Bismillah Khan’s popularity travels far and wide. Beyond the expected communities of musicians and connoisseurs of music, it makes ripples in worlds unmoved by art and culture. It goes below the surface of city, memory, contextualities, politics and the mainstream and, in this manner, achieves broad acceptance in an indifferent and self-absorbed society. Moreover, it shows that life and art are not two separate things, merely two names for the same being.

After having spent nine decades in mastering the shehnai, to the extent of becoming one with it, it is impossible to think of this master of Indian music, Ustad Bismillah Khan, and his shehnai without thinking of a river, a temple, a dying ethos and India’s struggle for independence. His art can only be understood in this civilizational context – it has been created by absorbing the internal/external vibrations of the society it addresses. And this art gives back to society what it takes – music and color, happiness and sadness, dreams and struggles. Whether it is the badhaiya sung during the Ganga pooja for newly-wed Hindus, the songs of boatmen who make their living on the currents of the Ganga, or the north Indian forms of folksong like the chaiti, kajari, thumri and sawani – it is the Ustad’s versions that have come to be regarded as original and authentic.

One must stop here to consider: Why did the Ustad choose to take the indigenous, ordinary and fraught path of engaging with folk music instead of the reputable and glorified one of classical music with its alankaars, taans and alaaps? Why, in interviews and conversations, did he pray that his God grant him, not the knowledge of music and its subtleties, but notes that could stir emotions? Why did he never leave Banaras, like Ravi Shankar or Sitara Devi? Why did he keep playing simple ragas like Pahari or Bhairavi all his life?

The answers to all such questions can be found in the Ustad’s life. The temple of Balaji, where he did riyaz for the first twenty years, is situated at the periphery, barely, of Hindu religiosity. Unlike the temples of Vishvanath or Sankatmochan, it is not at the center of the city’s religious life. And the road that leads from the Ustad’s house to this forlorn, faded temple is, like his life, tortuous, rough and crowded. After his death, media the world over expressed astonishment at the fact that the Ustad had, all his life, traveled on foot or by rickshaw – something everyone in Banaras was familiar with. He appealed to governments to help him take care of his large family. This naïve act had nothing to do with the stature of his art, but he was ridiculed for it by those who could not play even a note on the harmonium.

But such pettiness did not affect the Ustad. Just a glance at him, and you’d realize that he was filled with infinite gratitude – towards life, towards the fact of his own being. Like his shehnai, his way of life, too, is an original and uncompromising interpretation of morality and art.

Bismillah Khan’s influence can only be comprehended in terms of wonder. He turned the shehnai, which had heretofore been confined to the naubatkhanas outside temples, into a symbol of secularism, into a symbol of the freedom struggle’s values, the Indian Constitution’s soul. Likewise, a Muslim who offered namaz five times a day, he turned into a symbol of the city that is the center of Hindu tradition. The follower of a religion that almost forbids music, this aged artist declared, “Music, for me, is prayer,” and angered the advocates of extremism. And when a journalist asked him, “Islam has lowered the standard of music, what do you have to say?” he answered, “If, in lowering the standard, it has given us Fayyaz Khan, Amir Khan, Vilayat Khan and Ali Akbar Khan, just think what raising the standard would have done!”

Ustad Bismillah Khan has earned Banaras. He came from Dumrao in east Bihar to his uncle Ali Baksh, as a child, and started playing the darbari shehnai of his forefathers in the streets of the world’s oldest living civilization. It was not the city of his birth or one that was given to him – he earned it in its various forms while, at the same time, making his way to originality.

Unlike other modes of classical music, playing the shehnai has no gharana or institution. While playing, you often find yourself short of breath, or short of a shehnai. You find yourself needing more shehnais, more breath. All his life, the Ustad took to the stage with about a dozen shehnais. The lives and talents of most of his sons and disciples were spent in accompanying him. None of them except, to a certain extent, his son Nair Husain could forge an independent identity. He has left behind a vacuum. But is it something we should mourn for?

This posthumous vacuum is a reproof to those stalwarts who have, courtesy some shrewd marketing, established themselves as ‘institutions’ without having done anything creative for years. Indeed, some are operating websites and ambitious training schools on foreign shores. It is well-known that the Ustad was bad at keeping accounts. He did not know much about the cassettes and CDs that music companies released, nor about the income from them. His family’s standard of living was a step below that of the average middle-class household and the Ustad never did anything else to make a living. Kabir (who had lived not far from Banaras) once declared, standing in the bazaar, that those who wanted to walk his path would have to burn their homes. Bismillah Khan accepted that challenge. All his life, he lived in the bazaar and played the shehnai while his home burned.

An intercession like this can unsettle history. His being is also significant because it is located in the geography of his times. There are many places in Banaras that cannot be recognized without remembering him. He is inseparable from the waters of the Ganga. Coming generations will find many places dark and empty, if they do not carry the light of his memory.

(Translated from Hindi by Rahul Soni and Giriraj Kiradoo.)