It must have matched the glamour of its name once, but today, Ruby Mansion at 9, Forjett Street in Mumbai is in a state of gentle decay. If you gaze up its three stories, right at the top, to the left, you will see a flat with a bank of windows, now definitively shuttered. Nothing in the disrepair tells you that, until six months ago, this was a living monument to how Bombay became the epicentre of Agra gharana, a style that claims a history of at least 400 years.
For around 90 years, Ruby Mansions in the Gowalia Tank area had been home to generations of musicians who trace their genealogy to the earliest progenitors of the gharana. That fabled musical past came to an end last year, when vocalist Raja Miyan, among the last in this line to have lived in the building, moved out. It was a wrench, he says, leaving what he calls “sangeet ka mandir”.
“It holds a very important place in the history of our gharana, the centre of its famously generous vidyadaan,” said Raja Miyan. “We had a hall and four large rooms that the ustads and their families shared and doubled up as music classrooms, so we woke to the sound of riyaz. Jagannathbua Purohit, Jitendra Abhisheki and Ram Naik – it was common for us to have great masters at home. Mogubai Kurdikar and her daughter Kishori Amonkar, who learned from my father, lived one building away.”
The stalwarts of the form who lived at Ruby Mansion reads like a list of who’s who of Hindustani classical music of the 20th century. Many of them were connected through criss-crossing familial links with masters of lesser-known gharanas such as Hapur, Khurja, Rangile and Atrauli. There was the legendary Vilayat Hussain Khan, his brother-in-law and the much acclaimed Azmat Hussain Khan, and his nephews, the immensely gifted triad of Khadim Hussain Khan, Anwar Hussain Khan and Latafat Hussain Khan. The flat boasted as many ustads as the number of rooms. The succeeding generations saw more musicians in that home, among them, Raja Miyan, Aslam Khan, Yakub and Yunus Hussain Khan.
“At Ruby Mansion, they made for a true gharana in many senses of the word – they lived together as a joint family, taught, did riyaz and ate together off the same platter,” said musician and scholar Satyasheel Deshpande, who has memories of visiting the mansion with his father as a child.
Last month, Ruby Mansion and its history were at the heart of a music event at G5A, an arts centre in Mahalaxmi. The renowned Kolkata-based khayal singer Waseem Ahmed Khan performed and later, along with his uncle and guru, Raja Miyan, spoke of the building’s fabulous years. “In my view, at least 70% of the Hindustani music coming out of Bombay now is linked directly or indirectly to our gharana,” said Waseem Ahmed Khan.
Devina Dutt, the curator of the event, says sites of music-making are important in the telling of a city’s history. “For a music lover, a city is also made up of memories of concerts heard and described, of images and anecdotes from a time gone but nevertheless real and lived. The rasika’s mind absorbs all these stories and redraws the city map. I think we need to congregate around these stories to listen to this fabulous music again and with passion.”
Arrival in Bombay
There is an oral history of the proto-Agra gharana that traces it beyond the 16th century court of Akbar. It goes back to the 14th century rule of Alauddin Khalji and the court musician Gopal Nayak. The early form of the style bore the heavy influence of dhrupad, which is still reflected in Agra gharana’s music in the elaboration using syllables, referred to as nom-tom alaap.
But the progenitor of the contemporary Agra gharana style was “Ghagge” Khudabaksh, nicknamed thus because of his hoarse voice. The story goes that distraught at being spurned by his own family for his unmusical voice, he sought out the tutelage of Nathan Peerbaksh of the Gwalior gharana. Twelve years later, when he finished his training, his voice had been scrubbed and he had melded the traits of his own and his adopted gharana. The new sound had both, the dhrupad he was trained in and the khayal form he picked up in Gwalior.
By the 19th century, hereditary singers of the Agra gharana, like others, were faced with declining royal and feudal patronage. To make up for this loss, they fanned out across India in search of new patrons, students and fortunes. The Agra gharana, between the mid-19th and 20th century, scattered across the country – Bombay, Delhi, Kolkata, Vadodara, Mysore and Bangalore. Its most celebrated name Faiyaz Khan, whose fans were legion, had an especially peripatetic musical career.
Of all the places the gharana spread to, Bombay, the nascent commercial capital of the country, was where the style found its widest and most generous support – a prolific and widespread network of students, keen and appreciative audiences, and wealthy patrons.
Stories of the gharana’s remarkable work in the city – as performers, teachers and even organisers – come through in multiple accounts of Bombay’s musical history. This includes tabla player and scholar Aneesh Pradhan’s landmark work Hindustani Music in Colonial Bombay, and Tejaswini Niranjana’s Musicophilia and the Lingua Musica in Bombay. There are other books too that offer valuable insights on the subject, such as Parampara aur Bandishein by Yashwant Mahale, who at 92 is the oldest representative of the gharana in the city, and S Haldankar’s Aesthetics of Agra and Jaipur Traditions. Accounts of the gharana have also been documented by N Jayavanth Rao, a connoisseur and husband of the contemporary vocalist Lalit Rao, whose taleem with the Agra greats he was witness to.
By many estimates, the gharana arrived in Bombay in 1840 with vocalist Sher Khan, who was trained by his uncle, the legendary Ghagge Khudabaksh. Sher Khan is believed to have stayed in the city for around 15 years. His son Nathan Khan too made forays into the city, teaching two celebrated musicians, Bhaskarbuwa Bakhale and Bablibai.
“I believe that the arrival of the first passenger train linking Thane to Bori Bunder in 1853 was responsible for facilitating this movement of the Agra gharana to the city,” said Raja Miyan.
According to Raja Miyan, Vilayat Hussain Khan asked his nephews to seek accommodation for the family in Bombay. The clan first lived in Kandawadi in Girgaum and then in Babulnath, where Alladiya Khan, related to the family and the founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana, stayed with the family for a while.
“The shadow of a war was looming over the world then and there was the fear that ‘yahan kucchh bhi ho sakta hai’, so the family opted to stay together at all times,” said Raja Miyan, who moved to Bombay as a child of two from his maternal home in Atrauli.
Gharana lore
There is something of a joke about Agra gharana’s overwhelming popularity in Bombay – if you chucked a stone in any direction in south Bombay from Ruby Mansion in the mid-20th century, chances were that you would hit a home of an Agra shagird.
“Agra gharana was all over Bombay,” said vocalist Arun Kashalkar. “Most institutions of music of the time taught Agra gharana music, either through the family itself or its disciples. The mahaul of the gharana was very cosmopolitan. There were no divisions of caste, class or religion. And they gave generously of their art.” Kashalkar too trained in the Agra gharana. His guru was the late Srikrishna (Babanrao) Haldankar, who had learnt under Khadim Hussain Khan.
The Agra gharana lore has many fabulous Bombay stories – of ustads who could be spotted walking to bus stops around Tardeo on their way to teaching in the south Bombay homes of the upper class or the artistically inclined. Of the magnanimity of the Khansahebs, there are other legends – stopped on the way with a request for a composition, they would oblige readily with the encouraging words “Bete likh lo”.
“Khadim Hussain Khan saheb would go to teach across South Bombay: Breach Candy, Napean Sea Road, Peddar Road,” said Raja Miyan. “Vilayat Hussain Khan saheb would go to Dadar where Jagannathbuwa, CR Vyas and Vasantrao Kulkarni learned. Younger students used to fight over who got to escort him to a bus or taxi back home because it gave them the chance to seek out a cheez [composition].” Satyasheel Deshpande talks of his father getting a bandish scribbled on a bus ticket by an ustad.
Without doubt the gharana’s biggest service was to music education, producing an astonishing number of musicians of great merit. In Yashwant Mahale’s book, the list includes well over 100 names and these were those taught by just the six ustads – Nathan Khan, Vilayat Hussain Khan, Faiyaz Khan, Khadim Hussain Khan, Anwar Hussain Khan and Ata Hussain Khan. If one were to go beyond the first line of masters they produced, and include the equally generous numbers trained by these masters, the total figure would be staggering.
Mahale’s list of Agra greats includes Ratanjankar, Jagannathbuwa Purohit, Mogubai Kurdikar, Gajananrao Joshi, Srikrishna Haldankar, Anjanibai Lolekar, Kishori Amonkar, Srimatibai Narvekar, VR Athavale, among others. Between them they were to pass their knowledge on to masters like KG Ginde, SCR Bhatt and Dinkar Kaikini.
“Gowalia Tank was the main hub of the gharana and since Dadar TT marked the end of the city as we then knew it, most gurus, students and institutions were scattered between these two points,” recalled Kashalkar. “Jagannathbuwa taught at Mahim, Chidanand Nagarkar at the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan in Babulnath and there was the Vallabh Sangeet Vidyalaya in Sion.”
One of the most outstanding features of the gharana is its proclivity for composing – it is said to have generated more original compositions than any other style. Most ustads of the gharana carried a nom de plume, often suffixed with the word piya or rang, and inserted into bandishes: Vilayat Hussain Khan “Pranpiya”, Faiyaz Khan “Prempiya”, Sharafat Hussain Khan “Premrang”, Jagannathbuwa Purohit “Gunida” and so forth.
In Pradhan’s book on Hindustani music in colonial Bombay, the Agra gharana appears frequently in multiple roles. Its musicians were frequent participants in the hugely popular five-day annual concert series held in the memory of DV Paluskar by the School of Indian Music. They also spearheaded an early effort to create a platform for musicians and music – the Sangeet Prasarak Mandal set up by Vilayat Hussain Khan in 1936.
In the ephemeral, shifting world that Hindustani music inhabits, histories of people and places like Ruby Mansion are being constantly erased, says curator Devina Dutt. “I had landed up on the top floor flat at Ruby Mansion about two decades ago at the invitation of Aslam Khan saheb, who traced his lineage to the Hapur, Khurja and Sikandra as well as the Agra gharana. As I heard his stories, I began to understand how layers of our music history are lost to us. If these stories and memories were shared and collected and celebrated as an important part of our cities perhaps we would value the music and the musicians more.”
Malini Nair is a culture writer and senior editor based in New Delhi. She can be reached at writermalini@gmail.com.
