If The Music Room was Namita Devidayal’s personal foray into classical music with its trials and dilemmas TheSixth String of Vilayat Khan has the author trying to walk into the footsteps of the sitar legend, offering glimpses of an artist who had transformed his instrument to resemble the human voice. The weighty world of Indian classical music, inhabited by its brilliant practitioners is rendered to the reader in a light-hearted touch and therein lies its appeal.
The journey of Vilayat Khan from Calcutta where he lies buried close to his father known as the Jadugar (magician) of Calcutta and his friend, ustad Amir Khan, is an intimate profile of an artist battling his demons, slaying them and coming on his own, only to withdraw from it all at the peak of his craft and then getting back to it again.
Full of anecdotes and information culled from innumerable conversations, and archival material, the book brings the reader close to an era when All India Radio was the chief patron of classical musicians after the abolition of princely states. She highlights the intense competition between artists and the role that classical music played in forging new identities in a newly independent India.
In the case of Vilayat Khan, the book is at one level a personal journey and at another, a journey through geographical spaces and time taking the reader through Calcutta, Bombay, Shimla, the U.S. and back where it all began.
Devidayal makes an assumption that truly great artists need an equal they can compete with in the quest for excellence. In the case of Vilayat Khan that person would be Ravi Shankar. If for the former music was an intense personal journey, for the latter it was a way to conduct an affair with the world at large. Both charted their own course and made peace with themselves.
And lastly, it is an ode to the people behind the greats who are seldom mourned much less remembered, at best they are footnotes in time. In the case of Vilayat Khan, the credit goes to his mother Basheeran Begum, who steered him away from singing to play the sitar and keep alive a tradition practised in the family. There are other men who influenced Vilayat Khan each adding his bit to form the brilliant music that came out of his sitar. As for the eternal question, who is the greatest of them all, it would appear that there are many greats and there is Vilayat Khan.
The Sixth String of Vilayat Khan ; Namita Devidayal, Westland Books, ₹699.
