Plumbing the Depths Of Soul Music

Feb 24, 2005, 12.00am IST
Bindu Chawla.

With industrialisation and changing values, a world that was getting increasingly mechanised had begun to seriously question, then undermine, the traditional spiritual values of art. And then for centuries, the "art for art's sake" theory was ridiculed by the rationalists who relentlessly campaigned to give art a utilitarian purpose. Only in the past century the moulds got broken once again, to rediscover the abstract in art, returning to the maxim: "Art for spirit's sake".


As a child, the presence of Ustad Amir Khan Saheb at home brought to me my first awareness of spiritual angst, for there was always this inward-outward dialectic to his presence. There he would sit, on the proverbial takht by the window, looking out-side, but with his gaze turned within, absorbed by a singing that was the real (inner) window, to the great ocean of music churning within him.

Often, when he sang a raga, the eyes of Khan Saheb's listeners would fill with tears. Yet, they would not let him stop even after hours of singing. At other times, they would plead with him to stop, for it was too overwhelming to continue to listen to him. One day, on one such occasion, while singing, Khan Saheb came down a level or two for his listeners, and said: " Naghma vahi naghma hai jo rooh sune aur rooh sunaye ". (A piece of music is a piece of music which the soul hears and the soul sings.) This was typical of Khan Saheb's style of communicating. He would 'tell' through embryonic sentences. And here, it was to share the secret that his constant mystic highs came from the 'stimulation' of the soul when singing.

Then the soul began to sing — for itself. Once roused, what it poured forth was what has traditionally been termed as 'revealed' music — the word revealed coming from 're' or 'back' and 'velum' or behind the veil. A music from the far and the beyond. And sure enough, while the ustads of his day practised the vocals for hours daily, Khan Saheb would give two to three hours every morning to the physical or external riyaz, and the rest of the day to what he called ' chintan ka riyaz ', or the riyaz of contemplation, the internal riyaz, of spiritual search, and of spiritual finding.

Speaking of his guru, Ustad Amir Khan, Pandit Amarnath ji said: "He is not at all performance-conscious. He just sings. What you want — he will not pay any attention to that element. He will not produce 'items'... He will sing as though he is singing for himself, he is pleasing himself. And he was his own audience. He was his own listener. If I please myself then you are automatically pleased...". And from here deve-loped the first important maxim of the now re-nowned style and approach of the gharana of Indore which Khan Saheb founded, the first abstract style in Hindustani khayal music: " Apne liye gaao " — Sing for your Self. " Yeh fikra apne ko sunao, phir dekho kaisa lagta hai " — Sing this phrase for yourself, and then see how it sounds, the Indore masters say, while they teach.

So you can judge your music through your own inner mirror, the guru within, while striving for greater and greater truth in your singing.

For his followers, Ustad Amir Khan Saheb is both the musical and the spiritual master. There are no bifurcations. Quite unlike the practice with other Hindustani musicians, for whom the music guru has always been different from the spiritual guru. With Khan Saheb, music is in the Sufi way.

(Today is Ustad Amir Khan's barsi.)