New Delhi: The year was 1971. India was at war with Bangladesh. But on one night in New Delhi, the war took a backseat when Begum Akhtar gave a live performance at Pragati Maidan. In his poem, Snow on the Desert, Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali describes the moment the lights went out and the sirens started to wail:
But the audience, hushed, did not stir.
The microphone was dead, but she went on singing,
and her voice was coming from far away, as if she had already died.
The verse encapsulates the hypnotic hold that legendary ghazal singer doyen Begum Akhtar had on her audience. A household name in India and Pakistan, she is best known for her sophisticated mastery of the ghazal, thumri, and dadra, along with her rendition of works by famous Urdu poets.
She was the only musician who had permission to smoke on the premises of All India Radio’s recording studios’, wrote her student Rita Ganguly in her biography, Ae Mohabbat…Reminiscing Begum Akhtar. Her music was marked by decades of “loneliness, pain, suppression and silence.”
She is remembered as the one female artist whose art flourished from the kothas in Lucknow to theatres and eventually to the radio post 1947.
She overcame numerous personal tragedies to emerge as a “national symbol iconic of the courtly musical culture” – a woman who stood tall amidst a “musical and social establishment of men”, said musical scholar Regula Qureshi in her paper, ‘In Search of Begum Akhtar’.
With nearly 400 songs to her credit, the ‘Mallika-e-Ghazal’ as she was popularly called had fans on both sides of the border. She was awarded the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1972, the Padma Shri, and the Padma Bhushan posthumously.
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The journey from a courtesan to a ‘respectable lady’
Begum Akhtar was born Akhtari Bai Faizabadi in UP’s Faizabad (present day Lucknow) on 7 October 1914. But her father disowned her mother, his second wife, the courtesan, Mushtari Bai Akhtar.
When she was four, her father’s family fed poison-laced food to Zohra and Akhtar. While Zohra passed away, Akhtar survived and took refuge in music. But her first teacher molested her in the garb of imparting music lessons, and later on life, the raja of Bihar sexually assaulted her, writes Ganguly.
When she was just 13 years old, she gave birth to a girl, Shamima, whom she introduced as her ‘sister’ to the rest of the world.
In a tradition similar to her mother, she would perform in private mehfils, having been trained by classical ustads.
At the age of 15, she made her public debut in then Calcutta, alongside shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, enthralling audiences with her rendition of Behzad Lakhnavi’s ghazal, Deewana banana hai toh bana hi de.
And so began her journey from a hereditary courtesan performer to an acclaimed singer. During the talkies era in India, she briefly dabbled in films like “King for a Day” (Ek Din Ka Badshah) in and Nal Damayanti in 1933 by the East India Company, but was soon disenchanted and returned to Lucknow.
In 1945, she married barrister Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi, who introduced her to the likes of Urdu greats such as Mirza Ghalib. Though her marriage to Abbasi elevated her social status, under customary patriarchal norms it restricted her career in music, as her husband asked her not to perform anymore.
But several miscarriages and the death of her mother took a toll on her mental health. She was prescribed music after, which her husband relented. In 1949, she returned to the AIR recording studio – introducing herself as Begum Akhtar. In 1962, she sang in a women-only concert in aid of the war with China in Lucknow.
She also performed the ‘ganda-bandh’ ceremony of two of her pupils, Shanti Hiranand and Anjali Banerjee. This was unprecedented as, until then, the ceremony between a teacher and pupil was only undertaken by male ustads.
Having evolved her own distinct style of thumri and dadra, she was increasingly known for the break in her voice during high pitched notes, which became her signature style. “Her forte was not necessarily the audibility of her music, for she had a defective area where her voice cracked at a high-pitch, with a limited one-octave range, but she turned it into her virtue, for she knew how to mould her voice,” writes Ganguly in her book.
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Her influence on art and artists
What perhaps stays beautifully poignant is the poet’s Agha Shahid Ali’s devotion to Akhtar during his lifetime, to the point where the poet told writer Amitav Ghosh that staying away from her was unbearable for him during his adolescence, “in other circumstances, you could have said that it was a sexual kind of love – but I don’t know what it was. I loved to listen to her. I loved to be with her”.
In his book, Akhtari: The Life and Music of Begum Akhtar, Yatindra Mishra writes that before her, the ghazal as a form was something only read. Akhtar gave it “an identity and respectability by adding the dimension of singing to it”. In doing so, she influenced a generation of poets.
As the poet, Kaifi Azmi, says, “When in in an audience with Begum Akhtar, you not only get to hear ghazals but also to see one.”
Sheila Dhar, in the same book, writes that musicians like Pandit Jasraj took to singing because of her voice and that Hariprasad Chaurasia was besotted with her as a child. She further mentions how, in the mid-1940s, Lata Mangeshkar had once requested that a ghazal of Begum Akhtar be played on AIR’s “Aap Ki Farmaish” – the thrill of listening to her name beside Akhtar’s being an unmatched experience for her.
In 2014, Nirmal Chandra Dandriyal was commissioned by the Sangeet Natak Akademi to make a documentary on her birth centenary. The documentary, titled Zikr Us Parivash Ka, a phrase borrowed from Ghalib’s celebrated verse, traces her life’s journey through the years and the indelible impact she left on the world of Indian classical music.
In one part of the documentary, her student Shanti Hiranand says that Akhtar liked wearing red lipstick to her performances, always smoking a Capstan, and had a “pain in her voice”. Rita Ganguly notes in her book that when an admirer asked her how she could both sing and smoke so many cigarettes, she apparently smiled and replied that she didn’t sing from her throat anyway.
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A life dedicated to music – even in death
At the age of 60, Akhtar, dissatisfied with her voice during a performance at a concert in Ahmedabad, had put so much stress on herself while raising the pitch that it resulted in her falling ill, following which she was rushed to the hospital.
On 30 October 1974, she breathed her last in the arms of her friend, Nilam Gamadia.
Her mazaar lies next to her mother in Lucknow, at her ancestral plot. It was desecrated and neglected until 2014, her birth centenary year, when historian Saleem Kidwai and Ishtiaq’s nephew renovated the grave to protect it from illegal encroachers.
He did this every year to mark her birthday celebrations until his death in 2021.
Every year, on 7 October till 2021, Saleem would arrange a small gathering at the mazaar where the audience would perform her songs.
(Edited by Tarannum Khan)