Noted photo artist Dayanita Singh captures the life and rhythm of Ustad Zakir Hussain in a new photo exhibit

This photograph echoes the rhythm that beats in about 300 selected images shot by Singh over four decades and is now part of ‘Zakir Hussain — Learning to Learn’, an ode to Hussain through a photo exhibition. It opened last month on his first death anniversary at Mumbai’s National Centre for Performing Arts (NCPA) and is on display till February 3.

In the images, Singh maps Hussain’s life through its ordinary, lived moments; experiences that mattered because they were not milestones — eating, sleeping, laughing; lost in riyaaz as beads of sweat gather on his forehead; holding his daughter; talking on the phone, interactions with his parents, working closely with the tabla maker at his Simla House apartment in Mumbai’s Malabar Hill. These showcase a life and routine away from the stage as well as Singh’s unique access. “To watch 40 years of someone’s life through the same lens, to me, is really moving. You are really seeing life; you are seeing time and no other medium can hold time the way photography can,” says Singh, for whom Simla House was home whenever she was in Mumbai.

Hussain entered Singh’s life much before photography did. It was the ’80s and she was studying at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad when a class assignment to photograph a person’s moods took her to a Pt Ravi Shankar concert, where Hussain was accompanying him. Not allowed by the organiser to shoot, in the ensuing tussle, she fell on her backside. “At 18, you also get easily offended,” says Singh. So when Hussain walked out, a bruised but resolute Singh said, “Mr Hussain, I am a young student today but someday, I will be an important photographer and then we will see.” He told her that she could photograph him practising the next day. Singh knew chances like these were not to be wasted. “I thought I was going to become a photographer because I could be free. I could go anywhere, be anywhere and not be tied down by marriage or children,” says Singh.

That moment opened a door into the complex world of ragas and riyaaz, the existence of which she hadn’t known. It also kick-started her photography journey when she didn’t see herself as a photographer. “Photography was what the boys did. In the ’80s, as a woman, I was not a photographer. The musicians didn’t see me as a photographer. And when I look at those images, especially from the ’80s, I would give my right arm to be able to photograph like that now because they are so innocent,” says Singh, who, along with vocalist and friend Rashid Khan, would record the artistes snore on the musician’s bus during the Sangeet Research Academy tours. She eventually became part of the entourage that travelled with Hussain. “Like there was the tabla bag, there was Dayanita,” she says.

Zakir Hussain with other musicians in a bus (Dayanita Singh/ Ustad Museum)

For the next 43 years, Singh looked and listened. She talks of a unique mentorship where a musician was a teacher to a photographer. “Perhaps whatever difference there may be in my approach to photography, it is because of that. When I do shows in museums, I often say that I was a student at the ‘Zakir Hussain Academy of Focus’. That’s where I got my taleem. He taught me rigour, single-minded focus, to know one’s medium like the back of one’s hand before attempting to challenge it… And what a learning,” says Singh, who knew when not to photograph — at his sister Razia’s passing as well as of his iconic father Ustad Allah Rakha. She did shoot the latter’s burial. “I remember thinking ‘it’s a very big part of his life. So I did take a few pictures at the kabrastaan. But when we came back to Simla House, or the days that followed, which were very difficult for him, I didn’t photograph,” says Singh.

Besides teaching her no flash, no going in front of the stage, Hussain also steered Singh’s mind in the right direction. When she wanted to learn the flute and Pt Hariprasad Chaurasia agreed to teach, he told her, “Can you give 18 hours to flute? If you can’t, don’t waste Hariji’s time. You said you want to be a photographer. Give 18 hours to that.” Singh says, “So this training doesn’t come from photography. It comes from him.”

The difficult part of this project for Singh, however, was not the two big boxes with hundreds of photos but the weight and pain of going through them months after Hussain’s death in December 2024. “It was heartwrenching at the start… Looking at the contact sheets opened a Pandora’s box. There were so many experiences and memories that came rushing back. But his mentorship comes back at a time like this. He would have said, ‘Just get on with it’. So that’s what I did,” says Singh, who went over it all, frame by frame, often swallowing that lump in her throat. “The work shaped itself. I was being led through it with the intention of, ‘Can I share the privilege of having spent years photographing this man with other people in the hope that it brings something to them?’” says Singh.

She photographs Hussain playing the bayaan (the larger, left-sided drum) like a dholak. Then, there are images of Hussain playfully pulling the cheeks of ghatam legend and Shakti band mate Vikku Vinayakram over the decades, driving, rehearsing, and laughing — less a portrait than a record of a life lived and observed with patience. “Zakir led me into what I call the ‘green room gharana of photography’, which is everything that is happening to make that main moment happen. I am barely photographing on stage,” says Singh, who discovered the magic of the green room quickly. It is here that she wasn’t jostled or pushed aside by other photographers. “I never got accepted into the boys’ photography club. So I had to do my own thing. That was an advantage. No men were pushing me out of the way backstage,” says Singh.

Zakir Hussain with Ranjit Kaur (Dayanita Singh/ Ustad Museum)

The result has been quieter moments that resist immediacy. But how does a photographer convey the fluidity of music through a frozen moment? Singh says that Hussain told her not to photograph every sam (the beginning and end of a musical time cycle where musicians land, often with flourish). So she turned to photographing the quiet rhythms of daily life, like Hussain’s mother, Bavi Begum, scolding her son for not eating properly. Such moments carried a natural flow. As for the stage photographs, there is only one panel of nine images, one Singh calls a ‘mini museum’, which features Hussain in performance with other artistes.

At the Dilip Piramal Art Gallery at the NCPA, raga Hindol, played during Spring, drifts on Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s sarod, at times giving way to Hussain’s voice crooning Frank Sinatra’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’. Musicians can walk in, sing or play the tablas kept on a raised platform, as if offering a hazri in the ‘museum’ — the term Singh uses for her exhibits, wherein the wooden structures placed in the middle of the gallery and on the walls allow her photographs to be rearranged and change shape, sidestepping the fixity of traditional display. “Being among these photos has been some sort of closure for many,” says Singh.

Her ways of seeing changed over the decades, especially after she published the 1986 book on him (Dayanita Singh: Zakir Hussain Maquette, Steidl). “How my photography changed wasn’t so much to do with how he became bigger. Yes, that too. But it was more that I started to use a Hasselblad square format, photograph other things, including empty spaces, even. So there is a big change in my format. When I photograph him later, it’s much more Dayanita Singh. By then, I have a certain way of photographing, a voice. But I miss the innocence of the early years, when I didn’t have a clue what a good photograph was. But those are some of my best works,” says Singh.

Dayanita Singh. (Express Photo by Amit Mehra)

She wants to replicate this exhibit in a permanent way. Perhaps because music, like photography, is sustained by time and devotion, and what truly lasts is found away from the stage. “Maybe in an apartment at Simla House, where people can come together every year and remember him,” she says.