Listening to Kishori Amonkar, one was immediately struck by a sense of deep loneliness. Perhaps of the soul, with the dark recesses of one’s interiors getting gently illuminated. It was a loneliness rendered rich and luminous, bearable and ennobled by the music. It gathered the listener in with its beauty and left one longing for more.
Amonkar’s music was full of rich contradictions. She had deep and unfailing respect for tradition and its values of classicism. Yet she sought self-expression, originality and individuality. She was trained in the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, but her music reached out to incorporate elements from elsewhere—not from other gharanas but from her own thinking and creatively bold personality.
Described by musicologist Mohan Nadkarni as one of two musicians (the other being Kumar Gandharva), who pioneered the avant garde movement in Hindustani classical music, Amonkar was the daughter-disciple of Moghubai Kurdikar, a major figure of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana and herself a disciple of the legendary Ustad Alla Diya Khan. She was also guided by other gurus, including Anjanibai Malpekar, Anwar Husain Khan and Sharad Chandra Aarolkar. She was married to Ravindra Amonkar and their two sons were, in fact, brought up by Kurdikar, leaving Amonkar free to devote herself to music.
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Her sadhana revitalised tradition by her individual imagination and was forever open to charting new paths and to meander, once in a while, into unknown and even at times unexpected alleys. Her rendition of Raga Bhoop was an interesting example. She brought to the innate regality of Bhoop an element of lonesome grandeur. In her,
Her restlessness made her a bit volatile as a performer. She had the unfortunate reputation of being eccentric and unpunctual. She was invariably late to arrive for concerts and took a lot of time to tune her tanpura and swarmandal, and even lost her temper once in a while.
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Amonkar justified all this by simply asserting, “It is essential that I collect myself before a performance.” Answering the charge that she took liberties with her ragas, she said, “I am a purist and will always try to remain one, in the sense that I will remain faithful to the feel of the raga.” She gave her music the imprint of her emotional state, “the impetuosity and vehemence of passion,” as Nadkarni put it, and that was what made her music unique.
Her bhakti music had verses from Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and Kannada sources. Her She had also sung for films and even won the Filmfare award for ‘Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne’, but didn’t continue once she realised her forte was classical music. She received the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan.
The empathy that Amonkar felt with nature has perhaps not been fully appreciated. Her music encompassed a complexity of emotions—separation, longing, waiting, eagerness, anxiety and tension. But beyond all this, there was a yearning, irrepressible and none too concealed, to identity with nature. Amonkar’s music reached out to the primeval elements of nature: nature giving birth, generating a million different things.
Hers was a poetics of intensity. She had said: “To express music faithfully, you have to be very intense. Unless you are intense within, you cannot perceive the feeling clearly… Every intensity has a very small space, a laser-sharp focus. It gets compressed and it comes to a point where nothing but the truth remains. Art becomes simplified and condensed with this intensity of feeling. The beginning is not art and neither is the end—it is the thread linking the two that emerges as art.”
Hindi poet and lover of the arts, the author has written about major artists and musicians and was personally acquainted with Kishori Amonkar.