When Lalith J Rao moved to Delhi with her husband six decades ago, her fame as a Hindustani vocalist looked set to bloom again after a gap of engineering studies abroad. Around that time, an MNC offered her a lucrative job. The posting, though, wasn’t in Bombay, a hub of Indian classical music. Canada-returned Lalith’s career in technology was nipped in the bud. However, khayal regained its young promise.
In fact, the Agra gharana found a path-breaking female stalwart. Towards the end of the century, though, a tragedy part-eclipsed Lalith’s singing. It prompted her to reinvent, blessing the idiom with an array of acolytes. Lalith died recently, at 83, but only after ensuring a pioneering documentation of her gharana’s unique ways.
Earlier, as a 27-year-old, the vocalist found her maestro in the national capital. Dinkar Kaikini was working with Akashvani on Parliament Street. He suited Lalith’s artistic aspirations: both were from the vintage Agra gharana. What’s more, Pt Kaikini knew Lalith as a child growing up in Bangalore. The tutelage in Delhi flourished — for a year.
In 1969, Lalith’s musicologist husband N Jayavanth Rao got a transfer to Bombay. The metropolis gifted Lalith with her most-revered guru, Khadim Hussain Khan. Bespectacled and with drooping hair combed to his left, the ustad was someone she had met in the mid-1950s when she gave an informal concert at the house of her vocalist aunt, Saguna Kalyanpur. Khan walked in midway through her singing, and ended up blessing the vocalist.
To be a protege of the ustad thrilled Lalith. Khan was from a family of musicians in Atrauli near Aligarh. For all his patriarchal appearance, the ustad was thoroughly liberal in teaching methods.
“He taught me a raga for not more than a week. Four or five sittings,” Lalith would recall, hinting at the scholastic unconventionality in the gharana that traces its origin to the Nauhar-bani Dhrupad of the early 14th century. “Bandishes he made me repeat 50 times. The raga, he’d just sing the notes and basic features, and tell me to take them forward.” Months later, Khan would suddenly ask Lalith to sketch a melody. “That demand for an alaap was to check how much I stuck to the gharana. Any alien phrases, he’d correct them,” Lalith recalled. Wind back to her formative years further down the country in Bangalore. There, too, Lalith’s guru was from the Agra gharana: Ramrao V Naik, a disciple of the titan Faiyaz Khan.
Southern star
Lalith’s mother tongue was Kannada (though her birthplace was Chennai). So was it with Naik, a native of Mysore. The khadi-clad master, with a Marathi topi above his tilak-lined forehead, was in his forties when he located the promising pupil. He’d cycle 8 km northward to Lalith’s Malleswaram residence from Basavanagudi on the other end of town. The training spanned 15-odd years till Lalith left Bangalore in 1965 for Canada.
The lessons from Naik were infrequent. One reason was Lalith’s range of passions. She was into athletics. Her forays with the javelin earned her a school-level national record. Her Mysore team won the inter-state basketball championships. All the same, Naik’s avuncular conduct ensured continual music studies. The master, at one stage, played the tabla for Lalith at the classes. Soon, he called in Dattatreya Garud for a better professional percussive assistance. This boosted the rehearsals.
At 11, Lalith debuted. The venue was the mansion of connoisseur PN Chandavarkar. A year later, she sang the challenging Lalita Gauri raga at the Bangalore Sangeetha Sabha. By 14, she had made notable appearances in Bombay; one of them as the youngest entrant at the Swami Haridas Sammelan.
Then on, Lalith maintained a steady involvement with music — for four decades. She collaborated with the University of Washington for an archival project on the Agra gharana. Lalith was readying for a European tour of concerts in early 1994 when she suffered a throat rupture. It marred her voice.
The artiste eventually took medical advice from an expert in London. Coming out of depression, Lalith regained much of her singing skills by the dawn of this century. However, her voice still didn’t match the earlier form, leading her to focus on teaching, which enabled the emergence of an impressive crop of Bangalore vocalists.
Among them, Bharathi Pratap underscores the vitality of learning from a top theorist-practitioner. Nishant Panicker says Lalith “treated every person with the utmost respect and humility”. Deepa Hattangady notes that the teacher insisted upon listening to all schools of Hindustani.
Lalith was the first to modify certain phrases of male-centric Agra gharana to the general character of a woman’s larynx. She passed on the assertive ‘gamak taan’ as a highlight of her school, but as oscillations tailor-made for females.
— The writer is a freelancer
