S.Kalidas' Archive

My Name is Gauhar Jaan:

The Life and Times of a Musician

By Vikram Sampath

Rupa & Co

Pages: 318

Price: Rs 595

Empress of Excess

By S. Kalidas

Gauhar Jaan (1873-1930) was not the greatest of singers of Hindustani music, but she was definitely the most legendary of divas in the high noon of colonial India. Trained in music and dance by the best of masters (including Bindadin Maharaj and Bhaiya Saheb Ganpatrao to list just two) Gauhar ruled the native nautch scene for most of her eventful life like an empress. The toast of every musical event that she deigned to grace from Kolkata to Mysore, Gauhar Jaan (along with Janki Bai of Allahabad) even performed for the King Emperor George V at the Delhi Durbar of 1911. Educated mainly in Urdu and English she sang in several languages from Persian to Tamil and had honed her arts of seduction (of men) and subversion (of patriarchy) with great finesse.

Thanks to her many rich and powerful patrons, in her youth Gauhar was bold, witty, proud and fabulously rich. She was among the very first few Indian musicians to record her voice for the newly arrived gramophone record in 1902. Her glamorous persona and licentious infamy led to much gossip and myth-making and quite a few court cases. Yet, as it often happens with artists, she fell a victim to her own excesses on the one hand and on the other to the evangelist moral hysteria that was sweeping the country in those days. She died addicted to alcohol, almost penniless and very alone in a public hospital in Mysore where she was buried in a now lost unmarked grave.

With a heady mix of drama, romance and tragedy hers is a story that makes for an epic telling. In the latter half of the last century, many filmmakers from Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray to Kamaal Amrohi and Muzzafar Ali drew on Gauhar Jaan’s image and legend while making period films or depicting the tawaif character. Vikram Sampath’s telling of her life is as much an account of this wide-eyed young South Indian engineer’s journey of discovery into a bygone world of music and passion as it is a remarkable recounting of her life based on letters, court records and contemporary narratives especially from vernacular sources. However, the problem lies not with the content but with the form of his opus. Sampath relies on the cloying sentimental style of the 19^th century Bengali historical novel; conjuring up descriptions, details and even conversations in gushing prose replete with an undercurrent of simplistic moralising. What make the book significant though are the appendices—a definite contribution to musical documentation-- while the preceding docu-drama is fit to inspire the likes of Sanjay Leela Bhansali.