FEBRUARY 4: The tabla is an essential but unprepossessing instrument, occupying a complementary place on stage, never a central one. It required genius to make the tabla assume the high seriousness, the grandeur of instruments of more regal descent like the sitar or sarod.After all, what was the tabla? Just over 400 years old, just a few strips of wood covered with leather. Yet, long years ago, one man had a dream that he would bring it on the centrestage of Indian music. In the course of a career of six decades, Allarakha, or Abbaji as he came to be known at a riper age, made it into a cornucopia of rhythm and beat. As his son, Zakir Husain, was to observe years later, ``The creativity in tabla is not just technical dexterity and the ability to do complex divisions and subdivisions, but in simplifying the complicated flourishes. It comes from the notes, the balance of the two instruments, the creation of melodies, the ability to talk to an audience through the tabla. This is what my father achieved andtook before the entire world.''Zakir Husain should know. As his father's son he inherited that very legacy. As his father's son, he learnt to thrust and parry with sounds in enchanted jugalbandi with his father. But the father did not have it as easy as the son. Born into a Jammu-based peasant family, he could have chosen to gladden his father's heart by becoming a jawan. Instead, the boy seemed to be born with fingers that could coax music from objects as prosaic as a table or a dish. At 13, he knew who he wanted as his guru Mian Qadir Baksh of Lahore.Through unrelenting riyaz, that sometimes went on for eight hours at a stretch, he made the instrument his own. Indeed he did to the tabla what maestros like Bismillah Khan did to the shennai or Ravi Shankar, to the sitar. Like Ravi Shankar, he took his instrument to the world, but never at the cost of audiences at home. He has fashioned solos for All India Radio, performed jugalbandis with the greats of Indian music, and even done some music directionfor Bollywood. His last public performance, fittingly enough, was at the public birthday celebration of vocalist Pandit Jasraj. If Allarakha received love and support from his fellow musicians after all many of them made space for his genius at their concerts, allowing him to showcase the wizardry of that index finger or thumb he also gave in equal measure.Today, music will never flow from those hands but the nation will never forget the experience of having heard it once. Many in the community of musicians rue the fact that Allarakha was not honoured sufficiently by the dispensers of public honour in the corridors of power. That while a Ravi Shankar was awarded a Bharat Ratna, Allarakha had to content himself with a Padmashree. But it does not matter, this lack of formal anointing. Allarakha may be dead but his music is immortal.
