Truly to sing takes another kind of breath.
A breath in the void. A shudder in God. A wind.1
Rainer Maria Rilke

What to say about death—it’s not our world.
Kumar Gandharv

In the middle of the sky-circle, that enlightened guru certainly heard his voice.2 But we, here on this dusty earth, enmeshed in the business of our lives, have been listening to his voice for years. Despite disease and old age, he kept bringing forth that song of flourishing trees, spreading vines.3 Sitting on Shiva’s platform he sang, and, as Madhu Limaye had said years before on his 60th birthday, ‘It seemed to us that we were touching the mystery of this world.’ This time he had a premonition of his end. A week earlier, without any warning, he turned up in Indore to meet his friends. He had been telling his wife and daughter that the distress this time was beyond anything he had experienced. This time I won’t stay. Every time, I marshal all my forces to fight. Then something new comes along.

He even spoke of the direction in which he wished his dead body to lie. He had said that his last rites should be in the same place as everyone else’s, not any special place. He had asked his tabla accompanist to go to the cremation ground and see how it felt. He added that the place shouldn’t feel bad. A person going there should feel, ‘I have come to a nice place.’ When the funeral procession, after passing through the streets of Dewas with full state honours, reached the public cremation ground, surrounded by lush green fields, it really did feel like a park. Many intimate friends of Kumarji were there, along with the public from Dewas and Bhopal, many artists from Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Dewas and so on. The fire was lit by his son, the singer Mukul Shivputra, who had arrived from a temple in Nemavar just in time for the funeral procession. In that cremation ground encircled by green grasses, the pyre burned. But whose passing away was it? Kumar Gandharva’s, or Shivputra Siddharamaiya Komkali’s?

Kumar Gandharva had made his wager with death and sustained himself with untiring courage for nearly half a century. He had spent most of his musical life singing with only one lung. With his irrepressible will to live, he had held death back for almost 50 years. For him, singing became synonymous with living. The will to live and the will to create could not be separated. More: for him, to live was not merely to be alive but to live questioning and inquiring, meeting every unexpected and unpredictable turn of events with courage and dignity. Kumar Gandharva considered himself a practitioner of the most perishable art. ‘Every day I die singing,’ he said. We are all perishable in the same way, even though, in the entanglements and perplexities of our lives, we tend to forget it. Kumarji always remembered his mortality; he was an artist who was assaulted not by death but by the fullness of life, its innumerable sensations. Since his initial illness had brought him very close to death, in a sense he always remained close to it without falling victim to it. His music is a daring counter-image, without any self-pity, for this perishing condition.

Throughout his life, with ebullient curiosity, Kumar Gandharva seemed to be searching for the life-giving meaning of this inescapable mortality. His music had an astounding fearlessness. Such a vast canvas of emotion that it contained everything: truly another kind of ‘breath’, ‘void’, ‘shudder’, ‘wind’; a boundless, never-ending artistic passion. From passionate desire to carefree nonchalance to imperturbable detachment—all this in the music of one musician. There are great singers who are incontrovertible masters of a particular style or artistic emotion. But Kumar Gandharva sang everything with equal command and involvement—khayal, thumri, tarana, bhajan, tappa. He could bring forth countless artistic emotions with equal depth. He was the supreme singer of nirgun, yet he was also a powerful exponent of the sagun presence of words and poetry. In his singing, from beginning to end, he sustained a kind of peaceful tension. Everything flowed, emotion-charged, in that singing: passion and dispassion, joy and grief, nature exquisite and restless, solitude and community, awesome power and impenetrable silence, loquaciousness and calm, duality and oneness. Musical imagination had rarely bestowed such experience, such abundance and fullness of rich feeling, on any one musician.

In demolishing the myth of gharana membership, Kumar Gandharva radically redefined our tradition and our times. Not by repetition and duplication, but by experimentation, he brought forth the creative ambiguity of traditional truth. To experiment and find something new, he emphasised, we don’t need to go outside of tradition but to grapple with it and delve deep into it. He was not ready to believe that repetition, shunned in other artistic media, was desirable in music, the art of all arts. He was one of the very few musicians who believed, and participated in, a far-reaching community of artists. He took a deep interest in poetry, painting, theatre, architecture. Although, following custom, he had had little schooling, he was a great reader. In his house, ‘Bhanukul’, he had a collection of about 2,000 books, which he kept in careful order and read constantly. When you met him, he would ask—have you read this prose-piece by Vinda Karandikar, or such-and-such a book by Iravati Karve?

It was no coincidence that he attempted to make music a matter of reflection and dialogue. Raga, composition, beat, tempo, emotional expression—he was a constant, alert, eager questioner of all. This questioning showed itself both within and beyond music. Conservatives shied away from such abundant questioning. They had no answer to the question of why Kumarji, while he had all the musical notes and skills at hand, still produced ragas in such strange and unexpected forms. Dhrupad singer Ramakant Gundecha said that after setting forth all the notes of Yaman, Kumarji would go searching for Raga Yaman. It is not that he lacked respect, but that he refused to see thinking and questioning as destroying or opposing that respect.

Just as he put an end to the conservative hostility between tradition and experimentation, he also startlingly reduced the distance between classical and folk. Apart from him, no musician has ever had the temerity to present a two-and-a-half hour performance consisting only of folk music, as he did in his ‘Malwa Folk Melodies’ concert. For the first time in the 20th century, and the last, the stability of classical and the dynamism of folk, the dignity of classical and the energy of folk, found a graceful balance. He placed classical consciousness in the stream of folk culture, recognised the aristocratic in a refined version of the ordinary. From the folk to the classical, he brought passion, fragrance, the sense of touch. With regard to everything— whether god, saint, the given world, any structure or pattern of the status quo—he spontaneously raised his finger, questioning. Perhaps no other musician has posed such a continuous challenge to the classical status quo and, in his particular way, left behind the indelible stamp of his thought and perception. In a sense, Kumar Gandharva throughout his life was the ‘opposition’ in classical music. His music was in many ways a counter-music. At the same time, he was alert to the danger of being turned into an establishment himself. He had no desire to start his own tradition, but insisted on keeping his thought independent.

Kumar Gandharva changed at one go the foundation of prevailing musical aesthetics. In making change central to music, he made it entirely modern. Though he may not have written a conventional essay on classical music, whenever he expressed his ideas, and most of all whenever he assimilated those ideas in his music, he created by example a new aesthetic that only needs to be gathered together in order to be understood.

Kumar Gandharva gave words and poetry a new prestige in classical music. It is widely agreed that his singing deepened our understanding of Kabir, Sur, Mira and so on. But it is important to remember that, in doing so, he did not devalue the sovereignty of the voice (sur). Words had their place, even their greatness; but the medium of meaning in music is the voice. On this he always insisted, in both thought and action.

Kumarji, with his genius for waging battles, viewed opposition to the status quo as a necessary duty, and he fought on several fronts at once. He composed new bandishes under the pseudonym ‘Shok’ [sorrow]; he created new ragas; he collected in writing lost compositions of Kabir, Gorakhnath and others. He did this without ostentation or theatricality. If he created a new raga, he placed it before music-lovers for their enjoyment and reflection, with humility; he did not call a press conference and make a proclamation.

In his ordinary conversation, poetic expressions came forth effortlessly. He was at once the Kabir (who burns his own house) of Indian music and the rasik-grihasth (connoisseur householder) of its tradition. While he was intellectual and often argumentative, his singing had an irrepressible sensuality. In the growing disconnection of this age, he was at once the poet of affection and the passionate architect of a vast detachment. His first book, Anūp Rāgvilās (Bombay: Marg Prakashan, 1965), was published long ago. He had been thinking for several years about publishing a new book called Sagun Nirgun. He creatively brought forth the wholeness of that pair, sagun and nirgun. Through him a new taste developed for classical music— not only among many young people, but also among poets, writers, painters, dancers, architects and so on. He played a decisive role in bringing the classical together with the modern, on his own terms.

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This is an excerpt from Singing Emptiness: Kumar Gandharva performs the poetry of Kabir by Linda Hess. No part of this excerpt may be quoted or reproduced without prior written consent from its publisher, Seagull Books. 

The year 2023-24 is being observed as the birth centenary year of Kumar Gandharva, celebrations for which began at the NCPA in April 2023 with a two-day festival organised in association with the Kumar Gandharva Pratishthan.

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Pull Quote: In demolishing the myth of gharana membership, Kumar Gandharva radically redefined our tradition and our times ... To experiment and find something new, he emphasised, we don’t need to go outside of tradition but to grapple with it and delve deep into it

Footnotes: 

1. My Berkeley friend, Rilke translator Anita Barrows, kindly provided me with the German lines and reference for this epigraph, so that I would not get lost trying to translate a Hindi version of the German. It is from the third sonnet to Orpheus. The original German:
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch am nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind. 

2. Vajpeyi refers to the bhajan ‘Sunta hai guru gyani’. 

3. Vajpeyi (1999) writes that Kumarji still sings of ‘drum drum lata lata’, literally, ‘tree-tree, vine-vine’, the repetition signalling a profusion of these green and growing things. These are words from one of the bandishes that Kumarji sang.