Requeim in Raga Janki: A wounded music...

Over a century ago, a courtesan with the remarkable name of Janaki Bai Chhappan Chhuri, (Janaki Bai of fifty six blades) rose to fame. Born in Allahabad in a humble Halwai (sweet maker)’s family, Janaki, her mother and her siblings were largely neglected after the father took on a mistress, Laxmi. Eventually the mother Manaki left Allahabad with her children for Varanasi helped by a procuress. In Varanasi, Manaki became a tawaif and raised her talented daughter Janaki as a singer. Up until this point, Janaki Bai’s life reads like the story of many other courtesan singers from Umrao Jaan to Malka Jaan, and her daughter Gauhar.  Most of them, left to fend for themselves and their children by philandering husbands or patrons, found their way to the red light areas of Varanasi, one of the seven oldest cities in the north. Varanasi has been the venerable seat of firmly segregationist and austere Brahminical learning, and also, since Buddha’s days, home to various practitioners of sensuous art forms including music and dance.

The story of Janaki Bai’s life thereafter suddenly regresses into a horror novel. As precocious young girl, Janaki took on a lover, Raghunandan, a police constable. When denied favours he craved, he forced his way into the house with a sword and attacked and scarred Janaki. There followed a brief period of oblivion and ignominy when Janaki stayed indoors, weeping and hiding her scarred face. But then she realised she still had her rare gift safe within her. So beginning with the Maharaja of Rewa, she forced her entry into the world of public singing. With a veiled face, she arrived in Rewa and requested that she be allowed to present her music from behind a curtain and then be judged if she was fit to adorn a formal Mehfil. Legend says her music won her the Maharaja’s approval who was startled when he saw her face. But he grudgingly admitted that a talented female musician need not look like an apsara and gave his approval. Thereafter Janaki Bai, the charismatic singer used every wile in the book to storm her way into other homes and palaces of the rich and powerful. Soon the sheer beauty of her music won her many rich patrons and she gradually amassed a fortune.

But Gaur’s novel Requiem in Raga Janaki is worthy of closer inspection. The author sets out to create a novel based on the real-life story of courtesan singer Janaki Bai (1880-1934), based largely on her collection of writings and legends handed down by music lovers over the years. Understandably, there is a lot of anxiety here, dressed as genteel concern for a woman scarred, wronged frequently and betrayed by men to whom she turns again and again for patronage, for emotional fulfillment. To narrate the tale over a hundred years later in English, the supposedly kind hearted imprecision of the narrator’s language and its peculiar native nuances must be translated and then presented in an English used by the middle class Indian readers of the YouTube age. Such a mixing of 19th century Hindustani with Angrezi, fact with fiction, memory with desire is always a somewhat tricky business and must sacrifice many voices and shades and undertones and the quirks of the language used by various classes.

We soon notice a noticeable lack of ease in a simultaneous narration of two stories. One is a fairly well-recorded history of colonial India with its British dominated political mores and markets, its male dominant aristocracy trapped in age old customs and the noticeably male dominant musical Gharanas where women were major but unacknowledged contributors. Here a gripping tale of a scarred but feisty Baiji fighting for a proper place and earning in a male-centric  world of ustads or khalifas, riddled with court intrigues and deceitful liaisons, fails to rise into a memorable work of art. As the story progresses, it begins to dart between centuries: braiding popular myths and legends (about Tansen and Baiju Bawra,  Haddu and Hassu Khan, Shakkar and Makkhan Quawwal) with the actual world Janaki Bai lived in, it begins to flail and drag. Even the stories about the big breakthrough in music, the rise of the lucrative phonograph industry of post WW1 years,  appears listlessly.

Using her magical voice and gift for music, Janaki had already tripped the lock and risen like a phoenix to be a star showered upon by silver and gold by her many admirers. She was a fixture in all major celebrations in various regal and noble palaces and when King George V visited Allahabad, she was chosen to sing a laudatory duet with the mercurial, dazzlingly beautiful Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta at a special mehfil in Allahabad. The rivalry between Janaki and Gauhar was a source of some merriment. Janaki Bai was a poet too and considered herself the disciple of the witty contemporary Urdu poet Akbar Allahabadi, who penned a well known snide couplet on the much married and divorced Gauhar saying how Khuda had given her all but a Shauhar (husband). In time, Janaki Bai went on to publish a collection of her own, Deewan E Janaki, published  by Israar e Karimi Publishers of Allahabad. She was also a frequent recorder and cut 22 discs for each of which she charged a fee of Rs 3000.

But this was when disaster struck in the form of her adopted son turning out to be a disappointment. And then an ageing Janaki fell in love with another scheming young scoundrel, Abdul Haq, a married man. The heartbroken singer then turned to philanthropy and established a trust for the indigent with her considerable earnings for providing students with necessary financial help, lay out public feasts during both Hindu Muslim festivals and give blankets to the poor during winters. She died lonely and bitter and was buried by friends in a cemetery close to the Allahabad railway station.

What we miss in the novel are the true resonances of a new Indian society of post 1857 years stirring to life gradually, throwing up a new aristocracy and a whole new attitude towards music and patronage. Where is the exciting rise of a new mercantile class averse to old style baithaks, the German entrepreneurs dismissive of Desi music but avidly looking for a market for recorded native music in India, the recruitment of eminent singers? Unlike Premchand’s Shatranj ke Khiladi or Tagore’s Jalsaghar, Gaur fails to recapture the collective human messiness and magic of Janaki Bai’s era that was great and sick at the same time. Where old aristocracy was being replaced by an Anglophile Bhadralok middle class from Calcutta to Bombay, the eminent male ustads, remained wary of recording their jealously guarded music. Music in the age of Janaki Bai has many complicated back stories: men at this point began to lose the race in the entertainment industry even as opportunities grew for women. Gauhar Jaan and Janaki Bai grabbed the opportunity, sang in many languages and went on to charge a fee higher than many ustads and still were eventually tricked out of their fortunes by their males, dying sad and broken.

There is also a strange lack of reflective quality here, typical of an era rooted in a certain language and melodic tradition being forced to fit the precision of a foreign language and an alien tempered scale.

The garrulous ageing Baiji who narrates the tale in a strange flowery English sounds less like a polished and poetic member of the privileged circle and more like a Bollywood gossip columnist. Claiming close friendship ties with Rajab Ali Khan Sahib, she begins:

“..You want me to talk about her after all these years ? So be it. Maybe you can get a book out of all this. Me? I am content to turn this Raga into a requiem. Isn’t that what Vilas Khan did? Turned his Todi to a note of grieving, sang it to the corpse of his father, Tansen, and the corpse raised its hand in benediction…I am no hireling of your museum. I am an artist..”

With the creation of an inveterate name dropper who boasts of being an artist with “a sense of pride’, the author has made Janaki Bai both a shield and a weapon and can safely hide behind her narrator’s imprecision of language and vulnerability to historical veracity, and also disarm all those recent Google and YouTube supported lovers of traditional Hindustani music .

Frankly as fiction, the story of Janaki Bai remains an assembled, reshaped, embellished with currently hip musical terminologies in bhasha. The novel fails to even carry a whiff of the Desi languages and various kinds of Hindis (yes, Bhartendu Harishchandra lists 12 types of Hindi, including Railway wali Hindi flecked with English). It was this polyphonic north in which all our Hindustani musicians including Janaki Bai, sang and spoke wrote their musical scores. When this is replaced with flowery and archaic English phrases such as these, one begins to squirm: “..Hassu played out the suspense. “I, ignorant wretch, was all aflush with achievement and delight ..little did I know this corporal throat, this body of flesh and bone, can not take the breath of fire that a second crackle-of-lightening taan brings..”

To many who (for various political, personal or other reasons) are unfamiliar with various kinds of Hindi or the dialects that still continue to feed Hindustani music, this fictionalised biography may appear a pretty cool one with a certain simplicity, lack of artifice and of course a Veere Di Wedding kind of feminist punch.

“My song now feels all wrong to me, its false notes jar’,.. Janaki Bai’s last words seem a fitting requiem to the novel that suffers from the notion that one’s cultural allegiance must takes precedence over the creative art.