How Sabrang Stormed the South

Khan Sahib’s son Munnawar Khan passed away in the ’70s and is remembered as ‘adequate’ by those Delhiites old enough to have shivered through the annual Shankarlal Concert all-nighters in the early ’70s on the Modern School lawns.

Khan Sahib’s grandsons Jawaad and Murad are competent enough, but fortune has not endowed them as liberally as it did him. So what’s left of the old man’s magic except a clutch of recordings and a sudden softening of the eye as someone hums a snatch in Bhairavi of his signature thumri ‘‘Ka karun sajni, aaye na baalam?’’ Ask Sruti magazine of Chennai, founded by the late N Pattabhi Raman, a UN consultant who retired to start his dream of just such a journal in Chennai. This 20-year-old music and dance magazine in English has dedicated its June issue to ‘BGAK’.

Its present editor, K V Ramanathan, says, ‘‘Bade Ghulam Ali Khan had a soft corner for Carnatic music and he was certainly one of the South’s favourites among Hindustani musicians.’’

As Ramanathan points out, this love is usually one-sided. The Hindustani lay public is unappreciative, even uncomplimentary, about Carnatic music. (But it’s only fair to point out here that equally, the North embraced Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi with total fervour).

However, says Ramanathan, ‘‘The great North Indian maestros have borrowed and adapted ragas from Carnatic music, reciprocating a trend that started much earlier in the South. Bade Ghulam called M S Subbulakshmi ‘‘Suswaralakshmi’’, a lovely Sanskritic tribute, the more to be appreciated coming from a Muslim!’’ How did this extraordinary love story happen, given its unlikely protagonists from two furthermost points of the cultural spectrum? A meat-eating Punjabi Muslim from Qasur in Pakistan, who was a lion of the Patiala gharana, and the ascetic orthodox dahi-chawal vidwans of Carnatic country?

In 1954, G N Balasubramainam (GNB), the reigning star of Carnatic vocal music, arranged for Bade Ghulam to sing at several venues in Madras. So humble was GNB that he even prostrated publicly to Bade Ghulam at one concert. This upset several orthodox South Indians as demeaning to Carnatic music. But as more and more ‘Madrasis’ heard Bade Ghulam sing, the criticism died out.

What the public didn’t know was that Bade Ghulam himself had earlier stooped (and was restrained) to take the dust of GNB’s feet after hearing him, at his own request, sing Raga Hindolam. He learnt the rare raga Andolika from GNB and sang it in his next performances at Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata, telling audiences that he was indebted to GNB.

Bade Ghulam was also very attached to GNB’s star pupil, the late M L Vasanthakumari (MLV), herself a great singing star. Sruti magazine quotes R Krishnamurti (MLV’s husband) on an almost unbelievable incident. ‘‘Bade Ghulam liked MLV’s singing so much, and found himself so much at ease in her company, that on his second visit to Madras he just turned up at her house on Edward Elliot’s Road. He had given no prior intimation and perhaps he saw the look of surprise on our faces, for he said to MLV: ‘Where else do you expect me to go except to the house of a musician like you?’ Vasanthakumari’s father, Ayyasami Iyer, welcomed the exponents of Hindustani music to his home. Realising that he had to serve his guests non-veg food, he arranged to have the meals brought from outside and taken upstairs to where Khan Sahib and his party were ensconced, via the outside staircase … When we went to Mumbai, he invited us home to dinner. What did we get to eat? A meal prepared by a Brahmin cook he had hired

specially for the occasion, because, he said, ‘When I stayed in your house, you served me the food I like!’’’ That was less than seven years after Partition.

Perhaps we will have reason one day soon to replay Bade Ghulam’s song from Mughal-e-Azam: Shubh din aayo.