A legendary classical voice falls silent

New Delhi - Kishori Amonkar represented the last of a generation of great Hindustani classical vocalists in India.

Despite the heatwave that has been oppressing Delhi, Tuesday  began as cloudy and cool. The weather nearly wept. And the morning brought the news that Kishori Amonkar had passed away in her sleep in the late hours of Monday at her Prabhadevi residence in Mumbai. She was 84.
Kishori Amonkar represented the last of a generation of great Hindustani classical vocalists in India. She took on traditions and showed revolt could be a pure and transcendent act of genius.
Kishori Amonkar was a classicist in temperament too. There have been occasions when she stopped a concert and left the stage if she thought the audience was not paying respect to her performance.
"She had dinner at around 9pm and went to sleep," said Gandhar Bedekar, a family friend, and the son of Nandini Bedekar, a senior disciple of Kishori Amonkar. "A few minutes later, when we went in to check, her hand seemed cold. We called a doctor, but she was gone."
Kishori Amonkar was performing till as recently as last week.
She learnt music from her mother, Mogubai Kurdikar of Ustad Alladiya Khan's Jaipur Atrauli gharana. A gharana is a school of music, with its own variation in traditions, exclusive lineage and history. 
More than seven decades of riyaz went into the perfecting of Kishori Amonkar's gift. She was aware of its uniqueness early on, and that she was faced with the great artiste's problem of placing it before a world that tended to be crass, biased and distracted. 
Which was one reason why she came across as unpredictable and eccentric. For instance, if someone in the audience spoke in the middle of her rendition, she would leave the stage, no matter what the plight of the organisers. And she was particular about stage setting. She did not like lights in her face, for instance, as that prevented her from becoming one with the raga. For her, music was a means to transport her to the abstract, absolute truth.
In a recent interview, Kishori Amonkar explained when she sang she was not so much as rendering a raga as "striking a note", discovering a "shruti", or exploring a mood.
She continued on that journey, despite being frequently criticised for experimenting with classical traditions of the Japiur-Atrauli gharana, her school of music.
Besides her mother, Amonkar learnt music from Anwar Hussain Khan of Agra gharana, Anjanibai Malpekar of Bhendi Bazar gharana, Sharadchandra Arolkar of Gwalior gharana and Goa's Balkrishnabuwa Parwatkar.
Kishori Amonkar's musical foundations were laid in place by her mother who lost her husband when Kishori was six-years-old. Mogubai Kurdikar had to bring up three children on her own. The most gifted among them was Kishori Amonkar.
Her insistence on decorum on the part of organisers centrally stemmed from the way she had seen her mother being shoddily treated as a performing musician in a male dominated vocal world.
Film actor and director, Amol Palekar, along with Sandhya Gokhale, has shot a documentary, Bhinna Shadja (Different Note), on Kishori Amonkar. In it, the great tabla artiste Zakir Hussain says of Kishori Amonkar: "When you talk of Ustad Amir Khan's Marwa, in the same breath you talk of Kishoritai's Bhoop. There are these landmark performances that take place over hundreds of years and you will talk about them for the rest of your life and rest of the many centuries to come. Her music is like a painting that embodies every detail of someone's life. There is great happiness, great sadness, great anger, frustration, the desperation. It all comes concentrated in a little piece."
In her interviews, Kishori Amonkar came across as intense, often intimidating, insistent. In her renditions, she was tentative, exploratory,  supplicatory and incandescent. Her performances tended to begin as a faltering journey that slowly gathered the soul's full and almost inevitable flight into infinity.
This writer knows little of music. But he had once listened to Kishori Amonkar's live recording of Rag Bhimpalasi. And it had brought tears to his eyes.
7 decades of training
> Kishori Amonkar represented the last of a generation of great Hindustani classical vocalists in India.
> She learnt music from her mother, Mogubai Kurdikar of Ustad Alladiya Khan's Jaipur Atrauli gharana.
> Besides her mother, Amonkar learnt music from Anwar Hussain Khan of Agra gharana, Anjanibai Malpekar of Bhendi Bazar gharana, Sharadchandra Arolkar of Gwalior gharana and Goa's Balkrishnabuwa Parwatkar.
> The 84-year-old's insistence on decorum on the part of organisers centrally stemmed from the way she had seen her mother being shoddily treated as a performing musician in a male dominated vocal world.
> More than seven decades of riyaz went into the perfecting of Kishori Amonkar's gift.

• India