It wouldn’t be wrong to divide Niharika Popli’s life into two halves: before she attended a 2007 concert by Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan and life after that. Until she’d experienced it first hand, Ms Popli wasn’t into Hindustani classical music, let alone knowing anything about Khan.
She was in her second year in an engineering college in Delhi when senior students requested a bunch of juniors to attend a concert to fill up the auditorium. It was a night-long session and it was the first time she ever felt connected to classical music.
Early in the morning when it was over, she remembers coming out of the concert with her friends, still in a daze. “Something happened. None of us spoke to each other,” she says, recollecting the night that changed the course of her life.
Since that day, she has followed Khan in nearly all his concerts. She was surprised to find that very little is known of the incredible life of this 107-year-old: “When I asked his grandson if there’s any book on him, I realised there is nothing except the material of a research scholar who’d done a PhD on Baba.” Popli’s documentary on Khan, Rasan Piya , premiered at the Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) on January 31.
Khan hails from a family of great musicians of the Gwalior gayaki . An illustration that begins with a Mughal miniature painting links him to Tansen through a family tree. But he worked as a tailor first and then came into music after he was challenged by a cousin.
Khan became one of the prolific Hindustani vocalists who sang dhrupad, dhamar and thumri with equal ease. In an incident that’s straight out of the fables of deadly competition between royal musicians, Khan was poisoned with mercury by a rival. Miraculously, he survived; he was bedridden for a few years, but he continued performing. The film shows how he overcame physical setbacks time and again.
Learning on the job
With no previous interest in films or filmmaking, it is fair to say that Popli became a filmmaker only because she wanted to document Khan’s story. She and friend and fellow enthusiast Akshay Madan (a photographer who debuts as a cinematographer with the film), picked up the camera and began filming with Khan in 2010. Soon, they realised their lack of basic skills and joined a 35-day course on digital filmmaking in Pune. “Until then the footage we had shot had bad audio and there were a lot of mistakes in the cinematography,” says Popli. “When we shared the footage with filmmakers such as Amit Dutta and Gurpal Singh, they suggested we do a small course so that we can avoid the basic mistakes first timers make.”
That Rasan Piya is born out of pure passion, free from the pretences of ‘making a film’, is evident in every frame of this moody, intimate 79-minute film. There is no fancy camera movement and no radical experimentation with form. Shot over the course of two years, it tries to understand the musician-poet through his long, meandering answers and explores the fast disappearing guru-shishya tradition through his music classes. “For me, the best music, really, comes from him not as a performing artist but a guru when he is teaching his students at home,” she says.
The film has footage of concerts; one at Sankat Mochan in Varanasi with an audience of more than a lakh people, and even a private session at Kolkata’s ITC Sangeet Research Academy. But, as the director says, the film’s best moments are those of Khan’s interaction with his youngest students, sometimes reclined on the floor with his hookah, even as he extemporises with ease.
Oldest awardee
“He is so playful, even in his compositions you can see how he plays with the beat, rhythm or the lyrics, it’s almost as if he likes to trick you,”she says. “Through his interaction with children, I’ve tried to capture his childlike quality and the saintliness he possesses.” The two budding filmmakers left their jobs and freelanced to get their funding for the film.
The visuals of Khan’s lessons, in a cramped Kolkata flat with peeling walls, also make for a subtle commentary on the sad financial state of some of our great artistes. The film derives its name from the pseudonym Khan uses as a poet and musician. Khan was in penury until he was he got a salaried job with the ITC Sangeet Research Academy in Kolkata. There has been renewed interest on the great singer after he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2014, the oldest recipient of the honour ever. His music is now available on iTunes, and a few of his students are in the process of making his work more accessible online.
One of the reasons why Khan never got the fame and attention is because he isn’t as savvy and articulate as some of our other classical music stars. Popli describes him as a big-hearted fakir, a simple man, who is happy with basic joys of life: music, family, a packet of favourite sweet and his hookah. “He takes whatever his students wish to give him as gurudakshina . He refused to take money from me,” says Niharika, who is now a disciple of Khan.
Corrections & Clarifications:
This article has been corrected for editing errors
