Pandit Bhimsen Joshi: A challenge unto himself

Pandit Bhimsen Joshi’s life and music is marked by his wanderlust: nothing ever stopped him from soaring into realms unknown. The legendary musician was the last link of the golden years of Kirana, however, he will continue to live in hundreds of musicians across the country

It’s not possible to sum up a musical icon’s career. At best it’s possible to trace his life — from birth to death. Pandit Bhimsen Joshi (1922-2011), the “high commissioner of music”, as the legendary Kirana vocalist jokingly called himself, is no more. A study of his music can never be complete — this is not only because of the highly intuitive nature of the Indian music tradition, but also because of the kind of musical persona that Bhimsen Joshi was.

Deeply passionate about music, Bhimsen Joshi was always a wanderer; in life and in music. His parents were subject to moments of great anxiety when their little son would often go missing from home. It started when he was three; he would either be sitting in the mosque before his house trying to grasp the notes in the muezzin’s prayer Allah O’ Akbar, or he would be at some nearby temple listening to the temple musicians, there were times when he, as if he were in a trance, followed bhajan mandalis and wedding processions — completely tuned to musical notes and switched off to everything else. On several occasions, his father Gururaj Joshi lodged a complaint with the police, but often some Good Samaritan would bring the little boy back to his parents. At 11, Bhimsen Joshi left home over a flimsy reason: he quarreled with his mother because she could not afford to serve him ghee with rice. He had stomped out, leaving his food untouched.

Long journey to Kirana gharana

This was the turning point in his musical quest. After listening to the pioneer of Kirana gharana Ustad Abdul Karim Khan saab’s gramophone recording of raga Jhinjoti in a nearby tea shop, his heart was set on learning from him. He stood at the Gadag station and took a train that was heading towards North India. He was penniless, but had to reach his destination. He gave a slip to ticket collectors moving between compartments, sang songs for fellow passengers and begged for food. He stopped at Pune, Bombay and finally reached Gwalior after three months! He met and learnt from various maestros, but was unsatisfied.

In search of a guru

He went from Kharagpur to Calcutta to Delhi and finally to Jalandhar where the Gwalior maestro Vinayak Rao Patwardhan advised him to learn from Sawai Gandharv, in Kundagol, an outstanding disciple of Ustad Abdul Karim Khan. Though he shared an exceptional relationship with Sawai Gandharv, it however did not mark the end of his quest. He worked very hard to earn his music. In the sixties, when Bhimsen Joshi sang for the Calcutta Music Circle, the famous actor Pahadi Sanyal was present in the audience. Once the concert was over, Bhimsen Joshi went up to the actor and reminded him that he worked as a domestic help for him in the years that he was looking for a suitable guru, much to the actor’s embarrassment.

Bhimsen Joshi’s intense passion for music made him a non-conformist of sorts. While he stuck to the traditional, limited repertoire of the Kirana gharana, he was open to ideas from other gharanas as well. Unlike his guru bandhu Gangubai Hangal who never swayed away from the boundaries of the gharana, Bhimsen Joshi, to use his own term, “processed all the commodities in the Kirana factory”. A firm believer of the guru-shishya tradition, Bhimsen Joshi would say, “What one learns from one’s guru has to be supplemented by individual genius, else, one will not have anything worthwhile to say. In fact, a good disciple should not be a second rate imitation, but a first rate improvement of his teacher.” Hence, you find LPs in which Bhimsen Joshi sings ragas like Chaya Malhar which is a stamp of the Gwalior school. Also Lalit Bhatiyar and Marwa Shree. He never hid his deep admiration for the Jaipur maestros — Mallikarjun Mansur and Kesarbai Kerkar. In fact, once Kesarbai Kerkar who had high regard for Bhimsen Joshi’s music, came for his concert and later jocularly remarked, “I came to see what all you have stolen from me!” Musicologists believe that the sonorous tonal quality of Bhimsen Joshi’s opening note, the shadja, was strikingly similar to that of Kesarbai. He never disputed it.

The Bhimsen style

Bhimsen Joshi’s music is made of many shades – contemplative and mellow, intuitive and erratic. He took the traditional Kirana ragas to highest level of complexity. His brilliant virtuosity was always coupled with romantic intensity. But Bhimsen Joshi was constantly stretching the thresholds; a man of obsessive restlessness, he often dared to challenge his own music. There were moments in his music when he knew it would fail, but he nevertheless surrendered to the test. Both his imagination and execution went into relentless ramblings, but the fear of the unknown hardly deterred him from exploring higher realms. That’s probably why he is the only Kirana maestro to have even attempted a raga like Ramkali.

Bhimsen Joshi preserved the various streams of past and tradition within him, with great humility and respect. In doing so, he constantly broke established idioms and infused them with new ideas. In fact, he was rebuilding tradition and in the process never hesitated to bare himself.

Bhimsen Joshi is a living tradition. His maverick genius may be hard to replace, but it’s hard for a practicing musician of today to not come under the spell of his influence. When you listen to musicians from various gharanas across the country, you invariably hear Bhimsen Joshi in them. Just like Pandit Bhimsen Joshi kept alive in his music Ustad Karim Khan, Sawai Gandharv, Roshan Ara Begum and many others. He continues to live in his music.