin Khan took her to his wife and told her that he had brought her “another daughter”. “It was as if I had no more worries. They embraced me like I’m one of their own,” she says

The day she went to Ustad Allauddin Khan’s riyaaz room for the first time she felt like she had reached the doorstep of her temple. “We would riyaaz together every morning for more than two years,” she says.

Put together by Sharan Rani’s daughter,Radhika Narain,the documentary is Radhika’s tribute to her mother. “There might be innumerable technical glitches in the film. But I will urge the viewer to see this film as a tribute to a great lady. I shot this film in a very traumatic period in my life. Each time I interviewed my mother,I knew that this would be the last time I would get to speak to her like that,” says Narain who was in the city to screen the documentary in Kolkata at a function to commemorate the first year of Sharan Rani’s death (April 8).

Kolkata holds a special place in the hearts of Sharan Rani’s family. “The city is like second home to us. Sharan Rani always was attached to the city and I was treated like a son-in-law. We are quite close to quite close to the Chowdhury family here my wife (Sharan Rani) would always stay with them when she was in town. Moreover,it was in Kolkata that she earned the title of Sarod Rani. She won a competition and the first president of the country,Sri Rajendra Prasad,presented her with a medal and a shawl. And there she was hailed as Sarod Rani,” says Sultan Singh Backliwal,Sharan Rani’s husband who was also in the city for the function.