What is a life worth? Like the rest of us, Neelum Saran Gour, author of Requiem in Raga Janki , can’t quite know the answer; but she is as imaginative and eloquent an orator on life’s intransigence as an audience could hope for. Her instrument of exposition is the life and times of a protagonist who, for all her stentorian voice, grand life, and prolific career, left behind a rather fading legacy.
Jankibai Illahabadi (1880-1934) was a popular songstress-courtesan, recording artist, and resident (if not realty mogul) of Allahabad. That much is historical fact — albeit a tepid description, a full life reduced to a synoptic husk. As Gour exhumes the grave wherein lie the advent of the gramophone era and the first rumblings of anti-colonialism in an India at the cusp of modernity, she plucks out the skeleton, the basic form, of Janki, and then embellishes it with all the possible contours of her persona using a fine-haired brush, much like how a raga is developed.
The 56 knife gashes
The brush strokes are choppy — at times sweeping across vast swathes of Jankibai’s career; at others, taking a microscope to the minute inflexions of her mind; or dealing merely in dialogue, leaving the subtextual import ambiguous — and therefore, Jankibai’s mural too is a mix between a wash and a smudge. The chapters, segmented according to the phases and seasons of Jankibai’s life, are replete with rich snapshots of the culture and values of a past century.
The narrator, “a bleary old-timer vibrating with memories”, has a commanding voice with all the feistiness and candour of
someone who has seen many a waning moon and passing star. At first, she is careful to qualify her discourse, meticulously distinguishing conjecture from fact, guardedly issuing disclaimers about the murky circumstances of Jankibai’s early days (during which she had acquired the 56 knife gashes which gave her the name Chhappan Churivali).
Then, her character voice slipping away, she launches into unabashed fictionalisation with full creative licence, extrapolating the tone and tenor of entire conversations, nuanced relationships, and thought processes that might have transpired in Jankibai’s epoch. Here, Gour makes full use of her in-depth knowledge of the North-Indian heartland, recreating the milieu of the period, placing the character of Jankibai in its midst, and remodelling her identity algorithmically.
Light and mind
In snatches, the writing is bombastic as befits the highbrow company that a celebrity like Jankibai might keep; and when it is coarse in keeping with her lowly origins, there is a vernacular vintage to savour. The narrator’s own sparkling prose apart, the pages of the book are strewn with splashes of plaintive verse from Jankibai’s pen, and the jolly irony of her poet-mentor Akbar Illahabadi’s couplets, the classicism of Urdu and Awadhi showered on the reader generously. In depicting Jankibai’s tryst with religion and personal faith, Gour gratifyingly puts the two terms into perspective for this day and age.
The character of Janki morphs seamlessly — in the stream of Gour’s consciousness — from wide-eyed waif to proud performer to spiritual seeker to devout wife to imposing matron to fearsome virago.
Through it all, Gour strives to preserve Jankibai’s protagonism, rationalising her foibles, empathising with her disgruntlements, reading deeper into her intentions. While the focus remains on Janki’s character, other well-formed cast members add flavour, and help mould her story.
Through her forays into Jankibai’s mind, Gour showcases her own personal affinity with music and a remarkable understanding and articulation of its inherent power. Besides the heady folklore and old-wives’ tales that usually fuel the myths behind Indian classical music, it’s refreshing to read of a raga being likened to “a river known in discrete tones of light and mind”. Of Janki finding the flavour of tea akin to the ‘Re’ of Raga Poorvi. Of Janki serendipitously discovering that she can brew self-catharsis as a blend of her literary and musical proficiency — a transliteration of music’s esoteric dynamics into experiential terms, and how the mind of an artist interacts, engages and frolics with music, and how music, in turn, stirs, haunts and heals the artist.
Requiem in Raga Janki; Neelum Saran Gour, Viking Press, ₹599
