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 19th 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.
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