She has been instrumental in popularising the Agra-Atrauli gharana, a style known for its powerful vocals and intricate nuances.
Lalith Jayavanth Rao, Hindustani vocalist of Agra-Atrauli gharana has been chosen for the prestigious annual Gurumaa Annapurna Devi Award 2024. She will join the galaxy studded by the previous recipients including Asha Bhosle, Manik Bhide, Prabha Atre and N Rajam. The award will be presented today at a special ceremony.
The award in memory of Surbahar exponent Vidushi Annapurna Devi, the reclusive genius of the Maihar-Senia gharana is instituted by Mumbai-based Annapurna Devi Foundation. She once said, “Stardom is the ultimate test imposed by Sharda Ma on her seekers. Very few are able to pass this test…Awards and felicitations can trigger spiritual abjection.” But Lalith Rao, the epitome of grace and humility passes Sharda Ma’s test, receiving it as a blessing while the honour sits lightly on her shoulder.
“The heights by great (wo)men reached and kept,
Were not attained by sudden flight”
said American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
The award is a celebration of the heights that Annapurna Devi and Lalith Rao achieved by consistent engagement with their art, guided by time-honored values and virtues of artistic experience. The present award assumes significance by the fact that both the women represent liberal traditions in which syncretism was a lived experience and artificial boundaries had no meaning.
Annapurna’s Maihar gharana traces its lineage to Tansen’s daughter Saraswati. She acquired the most exquisite music guided by the finest aesthetic values from her father, Baba Allauddin Khan the Paramahamsa-like saint-musician. As the sister of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and wife of Pandit Ravishankar, she constantly inhabited a world of vibrant music. For personal reasons, she chose to be a recluse and kept away from public performances, shunned recordings and interviews and engaged in sadhana and teaching in order to perpetuate Baba’s music. Pursuing music in its divinest form, Annapurna Devi chose to play to God alone. She grew to be a legend and clearly outshone every instrumentalist of her gharana. An award in Gurumaa Annapurna’s memory hence assumes colossal significance.
Raga Lalit, the prayerful early-morning melody exudes peace and a feeling of surrender. The soft-spoken Lalith Rao embodies these qualities, while also exploring her gharana music known for its robust vocalism marked by powerful voice-projection. Agra gharana held Lalith’s imagination, whether as a three-year-old who listened to Ustad Faiyaz Khan for hours at an all-night program or the young woman who embraced the formidable Agra-Atrauli music for a lifetime, setting aside a brilliant career in Biomedical electronics.
Life dedicated to music
Despite an Engineering degree from Indian Institute of Science and a postgraduate degree from New Brunswick University, Canada, Lalith chose to embrace music giving up a highly promising world of career opportunities. With no clue where music would take her, she followed her passion, with the unstinted support of her husband Jayavanth, ‘the determining factor’, and his family.
Lalith’s music bloomed under two liberal gurus from diverse cultures and religious backgrounds. Pandit Ramarao Naik, an orthodox Madhwa Brahmin who spread Agra gharana music in old Bangalore, then a Karnatic music hub, and Padmabhushan Ustad Khadim Husain Khan, a prolific composer and music teacher settled in Bombay. With no incongruity in style and learning process under these gurus, Lalith sailed through comfortably, with a year’s training in between, under Pandit Dinkar Kaikini in Delhi.
While Rama Rao laid the firm foundation, Khansaab inspired Lalith to absorb gharana music, along with diverse elements from the wellspring of different musicians. Jitnaa tum sunoge utnaa tum badoge came his advice.
Bombay of the late sixties and seventies, vibrant with music, offered the music-loving couple an enviable opportunity to listen to vocalists of at least three generations. Nivrutti Buva, Gajanan Buva Joshi, Krishna Rao Shankar, Siddheshwari Devi, the senior Rahimuddin Dagar, Mallikarjun Mansur, Malavika Kanan, Dhondutai and many more. Outstanding instrumentalists like Vilayat Khan, Nikhil Banerjee, Bimalendu Mukherjee, Ali Akbar Khan and Ravishankar added to Lalith’s musicscape. However, her Guru’s music to which she relates unconditionally is the closest to her heart. Khansaab’s conviction Kanha ke binaa gaana nahin hai entered Lalith’s world shaping her inclusive worldview and affording newer meanings to her music.
A musical journey across cultures
Peter Harrison of Madrid and Oporto Operas in London, whom Lalith Rao considers her fourth guru played a vital role in handling a severe crisis in her life. When she lost her voice all of a sudden in 1994, at the peak of her career, Peter Harrison helped her recover her voice through breath and voice training. He employed concepts like head voice, chest voice, different modes of sound production and pronunciation in the process of healing.
Lalith and Khadim Husainsaab, like her other guru Pandit Ramarao Naik and his guru Ustad Faiyaz Khan, as also Pandit Rajeev Taranath and Ustad Ali Akbar Khan represent awe-inspiring guru-shishya models in our midst. In North Indian music, religion is immaterial, compositions are neither ‘Hindu’ nor ‘Muslim’ and they are addressed to all Lords and peers. Music alone remains at the core. Lalith acknowledges the role of Muslim Ustads like her guru and artists from the tawaifa community, in meticulously preserving ‘Hindu’ compositions and handing them over to posterity.
Lalith considers ‘completeness’ as the hallmark of her multi-faceted gharana-raga shuddhi, swara shuddhi, layakari, layabol, a huge repertoire of ragas and compositions. Lalith’s music is rooted in tradition, upholding the purity of ragas in the context of Agra gharana vocalism.
A lasting legacy
Lalith’s engagement with multifarious music activities-extensive performance, teaching and recording of unique gharana elements, makes her a notable inheritor. She took her gharana music, often labelled as ‘difficult’, and ‘meant for men’, across India and the globe for three decades. Khansaab’s repeated advice to ‘allow your expression to bloom’, (baandke math rakhna) guided Lalith’s soulful exploration.
The Ustad’s zeal in training Lalith towards becoming a concert-artist resulted in luxuriant music that touched listeners’ hearts on stage, on radio and television as a Top-grade artist and through her recordings under prestigious labels including Navras Records of London and Ocora Radio France. Lalith’s archival projects for the Ethno-musicology Department, University of Washington in Seattle and ITC Sangeet Research Academy; her lecture-demonstrations; her book reviews and interviews of revered musicians like Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur for the Sangeet Natak Academy, all constitute her rich contribution to the world of Hindustani music. Thematic music presentations Bhairav to Bhairavi, Raag-rang Samay Yatra and Agra gharana-Ek Vatavriksh by Lalith and her disciples document aesthetic traditions in the language of Agra-gharana vocalism.
Her loving and highly talented disciples are engaged in taking the musical lineage ahead in a creative manner, making Lalith’s music eternal and purposeful.
Jayavanth Rao, Lalith’s life-partner is a fine connoisseur of music and author of ‘Sajan Piya’-a biography of Ustad Khadim Hussain Khan. Despite his own high-profile job as an executive in a British company and extensive travel abroad, he has been an integral part of her music journey, enlarging her music canvas and augmenting her accomplishments.
Photo: Saggere Radhakrishna
