Opinion Express View on Ustad Rashid Khan: Music cut short

In the early ’80s, when Ustad Rashid Khan was just Rashid Khan, a young, curious student at Kolkata’s ITC Sangeet Research Akademi, a concert by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi at the prestigious Doverlane Music Conference changed the direction of his struggle to become a classical musician. Khan sat listening to the stalwart in rapt attention from the wings when he was asked to get off the stage and sit at the back. While it hurt deeply, as Khan would mention in interviews later, it also galvanised a strength of will, pushing him towards working harder so that he could sing on the same stage one day.

Not only did Khan, who died in Kolkata on Tuesday after battling prostate cancer and a cerebral attack, sing at the well-known music conference, he became perhaps the only classical vocalist to find appreciation on a public stage from Joshi. Khan became the link between the traditional and modern spaces and styles of classical music. Armed with a voice emblematic of a musical era now lost, Khan ventured onto the traditional proscenium like an old-fashioned, paan-chewing ustad and one could only marvel at the technical skill of his khayal and thumris. But unlike the older, traditional classical artistes, he wasn’t averse to probing his art form in contemporary and popular spaces — films, music studios, world music. His Hamsadhwani was as powerful as the popular “Aaoge jab…” from Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met.

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Born in Badaun, Khan was the great-grandson of Ustad Inayat Hussain Khan, the founder of the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana. He learned under the aegis of his maternal granduncle and the exacting Ustad Nissar Hussain Khan and from his uncle Ustad Ghulam Mustafa Khan. After he was brought to Kolkata by Nissar Hussain at the age of 10, the city became home. A place where he found music, appreciation, a family, and where he breathed his last. The city loved him back. Among others, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee bid a poignant farewell to the “Sangeet Samrat” who left too soon.