Tribute: Pt. Bhimsen Gururaj Joshi: Master of Melody
As a legendary singer, Bharat Ratna Bhimsen Joshi, who died in 2011, was a peerless exponent of Hindustani classical music. Here’s a fond remembrance on his birth centennial.
About fifteen years ago, when my uncle was visiting us in what turned out to be his last trip to Atlanta, I made recordings for myself from his vast collection of tapes of the great Hindustani classical vocalist Pt. Bhimsen Joshi’s concerts. One evening we were returning home and the tape of Pt. Bhimsen’s Raga Jaijaiwanti was playing. It is one of my favorite ragas. It has joy with tinges of melancholy: lightness slightly borne down by weight, probably an apt expression of life and its minor discontents. There was an added reverberation in this particular studio recording that made his deep, resonant voice hauntingly melancholic as it scaled high. It was dark outside, and he was still midway in the slower vilambit phase when we reached home, but we were so in thrall of the singing that it would have been a transgression to cut the maestro in mid-flight, mar the moment and break the spell. I drove around the neighborhood for some more time until the end of the raga. Listening to Pt. Bhimsen in the confines of a car, no words said, was a memorable moment of connection and bonding with my uncle.
The legend of Pt. Bhimsen Joshi, whose birth centenary was on February 4 this year, started with his naming after the powerfully built Bhim of the Mahabharata, endowed with enormous strength and stamina, will and a voice to match. Bhimanna, they called him in Karnataka where he was born a hundred years ago in Gadag, not far from Dharwad, which has been an incubator on a regional scale of prodigious talent in Hindustani classical music. There are many stories of his extraordinary stamina where he would sing in concerts for hours together through the night after driving the whole day to get there. He left home at age 11 in search of a guru who could teach him music, in shades of Joseph Campbell’s archetype of the hero’s journey in myth who sets out on a search and returns transformed. The young Bhimsen wandered around the north for a few years before coming back and settling down to learn from the musician Sawai Gandharva. It is tempting to think, with reason, that some of the searching and restlessness continued and showed in his intuitive explorations of the raga in his renditions. He had failings too—his bouts with alcoholism for a good part of his career that ended the day, he said, when he couldn’t recognize his own voice. An uncle of mine in Mangalore was a drinking buddy of his, and Panditji’s eyes lit up in recognition when I brought up the connection the only time I met him in Bhopal as a 17-year-old college student in 1985.
Growing up in a Konkani household in Coimbatore, Pandtiji’s music was always around us. Many Konkanis had LPs and tapes of his Kannada bhajans and Marathi abhangs, as did we. He held an especial affection for Mangalore (which many Konkanis call home), where he received patronage during his formative years and where he often performed. Most of my relatives had been to his concerts. In my teens, I dipped my feet in the deep-running waters of classical music, and “Aeri Aali Piya Bin” in Raga Yaman was probably the first khayal I heard of his, enough to come under the influence. Over the years I’ve only been drawn further in, collecting as much music as I could lay my hands on, teasing meaning and nuance out of his renditions. There’s a tape of a brilliant concert rendition in the ’70s in Mangalore of Raga Miyan ki Todi which I listen to sparingly, strictly appointment listening, fearing over-familiarity would dull its sheen for me. And when we moved into our own house in Atlanta, Pt. Bhimsen’s voice was the first to fill the bare high-ceilinged living room. It was an exhilarating and memorable moment, and there was no need to boil milk for the housewarming ceremony!
In the years following his death in 2011, private recordings of concerts continue to be uploaded online by music lovers, and it’s a joy to go down these rabbit holes and get transported to another reality, spending hours before you know it. A Pt. Bhimsen Joshi concert was in part musical performance and part theater. The voice, said the scholar Narayana Menon, is how Indian classical music is heard, not so much through sound. Even while playing an instrument, the effort is to approximate the voice. Bhimsenji’s was a deep, sonorous voice with an amazing capacity to explore the emotional range of the raga. He appeared to enlist his body fully in this effort, with extravagant and exaggerated gestures and facial expressions, seeming to pluck notes out of thin air, engaging his accompanists on the tabla and harmonium. There seemed to be an unmuted energy and intensity on stage in his concerts. An aunt used to say, give him chapati dough and it will end up kneaded at the end of the concert! Age finally seemed to calm him: in a studio performance when in his 80s, body still, no longer able to sit cross-legged, he delivered a moving, beautiful rendition of “Shyam Bhajaye Aaj Muraliya” in Raga Yaman Kalyan.
Indian classical music is not a narrative form of music or art. It does not construct the world in our image and out of our stories; rather, it describes moments and moods lyrically and with imagination. Not frozen in written form, the music as it unfolds at a concert belongs to the very present. Now that there are only Pt. Bhimsen Joshi’s recordings left, it is still the next best thing to occupying the present. That the moods of the raga can still be reconstructed when listening to the icon gives comfort, a sense of anticipation—and gratitude for shared memories with family, while on a drive or elsewhere.
Ganesh Nayak is an architect and sustainability professional in Marietta, Georgia.
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