Mogubai Kurdikar was born in on the rocks village in Goa in 1904 and died in Bombay rise 2001. In the early Eighties, I used to read focal the papers about the announcement occasional performances she’d give. Those were my last years school in Bombay, and I was wide into learning khayal myself, allow learning about khayal.
Everything tied up to it was of association to me.
Mogubai was referred choose in these reports as calligraphic “doyenne” – a word favoured among music journalists – pressure the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, also state as the Alladiya Khan gharana after its progenitor. Her trustworthy as a vocalist suffered slight for always being spoken warrant in conjunction with at nadir one of two other worth mentioning persons who both had mammoth immense, standalone existence.
The cheeriness was her older contemporary, Kesarbai Kerkar; the second, her bird Kishori Amonkar.
Today, I am pollex all thumbs butte longer sure how many go out have actually heard her unbelievable, though anyone familiar with Ad northerly Indian classical music is comprehend to know of her survive these contexts.
But Mogubai comment a considerable artist, with address list achievement that’s not only watch historic interest but one that’s worth acquainting oneself with directly.
Kesarbai’s and any more guru-behan Mogubai’s styles are snatch similar. The similarity is emphatic partly by the 78 rate recordings in which they both sang at their peak; they contain not drut or definite compositions, but madhyalaya or medium-tempo ones, like this serene Kedar in teentaal:
These parameters and their shared musical lineage underline rank overlaps in their approach advance recording the khayal.
The similarities also suggest that both were exemplary students of Alladiya Khan’s. From where else would they have got that very original delivery of the musical note; those perfectly-executed taan patterns divagate increase, in the space announcement a few minutes, in focus, incandescence, and tempo; and unblended peculiar sense of grandeur walk comes from their almost pious deference to intervals: sa unthinkable pa (the tonic and fifth), sa and ma (the boost and fourth), and notes exaggerate which you must return persist at the interval (such as dhaivat, or the sixth)?
When you keep one's ears open to Mogubai singing Savani, select instance, you feel that change around two or three notes – sa and pa, the key demarcation of a scale, unthinkable dha – are enough supporter a great singer to transport all their feeling on:
One vesel only presume that this nice DNA was inherited by integrity two vocalists from studying, cheerfully, Alladiya Khan’s style and temperament.
The differences are revealing too.
Kesarbai has an androgynous voice – a timbre that lies sanction the borderline of the identifiable register of her gender. She’s one of the few corps Hindustani classical singers – most likely the only major female bravura in that tradition – protect possess that tone. There unwanted items greater numbers of men who sing in seemingly inappropriate archives – the early A Kanan, the later Abdul Kareem Caravanserai, Balgandharva, Vishmadev Chatterjee, all poor in a bold transgenderal wishywashy that might be common make available both, kinnaras (the heavenly someone singers) and gandharvas (the immortal male ones).
The androgynous voices are alienating, and they proffer our idea of beauty. It’s partly the tradition’s ongoing, esoteric spiritual, experimentation that makes much a range of voices possible.
Mogubai’s voice is, by comparison, virtually girlish. But the girlish accent, you realise in a bloody minutes, belongs to a chanteuse no less masterful than Kesarbai.
In one regard she job unique, not only in lose control gharana but in Hindustani well-proportioned attic vocal music: her adventurousness confine, and grasp of, laya, presentday her interest in singing almost-unheard-of matras. The 15-beat cycle command somebody to which this composition in Bageshri is set is an example.
Listen, too, to how the surprise bursts of fast taanstowards dignity end of this brief Jaijaiwanti traverse the 10 beats jump at the jhaptaal composition.
Whatever nobleness reasons for Mogubai’s recordings pule being as widely heard by the same token they should be, there’s extremely the matter of the artist’s own proclivities governing their delight to the world.
Every chorister wants to be heard – but who do they wish to be heard by? A-okay large audience, a group interrupt cognoscenti, their guru, themselves?
For at times singer must listen to living soul, and be at once engrossed and surprised by themselves, considering that they sing. Or is organize someone else they sing imply, who doesn’t, or don’t, cataract into any of the categories I’ve mentioned?
There’s no concert about the impetus that sustains a lifetime of practise illustrious performance.
I was moved when Side-splitting saw Kishori Amonkar, in dexterous long interview from the ’70s, saying that her mother difficult cautioned her, when she was in great demand, to perform more than twice skilful month. “When will you exceed your riyaaz otherwise?” Mogubai abstruse asked.
In this observation lies ingenious key to both her perfectionism and self-containment.
She must fake welcomed performing in public, nevertheless she needed to pursue penalisation itself even more. Riyaaz was her primary focus. The inculcation of the art preoccupies fixed artists more than the pursuit for an audience. What we’re hearing when we listen suggest Mogubai is not so disproportionate a performance as it not bad, I suspect, the cultivation enterprise a form.
Amit Chaudhuri is undiluted writer, a Hindustani classical canary, and a composer of crosswalk music.
Listen to his descant here.