July 31, 2011
Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar died on 28 July, 2011. He had suffered a stroke some eight months ago while on a visit to Jaipur and did not recover either speech or movement. It is to the credit of the Sangeet Natak Akademi that they honoured him with recognition and more just before his demise.
The Chief Minister of Delhi, Sheila Dikshit had earlier recognised his talent and contribution to music with a ‘lifetime achievement award’, and provided him the much needed help in his last illness.
Dhrupad is considered to be a most demanding discipline as the notes produced are austere and without the embellishments allowed in Khayaal and Thumri. It is said to arise out of the Sama Veda and was used to invoke gods and goddesses as part of the yajna ritual of sacrifice. It is the most internalised form of Indian classical music and has aficionados and connoisseurs among the cognoscenti in the best musical traditions of the West.
It’s a great pity for Indian culture that neither Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar nor the Rudra Veena master Asad Ali Khan, who died in June 2011, left behind a near-maestro to carry on their tradition.
Dhrupad was kept alive by the princely states of Rajasthan and their imitators, such as the Holkars of Indore and the Gaekawars of Baroda. This held true until we won our freedom in 1947, when all the states were merged into the Indian union. The princes no longer had courts to which they could appoint musicians and the All India Radio became the major patron. The honorarium provided by this government institution was measly but it ensured that the artiste got a much larger audience than had been possible in the earlier dispensation. The mismatch between the ‘class’ limitations of the रसिक and the demands of the ‘mass’ audience militated against the continuation of the ‘pure’ and ‘unadulterated’ Dhrupad tradition. The objective changed from creating an atmosphere in which the listener follows the singer/instrumentalist in an inward journey, where the frontiers ‘struck’ and ‘unstruck’ अनहद music get blurred and the music of the spheres or ‘cosmos’ can be experienced, to a ‘performance’ where the audience responds to the effects created by a stupendous effort of the musician or the dazzle of the costume and stage lighting.
The rigour of the Dhrupad tradition equips the disciple to use his vocal chords as an instrument from which he or she can produce a whole array of sound, from the meowing of a cat to the roar of a lion. The elder Dagar brothers, Moinuddin and Aminuddin mastered this art, which enabled them to induce any of the nine ‘rasas’ in their rendering of a ‘raaga’ or ‘raaginee’.
Fahimuddin was the son of Ustad Rahimuddin Dagar, who was the youngest sibling of Nasiruddin Dagar षड शास्त्री court musician to the Holkar of Indore. His brothers were court musicians in other princely states — notably Ziauddin in Udaipur (Mewar) and Tansen Pandey in Alwar. When Nasiruddin died young (in his thirties), his youngest brother Rahimuddin succeeded him in Indore. Nasiruddin’s sons were very young; the elder two, Moinuddin and Aminuddin had to leave Indore. They went to Udaipur and learnt music from Ziauddin Khan sahib. He was a master of the Rudra Veena as well as the डागर वाणी ‘Dagar vaani’ of the Dhrupad परम्परा ‘parampara’. He would sing if the recital was before dinner and play the Rudra Veena if his stomach was distended by dinner. A rigorous training was imparted to Moinuddin and Aminuddin, who recollect that when they were trained to sing the nasal bits, their mouths would be filled with a special earth so that no sound could emerge from that area and all the notes perforce came from the nose. The special earth, called मुल्तानी िमट्टी, was available in all the homes as it was used to coat the tablets on which children practiced writing.
The rigour of the Dhrupad tradition परम्परा equips the disciple to use his vocal chords as an instrument from which he or she can produce a whole array of sound, from the meowing of a cat to the roar of a lion. The elder Dagar brothers, Moinuddin and Aminuddin mastered this art, which enabled them to induce any of the nine रस ‘rasas’ in their rendering of a राग ‘raaga’ or रािगनी ‘raaginee’.
However, diabetes struck again and Ustad Ziauddeen also died young, leaving behind a son, Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, who was keen to play the Rudra Veena. His training included the weighing down of his fingers and wrist with outsized rings and bangles, the idea being that if he could bring out the notes despite the handicap of the weights their removal would result in a lightness of touch that would be ethereal and out of this world.
It was to be so. Those fortunate enough to have heard the Dhrupad recital in the Festival of India in Paris will remember the ease with which Ustad Aminuddin Dagar covered the three octaves and how Pandit Gopal Das’s पखावज ‘pakhaawaj’ sounded like the echo of a heartbeat. Whenever Ustad Zia Mohiuddin’s veena came into play, it was as if water was being sprinkled as an offering to unseen deities.
We are lucky that Bahauddin Dagar, the son of Zia Mohiuddin is with us to continue the tradition of taking the listener into his own soul; to thrill to the touch of cosmic music, the music of the spheres.