Meeting Gangubai Hangal was his dream. this aficionado of the Kirana gharana came back overwhelmed.
It was our annual trip to India two years ago. I had drawn up a secret plan. My daughter and I would visit Hubli to have a conversation with the lioness of Indian classical music, Gangubai Hangal. This had been a dream ever since I became passionate about the music of the Kirana gharana and its major architects — Abdul Karim Khan, Sawai Gandharva, Gangubai Hangal and Bhimsen Joshi. Though I’m not initiated into classical music, something touched me whenever I listened to Gangubai. Perhaps she provided maternal solace in a lonely place like Geneva.
Her renderings of ragas like Abhogi, Miyan-ki-Malhar, Hindol, Bhairav, Deskar, Chandrakauns, Bahar and Bageshri, among others, enchanted me with their sheer joy and emotional appeal. There is also that melancholy when listening to her Charan dhar ayo, ali in Abhogi, my favourite raga. She was a singer with divine grace, her music is shorthand for one’s emotions, or “soul’s turmoil”, to quote Kannada novelist S L Bhyrappa when he first heard her.
Thanks to a former colleague in the Deccan Herald in Hubli, we managed to get an appointment with the legendary musician on a morning in August 2007. Gangubai, who was already 95, agreed to meet us for two hours. We took the evening train from Bangalore. The BJP MLA from Dharwar and his followers happened to be our co-passengers. The MLA said it was unusual to see people coming all the way from Geneva to meet Gangubai, and added: “That says a great deal about the power of her music.”
My daughter had already planned what she would ask, based on her earlier musical training at the Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra. I had decided to ask about the Kirana gharana and its principal architects, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan and Pandit Sawai Gandharv.
I also wanted to know why she had not sung certain ragas like Todi, Darbari and Darbari Kanada — was it just that there are no recordings of hers in these ragas?
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We reached, and her son, who is a practicing advocate, took us into the small room where she was sitting on her bed. Gangubai sat close to the wall, near a window. The first thing she asked us, in Kannada, was how our train journey was. My daughter, who knows Kannada, said it was comfortable. Gangubai said that she had stopped travelling in trains because of a recurring backache. Then she started talking about train journeys at the beginning of her musical career, in the early 1930s. “It took me more than three days to reach Calcutta for my first concert there, and we had to change train in three separate places,” she said. “Those were marathon journeys in which it would take several days to travel from one place to the other. We had to put up with them.”
We asked her how she felt at her first engagement in Calcutta. Gangubai said the organisers who received her at the railway station were unsure whether she would be able give a performance, given her small frame and demeanor. So, they took me to a house for rehearsal, which was basically a test to see how I sing, she said. But when I finished my concert there was a rapturous ovation,” Gangubai said. “Suddenly, somebody tapped me on my shoulder and said it was marvellous, and when I looked back it was K L Saigal,” she said, laughing at her encounter with the famous singer.
She bent to her bedside window to show us some old books containing her mother’s Carnatic music compositions. Gangubai, who seemed like the ultimate expression of humbleness, humility, tenacity, determination, perseverance, courage and vivacity, said that “but for my mother and her support and sustained encouragement, I would not have become a musician.” It is she who prodded Gangubai to take up Hindustani music. Of course, it was a painful and frustrating journey, she said, with her mentor Pandit Sawai Gandharva insisting on attaining perfection in each note and swara. “Bhim anna [Bhimsen Joshi] and I would practice for 10 to 12 hours in a day, and our guru [Sawai Gandharva] would never tolerate it if there was a small slip in any note,” she said, adding that “because of the rigour he had inculcated in those days, we can claim to have achieved a high degree of perfection in our music in later years”.
I asked her whether she had ever met Ustad Abdul Karim Khan. She said her mother took her to see the founder of the Kirana gharana when she was a child. He asked her to eat well to become a good singer. She said, “He was a musical genius and a god, and I listened to him when he was practicing once in Miraj,” maintaining that both Karim Khan and Pandit Sawai Gandharva were masters to which a disciple can never pay back the debt.
When I asked why she had made no recordings of Todi, she narrated a story. She said it was at a music festival in Bombay where she practiced Todi for that concert in the morning. By the time her turn came it was almost evening, she said, saying she loves Todi, which is a deeply contemplative raga. She said her Darbari raga recordings are there in the AIR archives.
As regards her favourite ragas, Gangubai said Miyan-ki-Malhar and Bhairav would be among them. Later she said that it was difficult to say which raga was best, because each has its own beauty and depth.
Although she had not been keeping well, Gangubai sat through those two hours with us and recounted several memorable experiences. Never once did she mention the social and economic distress she had faced in her early days. Only once did Gangubai express her grief about her daughter Krishna Hangal, saying that she stopped singing after her daughter’s death.
Each moment of our conversation is etched on my memory and it was a dream come true.
I cried like a child when I read that Gangubai passed away, on Tuesday. For me, it is the day when classical music died.
