An August requeim

Nikhil Banerjee was a musician out of tune with his times. A sitar virtuoso who was a cut above the rest.

Till the end, however, Banerjee preferred to stay away from the limelight. Playing essentially to further his art, conducting his career with quiet dignity.

MOHAN NADKARNI reminisces about the maestro and his contribution to Hindustani music.

What is it that makes most of us – especially those of my generation – claim that Nikhil Banerjee was a cut above all other sitar virtuosi of our time? Comparisons can be way out and invidious, too. And much more so in a field like music, hopelessly riven with feuds, rivalries and intrigues.

Nikhilbabu was one virtuoso who had no use for catchy, theatrical elements to compel wild, lusty applause from today’s motley audiences. He could win over his listeners with his persuasive music and pleasing, dignified manner. For all his supreme virtuosity, he never lost sight of those aesthetic values that make our music a truly ennobling, fulfilling experience. He played more for himself than for the gallery. (This also, incidentally, perhaps explains the kind of casualness with which the national press has, by and large, given the news of his death.)

True, death comes to all. But then in the case of a rare genius like Nikhil Banerjee, 54 was not the age to die. Despite three heart attacks and a paralytic infirmity that once almost threatened to disable him, he continued to perform with the same verve and vigour as before. I have haunting memories of his out-of-the world recital at the Gharana Sammelan in Bombay in January last year. According to reports, he succumbed to a fourth cardiac attack barely within two days of his performance at the hallowed Dover Lane festival in Calcutta on January 27.

Indeed, had Nikhilbabu lived longer, his music may well have served to eventually demolish the myth that still revolves – albeit totteringly – around two sitar maestros with international eminence. Although he had emerged on the Indian musical scene more than two decades ago to represent a third force in the instrumental domain, it was only lately that shy, unassuming and introverted Nikhilbabu had begun to show an awareness of the impact he was capable of making on our top rankers who were more glamorous and much senior to him in profession and age.

Prodigies of the common run seldom maintain their fame at a more mature age. Nikhilbabu was a rare exception to this truism. He learnt from many masters. His musician father Jitendra Nath Banerjee, gave his basic training from the age of four. He was only nine when he gave his first public performance and won acclaim as a star performer an all-Bengal sangeet sammelan. Sensing the conspicuous potential of the boy, Raja Birendra Kishore Roy-Choudhary of Gouripur (now in Bangladesh) took him under his wing. The Raja was himself a noted beenkar of the Seniya (Rampur) tradition and a great patron of music, and it was from him that Nikhilbabu had his systematic grooming in sitar-playing. Six years later, Roy Choudhary himself placed him under the tutelage of Allauddin Khan of Maihar.

And it was from Allauddin Khan that the genius of Nikhilbabu received its magic touch. Looking back, it can well be regarded as an association of two kindred souls that culminated in a lasting guru-shishya relationship. For, in the course of his long arduous shagirdi with the pioneering master, Nikhilbabu imbibed the content and spirit of his Ustad’s music to a degree where it became an integral part of his own musical being.

The mystical element in Nikhilbabu’s music, that quality of detached intensity that suffused his playing, was his mentor’s precious bequest. That explains, why, even while showing equal concern for form and design with all his supreme virtuosity, his music never shed its contemplative character. His own introvert temperament made the impossible possible.

In 1952, Nikhilbabu moved to Bombay after Allauddin Khan went to Haj for his pilgrimage. During his four-year stay in the metropolis, he sought further guidance from Ali Akbar Khan, the Ustad’s illustrious son. True to the manner born, Ali Akbar Khan accepted his gurubhai as his shishya and gave him valued guidance on his quest for perfection. And more. He helped the struggling youngster in various ways. To bring him into the limelight, he even condescended to present instrumental duets in partnership with him. In later years, Nikhilbabu continued, in the true spirit of an ardent devotee of his Muse, to seek guidance and direction from Annapurna Devi, the versatile sister of Ali Akbar Khan. And he never tired of expressing his gratitude to these three stalwarts of the beenkar tradition.

To my mind, Nikhilbabu’s singular distinction lay in the way he enriched his inheritance. In doing so, he achieved an uncanny fusion of two musical streams: Maihar, pioneered by Allauddin Khan, and Etawah, founded by Imdad Khan, of which Vilayat Khan is the reigning master. This was a bold attempt at synthesising what are regarded as two contrary paramparas where even reconciliation, let alone fusion, would have been a pipedream. And as we know it today, Nikhilbabu’s approach proved to be the kind of venture that set our gharana-conscious diehards a-thinking. Strange but true, he did it with the blessings of his mentors!

Nikhilbabu was proud of his sitar. He called it the most versatile of all other string instruments. He once demonstrated to me how no other fretted instrument could hold a candle to the sitar in point of instrumental expressiveness, how it could conjure up the tonal abstractions associated with other musical media like the surbahar or the sarod or the surshringar. He reminded me that it was Allauddin Khan who pioneered and popularised such a unique combination of contemporary modes of instrumental expression without bias to any particular technique. Nikhilbabu’s own style provided proof of the validity of the Ustad’s trend-setting concept.

It was at a private concert that I first heard Nikhilbabu in Bombay in the early fifties. Many opportunities came my way, in the years that followed, to listen to his public concerts. His concert at the January 1985 Gharana Sammelan was his last appearance on the city platform. It was great music that he offered us for two hours.

All said and done, Nikhilbabu’s music was truly sui generis. The moving humanistic faculty that inspires all great creations was supreme in his art. It breathed life into his melodies. There was something in it that was much deeper than a mere display of an art cultivated through long and deliberate concentration. There was in them a rare assimilation of classical exactitude and emotional freedom – the kind that revealed his extraordinary insight into our ageless classical tradition. I, unhesitatingly, hail him as the best sitar maestro of our time.

Unlike most other less gifted but more fortunate confreres, he had no use for new-fangled or so-called self-composed ragas. He always chose profound, serious ragas that ideally suited his temperament. The raga Man-manjari, which he occasionally played for his audiences in response to requests, was about his only melodic innovation.

It is an irony of our time that despite the world acclaim he earned in his own right, Nikhil Banerjee did not receive the recognition richly due to him in his own country. A Padma Shri in 1968 and a Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1974 were all that came to him in ‘recognition’ of his contribution to Hindustani music. Could this, in the final analysis, be attributed, at least partly, to the personality of the man himself? He was none the worse for it when he was alive. Now he has gone away, leaving us sorrowing and wondering. The half-a-dozen commercial discs he has cut for the Gramophone Company of India are now all that we have to cherish and preserve as mementos of his greatness and, let me say it again, of the best sitar maestro of our time.

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The Illustrated Weekly of India, March 9, 1986