The Monarch's Notes

Thus was born a style of singing never heard before, the Alladiya Khan gayaki, known to us by the somewhat imprecise appellation of his filial gharana, Jaipur-Atrauli. Arcane, difficult, intellectual. The adjectives poured forth-half in awe, half in spite-as that idiomatic blend of formal sophistication and serene lyricism conquered the music world and spawned a gallery of greats: Bhaskarbua Bakhle, Kesarbai Kerkar, Mogubai, her daughter Kishori Amonkar, Pt Mallikarjun Mansur.

Khansaheb's life spanned the years 1855, two years before the great mutiny, to 1946, a year short of independence-a period of transition and irrevocable change. The present book is an autobiography in a hurry. Related in the evening of his life to grandson Azizuddin Khan-who has for the first time made his typescript available in full-it's an invaluable document in a country starved of cultural material, where all too often apocrypha passes for history.

The narrative traces Alladiya's life from his birth in Uniyara, near Jaipur, to a family that claimed descendance from figures like Swami Haridas, guru of Tansen; to his early training in dhrupad under his father; his boyhood travels to Agra where he witnesses the sursringar maestro Bahadur Hussain, and a great musical congregation of "all tawaifs of the purab style"; to Aligarh where Aliya-Fattu, the "gunners of Lahore" who founded the Patiala gharana, are beaten at an impromptu soiree; to Atrauli, his family's roots, where he hears the great Tandraz Khan of Delhi.

Training intensifies under uncle Jahangir Khan, a singer with a stupendous repertoire-25,000 compositions in all, according to Alladiya, who was to learn about half of that corpus over the years. Accounts of travel to central India, Bihar and Nepal, comparisons of gharana styles and thumbnail lineages are interspersed with fond descriptions of the Jaipur gunijankhana-a unique commingling of rare talents at the court where the young Alladiya is being initiated. From this litany of grey eminences, he marks out one man, Mubarak Ali, as the singer who's intrigued him the most in his life. The impressionistic, quirky narrative sputters to a rest in the western states, in the early 1900s, where the Kolhapur court offers him his longest stint anywhere.

In between are strewn stories. Of the Jodhpur king's brother who spends Rs 3 lakh meant for the troops on singers, wrestlers and tawaifs in three days. Of a mehfil in the jungle for bandit Dungar Singh. Of Behram Khan, who disguises himself as a Brahmin at Kashi to learn Sanskrit music treatises. Inspired reminiscences of fierce competitive singing by Alladiya's "three gods of music", Mubarak Ali, Tandraz and Gwalior gharana founder Haddu Khan. Encounters, convivial and tense, with seminal figures like Ustad Wazir Khan (the Senia gharana beenkar who taught Baba Allaudddin and Amjad Ali's father Hafiz Ali) and that other turn-of-the-century titan, Ustad Abdul Karim Khan of Kirana.

Being a verbal account, it's invested with all the angularities of speech-gaps, repetitions, tautologies, abrupt jump-cuts in location and chronology that obey no neat logic. There are also bemusing passages-moments of pure epiphany, chandeliers lighting up at a rendition of raag Deepak et al. Then, there's the Ego at centre of the text, a constant and tacit "self-valorisation".

Above all, it's an insider's keyhole-view to the gharana system, which some today persist in seeing as life-in-a-pond, rooted, sedimented and stagnant. This unceasing roadshow-when on a train, he "practised to its rhythm"-and the constant, innumerable transactions en route will serve to qualify that notion, if not dispel it. Mobility, exchange and evolution are built into that filial network where items of musical knowledge are zealously guarded patrimonies (where bandishes even formed part of dowry!).

Anchored in a world where musicians subsisted on royal patronage, tragically for us Alladiya never made it to a recording studio. He lived long enough for it to have been possible-and his contemporaries have left us fascinating, if partial, vignettes of early 20th century music-but Alladiya belonged to that tribe which, in the exasperated words of an HMV recording executive, was "peculiarly obstinate and conservative" when it came to technology.

What he has left behind, however, is vastly more ineffable than a few pieces of scratchy, 78 rpm vinyl. It's a musical legacy that draws its puissance precisely from the tension embodied in the man, a figure of transition himself, on whose bodily person devolved that peculiar historical function of interfacing between medievalism and modernity. Progenitor and preserver collapsed into one.

The first of a series by Music Thema-a new wing dedicated to archival material-it illumines a fuzzy prehistory of our culture, bringing to our view dimly-lit bylanes of a long, intricate journey and moss-covered figures whose signatures form footprints on all modern repertoire. This slim, unassuming volume with plain-vanilla prose-in the endangered tradition of low-priced editions, minus all retro chic frills-is a necessary addition to our mental library, if not our coffee tables.