Sangit Mahabharati, a premier music teaching institution in the city, was set up by tabla-player and musicologist Nikhil Ghosh in 1956. Ghosh was an accomplished tabla player who accompanied musicians of the stature of Ravi Shankar, Halim Jaffer Khan and Ali Akbar Khan, and a talented composer. Some very popular non-film songs of the 1950s, like Geet kitne ga chuki by Asha Bhonsle or Hole hole hava dole by Geeta Dutt were Ghosh’s creations.
Ghosh also wrote one of the first books on the tabla in English and began the stupendous work of compiling an encyclopaedia of music and dance. “Over the decades, Sangit Mahabharati has built up a sizeable archive of recordings of the great masters,” he says. Many of these are published works; many are impromptu recordings made when the musicians visited the institute and performed, or just reminisced about the time they spent there, or their training, most often about the music itself, or about other ustads, or lineage. Ghosh explains that “We also have a few films and videos. The recordings are in the form of vinyl LPs, 78’s, EPs, spool tapes and cassettes, besides more recent ones on CDs and MDs.”
The spool tapes and cassettes are the most vulnerable to Mumbai’s humidity and saline climate. They need to be digitised, as do the other recordings, and reorganised, to be more accessible to students and musicians. For this, financial support is essential “for us to employ professional help to restore the archive,” Ghosh admits.
According to Kanchan Mukherjee, Honorary Director of the Sangit Mahabharati, “Over the years we have tried to record whatever we could using any simple equipment, knowing its increased value down the years.
Great masters of that stature are virtually non-existent today. Fortunately, these recordings will not only serve as nostalgia, but also provide useful information to those who need it.”
In support of the institution and its work, a programme of thumri singing has been organised tomorrow evening. It will feature thumri veteran Afroze Bano. She will be accompanied on the tabla byKhadim
Hussain of Baroda, a disciple of Ustad Hidayat Khan, and on the harmonium by Naseer Khan of Jaipur and on the sarangi by Mumbai’s Anwar Hussain. “Afrozeji has been trained by several ustads, including Sadullah Khan and Abdul Rehman Khan of the Patiala style, Ustad Faiyaz Ahmed Khan of the Kirana gharana and Ustad Hidayat Khan, her tabla-maestro husband. She is among the very last of the old-timers like Begum Akhtar, Siddeshwari Devi and Shobha Gurtu, who regale their audiences with their open-throated renditions of thumri, dadra and ghazal. Her stage presence and style of singing reminds one of the great female vocalists,” says Nayan Ghosh, a talented sitarist and tabla-player of repute, who runs the
institution now.
PL Deshpande Auditorium,
Prabhadevi, June 1, 6.30pm
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