Vilayat Khan

All Music Guide:

Vilayat Khan, one of the greatest Hindustani musicians of the 20th century, was born in Gouripur in East Bengal (later Bangladesh) in August 1922. (Various other dates are strewn throughout the literature but that is the date that he confirmed in 1993.) His grandfather, Imdad Khan (1848-1920) and his father Enayat Khan (1894-1938) -- Vilayat Khan gives the spelling Inayat Khan -- were famed musicians in their lifetimes and Vilayat and his younger brother Imrat Khan inherited their musicality. Their gharana is known as the Imdadkhani gharana after their grandfather.

He studied initially with his father. On his father's death in 1938 his training became the responsibility of his mother, Bashiran Begum, his grandmother, Bande Hussain Khan, and his maternal uncle, Wahid Khan. Around the same period Vilayat Khan began recording 78s. Peculiarly it is reported that he had to cope with odious comparisons with his father. Gradually he developed a style which, while acknowledging his kinsfolk's contribution, spoke with his own distinctive voice. His most outstanding contribution to his gharana's tradition is the evolution of what is known as a vocal style or gayaki ang on sitar. To some degree this is a term of convenience. Other contemporary musicians were striving to develop instrumental styles which more closely resembled the human voice -- it was after all the goal of all instrumentalists to mimic as far as possible the human voice -- and Vilayat Khan did not have a monopoly in this endeavor whatever some commentators claimed. That is not to detract from his achievement which was considerable and caused a sensation.

Vilayat Khan's strides in compensating for the sitar's shortcomings were immense. His career was marked by a regally consistent musical quality. An outspoken critic of low standards, he maintained levels of personal integrity that on occasion earned him the disfavor of the establishment. Little of his work was in any context other than the strictly classical one although he worked with Satyajit Ray on the soundtrack to the film Jalsaghar and the Ismail Merchant/James Ivory film The Guru. He might be summed up as a keeper -- not a quencher -- of the flame.

Wikipedia:

Ustad Vilayat Khan (Bengali: বিলায়েত খাঁ Bilaeet Khã; August 28, 1928 –March 13, 2004) was one of India's well known sitar maestros. He recorded his first 78-RPM disc at the age of 8, and gave his last concert in 2004 at the age of 75.

Early life

Vilayat Khan was born in Gauripur, British India to Enayat Khan, a sitar maestro. His family of musicians trace their pedigree back to the court musicians of the Mughals. His father, recognised as a leading sitar and surbahar (bass sitar) player of his time, as had been the grandfather, Imdad Khan, before him. He was taught in the family style, known as the Imdadkhani Gharana or Etawah Gharana, after a village outside Agra where Imdad Khan lived.

However, Enayat Khan died when Vilayat was only nine, so much of his education came from the rest of his family: his uncle, sitar and surbahar maestro Wahid Khan, his maternal grandfather, singer Bande Hassan Khan, and his mother, Bashiran Begum, who had studied the practice procedure of his forefathers. His uncle Zinde Hassan looked after his riyaz (practice). As a boy, Vilayat wanted to be a singer; but his mother, herself from a family of vocalists, felt he had a strong responsibility to bear the family torch as a sitar maestro.

Performing career

Vilayat Khan performed at All bengal Music Conference, as his first concert, organized by Bhupen Ghosh in Kolkata with Ahmed Jan Thirakwa on tabla. His performance made headlines as "Electrifying Sitar" in Bombay next day of his concert organized by Vikramaditya Sangeet Parishad, Mumbai (1944). In the 1950s, Vilayat Khan worked closely with instrument makers, especially the famous sitar-makers Kanailal & Hiren Roy, to further develop the instrument. Also, he liked to perform without a tanpura drone, filling out the silence with strokes to his chikari strings.

Some ragas he would somewhat re-interpret (Bhankar, Jaijaivanti), others he invented himself (Enayatkhani Kanada, Sanjh Saravali, Kalavanti, Mand Bhairav), but he was first and foremost a traditional interpreter of grand, basic ragas such as Yaman, Shree, Todi, Darbari and Bhairavi.

When he died from lung cancer in 2004, Vilayat Khan had been recording for over 65 years, broadcasting on All-India Radio since almost as far back and been seen as a master (ustad) for 60. He had been touring outside India off and on for more than 50 years, and was probably the first Indian musician to play in England after independence (1951). In the 1990s, his recording career reached a climax of sorts with a series of ambitious CDs for India Archive Music in New York, some traditional, some controversial, some eccentric. Towards the end of his life, he also performed and recorded sporadically on the surbahar. He has performed duet concerts with maestros like Bismillah Khan, Ali Akbar Khan, brother Imrat Khan.

Khan composed and conducted the score for three feature films - Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar in Bengali, Merchant-Ivory Productions' The Guru in English, and Madhusudan Kumar's Kadambari in Hindi. In addition to these, he also gave music for a little known documentary film in Bengali produced by Dr. Barin Roy.

Personal life

The Imdad Khan family is of Rajput lineage . The family is of Hindu origin and later converted to Islam. In an informal continuation of his rajput lineage Ustad Enayat Khan (father of Ustad Vilayat Khan) kept a Hindu name of Nath Singh. Ustad Vilayat Khan himself composed many bandishes using the pen name Nath Piya.

Vilayat Khan spent much of his life living in Calcutta. He was married twice. He had two children from his first marraige - Sufi singer Zila Khan and Yaman Khan. From his second marraige he had two sons, Shujaat (b. 1960) and Hidayat (b. 1975), both sitarists. He was survived also by his younger brother, Imrat Khan, the post-war star of the surbahar field. The brothers played celebrated duets in their youth, but had a severe falling-out and for years were not on speaking terms. His nephew Ustad Rais Khan is also a star sitar-player. Ustad Vilayat Khan took few disciples other than his sons; among the best-known are Kashinath Mukherjee (younger brother of film director Hrishikesh Mukherjee), Arvind Parikh, Kalyani Roy. Debashis Datta. Mrs. Lakshmi Seshan now a teacher of the instrument in her 80th year was a student of Vilayat Khan starting at the age of 12. The Maestro also gave sitar lessons to Big Jim Sullivan, the famous English session musician.

Ustad-e-Maa Zila Khan, the great Sufi singer from the Imdad Khani Gharana and daughter of Ustad Vilayat Khan’s was a formal student (gandabandh shahgird) and Ustad Vilayat Khan empowered her to also be a successor of this great Gharana. She is the first and only woman of this gharana who performs public concerts and her CD’s are very popular with the masses and the intellects alike.

He enjoyed horse-riding, pool playing, swimming and ballroom dancing. His successes made him rich, and though he grew more pious late in life, he used to drive sports cars and dress in haute couture, and also collected such various items as firearms, smoking pipes, antique European crockery, cut glass and chandeliers.

Controversy

Fans and media alike liked to play up Vilayat Khan's rivalry with and animosity towards Ravi Shankar. However, in calmer moments Vilayat would admit there was not much to it. His animosity for the politics and institutions of India's cultural life was another matter. In 1964 and 1968, respectively, he was awarded the Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan awards – India's fourth and third highest civilian honours for service to the nation – but refused to accept them, declaring the committee musically incompetent to judge him.

In January 2000, when he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian award, he again refused, going so far as to call it "an insult". This time, his criticism had a slightly different twist: he would not accept any award that other sitar players, his juniors and in his opinion less deserving, had been given before him. "If there is any award for sitar in India, I must get it first", he said, adding that "there has always been a story of wrong time, wrong person and wrong award in this country".

Among other honours he turned down was the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award. For a while, he also boycotted All-India Radio. The only titles he accepted were the special decorations of "Bharat Sitar Samrat" by the Artistes Association of India and "Aftab-e-Sitar" (Sun of the Sitar) from President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed.

Footnotes

^ He kept his childhood interest in vocal music all his life, often singing in concerts, and composed khyal bandishes using the pen name Nath Piya.

^ Sitar Maestro Vilayat Khan Refuses Padma Bhushan, The Hindu, February 7, 2000.