Born to mesmerise, Zakir Hussain did exactly that

Ustad Zakir Hussain and I have been silently accused of being nepo-kids, as if familial opportunities guaranteed success without personal insights, experiences, vidyak samaggri (repertory) and application. Jealousy forgets there were thousands of big-daddys when India declared itself a Republic on January 26, 1950, when overnight, royal and zamindari master potters, weavers, stationers, swordsmiths, literati and musicians were cast out on the footpaths of the modern age. A new era had dawned in which the reins of patronage were no longer with the connoisseurs — carrying aesthetic parameters honed over millennia — but mostly with a newly minted bourgeois listenership. It was among the gravest cultural genocides a new nation had perpetrated, even if unknowingly. A year later, Zakir Hussain was born.

In the early 1950s, Allan Danielou was sifting some of India’s finest musical talent, introducing dhrupad, pakhawaj and veena to European ears. Dancer Uday Shankar had already received western acclaim for Indian performing arts by the 1920s which his younger brother, sitar maestro Pandit Ravi Shankar, took to extraordinary new heights in the 1950s and 1960s in partnership with Ustad Alla Rakha Qureshi. Tabla was now globally noted. Europe and the Americas were listening to short solos by Ustad Qureshi and on pakhawaj by Raja Chhatrapati Singh, who recorded for television programmes.

The boy who was to become the phenomenon, Zakir Hussain, underwent his father’s taleem in the rhythmic riches of Punjab. He studied the usual adaptation of pakhawaj on tabla, where ‘dha dha ti te dha dha din ta’ became ‘dha dha ti te dha dha tin na’. The magic lay in what he did with it. He was a showman of his own kind. Many copied his curls, his gesticulations, demeanour, wittiness, sense of humour, and wardrobe. The field of tabla had discovered an iconic ambassador who would go on to export dha-s, tita-s, tirkit-s and dhirkit-s the world over like none before. He was born to perform and mesmerise. He did exactly that.

In my 50th year of learning, I have penned over 8,000 pages of raga-tala vidya of the near-extinct Gurbani Sangeet tradition, including a 2,500-page mridang volume from the Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari baj, the oldest living percussion tradition of South Asia, while Ustad Zakir Hussain summed up his decades long performative career with a tihai of Grammys.

My Encounters

It was in 1992 at the Nehru Centre in Chandigarh, when Ustad Alla Rakha was invited to play solo. And Giani Darshan Singh, who was among the seniormost disciples of Mian Qadir Baksh, asked me to take him to meet ‘Rakha’. As I entered the green room, holding the hand of Darshan Singh, he introduced himself to the visiting maestro with “Main Darshana!”, as Mian Qadir Baksh would call him. Mianji didn’t have a child of his own, and his wife noted Darshan as her own, opening her husband’s diaries for him to study. An inseparable friend of Qadir Baksh, Darshan Singh’s father was a tantrik and ayurvedic healer who would occasionally lock horns with the English doctors and surgeons, challenging them to medical duels — and emerging victorious. They shared a passion for kites, quails and cockfighting.

Before his solo, Ustad Alla Rakha addressed the audience, announcing, “I will play first for my friend, for the first time since 1947.” The presentation was very thoughtful, labourious, and passionate. After ending that sequence of uthans, peshkar and barhat — followed by a variety of tihais (ending patterns) — he, with a little smile, said, “Aap ki ijaazat se ab main logon ke liye bajaunga.” He then began with playful savvai or jhaptal patterns in teental. Realising what had happened, the elderly Giani Darshan Singh immediately got up and said to me, “Take me home, for he is now ‘playing for the people’.”

Zakir Hussain managed his business side well, where others with great musical abilities struggled. He was a charmer of audiences, a maestro made for the stage. His founding the Shakti group was yet another masterstroke. He did for tabla what Ravi Shankar did for sitar decades earlier. His collaborations, buoyed by his charisma, thrust the tabla on to the centre stage, and brought him four Grammys.

In 1994, Zakir Hussain was at the Faculty of Music, Delhi University, to play for and interact with the students. He played qaidas of Delhi Gharana with a nimble touch of the fingers and caress of the wrist. His hands were deceptively soft, and he performed seemingly effortlessly. His fingers would arrive in anticipation, where others’ barely managed to arrive in time. He ‘played’ with compositions, where others might wrestle with them. Each syllable, forming compositions, was as if chiselled to perfection.

A Shared Bond

It was an interesting development when Ustad Zakir Hussain and I came to mentor a student of percussion in common. In the past, there existed a culture of comparative musical study and dialogue between traditions, where maestros would send their own children and senior disciples to study under the maestros of different lineages. Zakir Hussain held a yearly tabla workshop in California, for which some 50 students would converge from across the world. I recall that when Nihal Singh (my student) recorded his playing to audition for the workshop, he submitted both jori-pakhawaj and tabla solos.

While teaching a paran during a workshop, Zakir Hussain asked Nihal how the bol ‘dhumkit’ would be executed on the jori, exclaiming on seeing it, “Woah, that is quite a difficult nikas.”

It reminded me of the era when the musical culture facilitated similar inter-tradition, academic-performative cross-pollination. In the natural course of our mentoring a student in common, we came to meet again, if briefly, after three decades. There was, of course, a degree of formality in our interaction, but he recognised me from a distance, having heard and seen Nihal play not a collection of souvenirs, but heritage sequences from a living tradition.

His Final Tihai

His performances were an act, and as an actor he entertained. His brilliance was in not letting monotony trespass his performative space. The same old Punjab 10-beat jhaptal sequence ‘dha ti te dha ti te dha dha ti te kridha ti te kata gadi ghin’, adapted by the Delhi Gharana exponents as a ‘dha ti te dha ti te dha dha ti te dhage tinna kinna’ qaida but played each day by the legendary maestro, Zakir Hussain, would awe you.

This summer, I met him and his wife in Surrey, British Columbia, at a reception in his honour. I joked that as we were both employed as husbands of Italian women, both Kathak dancers at that, the nature of our spankings must have been eerily similar!

Beaded in the akal-chakra, our circumambulations must come to an end. He is among the stars who shone the brightest. His Grammys, in retrospect, seem to form the tihai that Mommy Nature chose to conclude his final act. I send ‘un abbraccio’ (a hug) to his dear wife Toni, daughters Anisa and Isabella, and grand-daughter Zara.

— The writer is head of a five centuries old Gurbani Sangeet tradition and Pagri-Nashin of Sultanpur Lodhi-Amritsari baj