Date:22/08/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/08/22/stories/2006082205482000.htm

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The maestro remembered

Marcus Dam

Film-maker Goutam Ghose on a moving interaction with the `Ustad'

KOLKATA: Bismillah Khan had initially agreed to be available for shooting for "not more than four or five days," but he got so involved in the making of the documentary on him that he asked for more time and settled for 15 days. "Why are you leaving in such hurry?" he asked at the end of the fifth day. "There is so much more left I wish to say," he told film-maker Goutam Ghose during the making of Sangemil se Mulakat in Varanasi in 1989.

Ghose was recalling here his experiences of making his 90-minute documentary on the maestro 17 years ago. "It took me 18 days to complete the documentary and there remains with me so much unused footage that perhaps I could make another on the Ustad," he said.

The funeral was to take place at Fatman Gate. "It was one of the locales in the documentary where I had shot him, playing his shehnai, with a huge crowd following him, an occasion reserved especially for the day of Muharram," recalls the film-maker.

Ghose remembers an anecdote the maestro narrated to him during the making of the documentary: "He had reluctantly agreed to a request from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to play the shehnai while leading a procession of dignitaries including the President and Pandit Nehru himself to the Red Fort in Delhi on the day India became a Republic. The occasion, after all, was not Muharram. But having agreed, the Ustad's next thought was of the tune he should play. Bismillah Khan finally decided on one that the boat-men sing while rowing down the Ganga which flows by Benaras."

"That comes as no surprise. It was Benaras that inspired Bismillah Khan's music, an inspiration I have tried to portray in the documentary," Ghose says. "It was this deep relationship with his surroundings that prompted the Ustad to turn down an offer from the Rockefeller Foundation for temporary residence in the U.S. He would accept, but only if the Ganga and the ambience of Benaras could be transplanted to that country, is what he said."

Bismillah Khan, who sat beside Satyajit Ray to watch the premiere of the documentary in Kolkata in December 1989 was so "moved" after seeing it that he borrowed it for a screening in Varanasi that the maestro had arranged for.

For Ghose, the death is "like the loss of a father." "As far as the shehnai is concerned no one will be able to bring out of it the magic of music the way Bismillah Khan had. None had been able to before he came, there will be none, now that he has gone."