GURU  MAA

I’ve been spending time with Garden & Cosmos, a catalogue of an exhibition of Indian paintings from the collection of the Maharaja of Jodhpur that took place in 2009.  Much of the work is typically rich and exotic, reflecting the pleasures and luxuries of life at the Jodhpur Royal Court, but the pieces that really engage me are the more religious images, especially those that speculate about the origins and mysteries of the universe, which bring together a Mogul Muslim style of painting and ancient Hindu beliefs. In the early 19th century the Maharaja, a devotee of the Nath gurus and mendicant ascetics, commissioned paintings that mark a dramatic shift from those that went before. Instead of flattering and charming pictures of a courtly world there are surreal representations of metaphysical realms where, for example, Brahma, god of creation, emerges from a golden lotus flower that sprouts from the navel of the deity Narayana. Such images, uncommonly large in reality, are truly magnificent.

The paintings in Garden & Cosmos are usually to be found in a museum in the great and forbidding Jodhpur fort of Mehrangahr, where the album Junun and its accompanying  documentary were recorded and shot in 2015. Junun is the fruit of another cultural fusion, this time between the music of Shye Ben-Tzur, an Israeli who lives in Rajasthan and composes versions of Sufi Qawwali songs, and local drummers, a six-piece  Hindu brass band, two women singers, and musicians from the Muslim Manganiar community who play bowed-string instruments. Jonny Greenwood, the composer and guitarist from Radiohead, produced the record and brought in his friend and collaborator, Paul Thomas Anderson, to make the film. Its highlight, perhaps, is the wonderfully ecstatic Allah/Elohim, named after the Muslim and Jewish words for God, but the overall exuberance of the project, happily captured in the informal and rough-cut film, is just as joyful and uplifting.

Indian court patronage and the intersection between Muslim and Hindu culture are also at the heart of a quite different musical story, one that makes for a sombre contrast to the more confident and extrovert narratives of Garden & Cosmos and Junun. The celebrated sarod player and teacher Allauddin Khan, at one time employed at the court of the Maharaja of Maihar, was the father of Annapurna Devi, widely considered to have been one of the finest classical Indian musicians of the 20th century. Born a Muslim, Roshanara Khan was later renamed by the Maharaja, an incident that was in many ways typical, for as one obituary put it,  if outsiders knew of her at all, it was probably only as an accessory to the men in her life. It is said that her father had pledged not to teach her music, but when he heard Annapurna, at the age of ten, correcting her brother’s practice, he could no longer ignore her talent. She began learning the sitar, but Allaudin Khan soon encouraged her to take up the bass surbahar, telling her that while it would never be as popular as the sitar, the instrument’s refinement and musical depth would suit her well. 

At the age of thirteen Annapurna met Ravi Shankar, one of her father’s students, and they married two years later, Annapurna converting to Hinduism on the day of their wedding. A conventionally arranged marriage, it began to fall apart not long after the birth of a son. The worldly Shankar blamed his sheltered wife’s tantrums, but he also admitted that she was aware of his persistent affairs with other women. Annapurna, however, suggested that the the cause of the breakdown was her husband’s jealousy of her talent. ‘Whenever I performed’, she said, ‘people appreciated my playing, and I sensed that Panditji (Ravi Shankar) wasn’t too happy about their response. I wasn’t that fond of performing anyway’. Shankar didn’t agree. ’She maybe doesn’t like to face the public or she is nervous or whatever’, he told an interviewer. ‘This is very sad, because she is a fantastic musician’. Annapurna subsequently called Shankar’s accounts of the collapse of their marriage and the premature death of their son ‘false and fabricated stories’. ‘I think Panditji is losing his sense of propriety or his mental balance’, she said; ‘or he has turned into a pathological liar’.

Annapurna Devi withdrew from public life in the 1950s, choosing never to play in public again, and because the only extant recordings of her playing are of poor quality, her reputation is based on memory and hearsay. Many serious students were nonetheless drawn to her, among them the distinguished sitar player Nikhil Bannerjee, the flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia, and her nephew, the fine sarod player Aashish Khan. It is rumoured that the only outsider to hear her play was George Harrison, whom she allowed to sit in on a daily practice session, a privilege granted only after persuasion from India’s then prime minister, Indira Gandhi. Becoming known as ‘Guru Maa’, she refused to be photographed, was rarely interviewed, and seldom left her apartment. Some years before she passed away in 2018, she said that she was happy in seclusion and was at peace when teaching, practicing, and feeding pigeons on her balcony.

A sign on the front door of Annapurna Devi's Mumbai apartment read:

A Request

Please Ring The Bell Only Three Times
If Nobody Answers, Please Leave Your Card/Letter
Thank You for Being Considerate
Smt Annapurna Devi

Some references:

Review of Garden & Cosmos:   https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/may/31/exhibition-art

Junun:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTK7S97EQU

Article on Annapurna Devi:  https://www.mansworldindia.com/people/annapurna-devi-the-tragedy-and-triumph-of-ravi-shankars-first-wife/

Obituary of Annapurna Devi:  https://www.npr.org/2018/10/23/659786993/annapurna-devi-poised-star-surbahar-spent-60-years-her-apartment