Ustad Bismillah Khan Carried the Shehnai From a Varanasi Temple Courtyard to the Edinburgh Festival, the Independence Celebrations of 1947 and the Bharat Ratna of 2001

Bismillah Khan took the shehnai, a double-reed wind instrument played for centuries at temples and weddings, onto the concert platform, and the Government of India gave him its highest civilian honour, the Bharat Ratna, in 2001. After his death in 2006 the Sangeet Natak Akademi, the national academy for music, dance and drama, said in a condolence resolution that he had “elevated the Shehnai to its present position in Hindustani music.”

Born on 21 March 1916, he died on 21 August 2006 in Varanasi, the city he had lived in since childhood. The sources differ on some dates, chief among them the Red Fort recital of August 1947, and this piece says where.

A family of court musicians

The music magazine Sruti says he was born in Dumraon, Bihar, the second son of Paigambar Khan and Mitthan Bibi. His grandfather Rasool Baksh Khan looked at the baby and said “Bismillah”, and that became his name; the birth name was Qamaruddin. His great-grandfather and grandfather played the shehnai at the court of the Bhojpur king, and his father was a court musician too. The Daily Star of Dhaka places his father at the Dumrao palace.

At six he was taken to Banaras (Varanasi) to his mother’s brother, Ali Baksh “Vilayati”, who played at the Vishwanath temple and practised in the Balaji temple. Sruti says the boy chose the temple precincts for his own daily practice, called riyaz, and accompanied his uncle to music conferences until the uncle died in 1940. The Daily Star adds that Khan became a soloist after that.

From the temple to the concert stage

Sruti dates his first concert to the Allahabad Music Conference of 1930, when he was 14. The breakthrough came at the Calcutta session of the All India Music Conference in 1937, where, Sruti says, he established the shehnai as an instrument of classical music rather than a folk one. The opening of the Lucknow station of All India Radio then carried his playing to thousands of listeners.

Cross-fingering to produce gamakas, the sliding ornaments of Indian music, is among the innovations Sruti credits to him, along with a wider range for the instrument. The Tribune’s 2006 obituary puts that range at one and a half octaves extended to two, and says his fee rose from about a rupee for a night-long performance to Rs 5 lakh (Rs 500,000) a performance.

August 1947 and the Red Fort, and why the accounts differ

Sruti says Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru invited him to play on the ramparts of the Red Fort on the eve of 15 August 1947, and that he heralded the first Republic Day celebrations on 26 January 1950. A ThePrint profile gives 14 August 1947 and says Nehru handpicked him. In the Sangeet Natak Akademi resolution, as Boldsky reproduced it, he played at the celebrations marking independence in 1947, preceding the speech by Nehru, and again for the Golden Jubilee of independence in 1997.

Other accounts give other framings. The Tribune’s obituary puts him at the Red Fort on 15 August 1947 itself. A 2016 Daily Star feature calls him the only musician invited to the official ceremony that day. The Mail & Guardian’s 2006 obituary dates his Independence Day performance to 1948.

The documented events of the day help explain the spread. The Nehru Memorial Museum and Library’s exhibit on Google Arts & Culture records that Nehru delivered the “Tryst with Destiny” speech in the Constituent Assembly on 14 to 15 August 1947. His flag-raising and speech at the Red Fort are dated to 16 August there, and he takes the salute at India Gate on 15 August. National Herald, reporting a Congress archival release, says Nehru broadcast on All India Radio on 15 August and made his first Red Fort address on 16 August. Neither source mentions a shehnai.

So an account that puts Khan at the Red Fort just before the Tryst with Destiny speech joins two venues and two nights. The sources opened for this piece include no 1947 newspaper report or printed programme of his recital. What they support is that he played at the Independence celebrations in 1947 at Nehru’s invitation; the hour and the place are not fixed.

The annual custom is better recorded. The Daily Star’s 2006 obituary says Doordarshan, India’s national television broadcaster, aired his live recital each 15 August after the Prime Minister’s speech from the Red Fort.

Edinburgh in 1966

Khan was afraid of flying, and his international career began late. G. N. Joshi, a record producer who worked with him at the HMV studio, wrote in his 1984 book Down Melody Lane that an invitation to the Edinburgh Festival arrived through the Indian government, that Khan first made demands he hoped would end it, and that he finally set one condition: a state-funded pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina for himself and his party. The government agreed, and he completed the Haj before flying to Britain. Joshi writes that he was the star attraction of the festival that year and that the next day’s papers praised his performance. The Daily Star’s 2016 feature and Frontline both give 1966.

Sruti says his first trip abroad was to Afghanistan, where King Zahir Shah gave him Persian carpets, while Frontline calls Edinburgh the first time he played internationally; neither gives a year for Kabul. The countries Sruti lists are the United States, Canada, the Middle East, Europe, the Soviet Union and Japan, with the World Exposition in Montreal, the Cannes Art Festival and the Osaka Trade Fair among the stages. Both Sruti and the Sapan News feature say he was the first Indian invited to Lincoln Center in New York. A 1987 duet with the violinist L. Subramaniam at the Festival of India in Geneva is in Sruti’s account too, as is the World Music Institute’s celebration of his 80th birthday in New York. At London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall in November 1993, Frontline records, he told the audience, “Music has seven notes. I challenge anyone in the world to show me an eighth!”

The man who would not leave Varanasi

Playing every morning at the Kasi Viswanath temple was, Sruti writes, what Khan considered his biggest honour, and he declined an offer to settle in the United States. The Daily Star’s 2016 feature says he refused a post as musician-in-residence at a top American university unless he could bring the Ganga with him. Frontline gives two versions of that exchange. His grandson Nasir Abbas says Khan asked whether Ma Ganga also flowed through America. In the 1989 documentary Meeting a Milestone, directed by Goutam Ghose, Khan himself says he asked the man to “first make me a Banaras in America.”

In the same film, Frontline reports, he recalls his youth: “I would bathe in the Ganga and then run off to perform my namaz.” He was a pious Shia Muslim who prayed five times a day and a devotee of Saraswati, the goddess of learning and the arts, Sruti says, and the Daily Star’s obituary describes him as a symbol of religious harmony. According to both, he never owned a car and went about Varanasi by cycle rickshaw. For the city he lived in, tuput’s guide to the ghats of Varanasi sets out the riverfront and the Kashi Vishwanath Dham.

On screen and in film

Sruti’s list of his screen work starts with the shehnai he played for the title role, acted by Rajkumar, in the Kannada film Sanaadi Appanna. He also played for Rajendra Kumar in Goonj Uthi Shehnai and composed songs for that film, and he appears in Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (The Music Room). Tuput’s profile of Satyajit Ray covers Ray’s own honours. Two documentaries are named too, Ghose’s 90-minute Sange Meel Se Mulaqat (Meeting a Milestone) and Nasreen Munni Kabir’s 50-minute Bismillah of Benares, which Frontline says she made for the BBC in 2002.

The honours, as the record gives them

Under the Padma Shri heading, the Gazette of India of 26 January 1961 lists “Shri Bismillah Khan, Musician, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh.” The Akademi’s resolution gives 1962 for the Padma Shri; the Gazette is the primary record. Its resolution dates his own Sangeet Natak Akademi Award to 1956 and the Padma Bhushan to 1968. In the Gazette notification of 26 January 1980 he appears among the Padma Vibhushan awards as “Eminent Classical Musician (Hindustani), Uttar Pradesh.” The Akademi elected him a Fellow (Ratna Sadasya) in 1994. Sruti adds the Rajiv Gandhi National Sadbhavana Puraskar in 1994 and the Tansen Award of the Madhya Pradesh government, and the Akademi lists honorary doctorates from Banaras Hindu University and the Deshikottama title from Visva-Bharati, the university founded by Rabindranath Tagore, whose own story is in tuput’s piece on Tagore and the Nobel.

The President’s notification of 26 January 2001 awards the Bharat Ratna to “Ustad Bismillah Khan”, and the Gazette printed it on 4 May 2001. The Tribune reported from New Delhi on 21 March 2001 that President K. R. Narayanan conferred the award on him and on Lata Mangeshkar that day, a ceremony the tuput article on Lata Mangeshkar also records. Sruti notes that M. S. Subbulakshmi had received the Bharat Ratna in 1998 and Ravi Shankar in 1999.

August 2006

Khan died at Heritage Hospital in Varanasi at 2:20 a.m. on 21 August 2006, the Mail & Guardian reported, citing the hospital’s Dr P. S. R. Aiyar. By the 1916 birth date he was 90, as the Tribune and the Mail & Guardian say; the Daily Star gave 91. The Government of India declared a day of national mourning, and the Tribune reports that Uttar Pradesh closed schools, colleges and offices for the day and that Varanasi’s bazaars closed.

He was buried that evening with state honours in the Fatemaan burial ground beside a neem tree, the Tribune says. Sruti reports a 21-gun salute from the Indian Army and that his shehnai, which he called his “begum” after his wife’s death, was buried with him.

The Sangeet Natak Akademi instituted the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar for young performers in 2007, according to Sruti. India Post issued a five-rupee commemorative stamp on him on 21 August 2008, the second anniversary of his death; the India Post folder gives a print run of 0.4 million.