KI SHORI AMONKAR REMEMBERED
In the last decade, Kishori Amonkar’s stage persona was, naturally, a physically reduced version of herself. Her voice would take half an hour to gradually find its stride. Her seated posture seemed to barely rise above the sur mandal (a box-like zither) whose strings she caressed to fill the spaces in her singing. She seemed to lean on its wooden frame for support, holding the box as if it were a defence against the world. Or a defiance of it.
Old age is never the image we want to remember someone by, yet this image of defiance has the seeds of permanence. Kishori raged against age, admitting to worrying about it even in her 60s, when many artists touch their peak. She strove to preserve a youthful persona, with the voice of a girl. Alien as it seems, the French phrase enfant terrible fits well.
She railed against what she saw as the straitjackets of tradition, prioritising emotional response over prescribed form. “When I feel I have to sing a phrase in Bhupali in this way, I can’t follow Bhatkhande [a foundational text in Hindustani music’s pedagogy],” she’d say. She defied good manners towards her audiences, keeping them waiting while she remained in the green room, earning a well-deserved reputation for caprice. She scolded, from her stage, listeners for chatting or lesser offences; maintaining that it was a part of her war for the respectful treatment of musicians.
Kishori asserted her musical independence even while insisting that her Jaipur gharana heritage served as a base, or ‘my mother’. Much of the discussion on her among rasikas is framed in this approval or disapproval of her departure from gharana lines. Depending on where you stand, she liberated or dismantled the gharana style, whose genius lies in part in its intricate binding of notes to rhythm. Into this dense pattern, Kishori’s (maverick) insertion of space stands out, creating a tonal idyll where an emotive, romantic voice can roam.
Kishori represents, like Bhimsen Joshi, a generation whose teachers imbibed the lessons of the originators of 20th century gharanas (like Jaipur, Kirana or Agra) but made individualistic departures. Like Bhimsen, 11 years her senior, she built a magpie’s nest of influences from her many teachers. By 1970, she had emerged with the lyrical romanticism that seems to have become the mood of the times. Though more than Bhimsen, the romanticism of Pandit Jasraj and Carnatic music’s Balamuralikrishna, whom she admired, come to mind. Her adoring audiences, even the musicians among them, couldn’t care less: with the space she now enjoyed, she alloyed her romantic temperament to her vocal and musical rigour to create an original aesthetic.
Kishori’s was a remarkable voice, both as an instrument of musical production and as a metaphor for her approach to and place in Hindustani classical music. It was precise and powerful, singing fast figures with a bird-like sense of flight, with a vigour and suppleness honed by her exacting and famous mother Mogubai Kurdikar, and other gurus. It segued, in the lower octave where she often lingered, into a hauntingly aspirated breath, as if searching for some truth hidden in a still mist.
There’s little doubt that her interest in light music coloured her approach to her art. Her romantic gestures could, to my ears at least, descend into mawkish sentimentality, bringing an unwelcome melting of the frame of composition. At other times, it could be undirected meandering, failing to appeal even to sentiment. It was a hunt for the elusive, often frustrating listeners like me. But on a clear day, you could see a vista of emotion and ragasoaked musicianship, a profound experience that great music brings to the attuned listener.
Kishori liked to use the word ‘abstraction’ to describe her own experience of her music. She did achieve that height, if by a more languid and uncertain route.