The following is an excerpt from Pt. Satyasheel Deshpande's Marathi book, Gaan Gunagaan, Rajhans Prakashan, 2023, edited and translated by Srijan Deshpande. An abridged version of this piece was carried in The Hindu's Friday Review edition, dated April 07, 2023, to mark the beginning of Kumar Gandharva's birth centenary year.

I would sing all the time then, at the age of nine or ten. I didn't really feel like singing the 'classical music' I heard at home, but I loved singing songs from the movies. In a vain attempt to tame my incessant humming, my father, musicologist Vamanrao Deshpande, sent me to Shamrao Gogte, a talented disciple of Professor B.R. Deodhar, to study shastriya sangeet, and I enjoyed the few short years I spent learning from him. But Kumarji would stay at our house every time he visited Bombay, and the madhyalay and especially the drut bandishes I’d hear from him, or the Malvi lok-geet he’d sometimes sing would embed themselves in my voice easily, and my father, full of fatherly admiration, would ask me to sing these bandishes for visiting guests.

Kumarji’s inspired music would shine a light deep inside me, and echoes of it would emerge refracted in my young voice, and I’d flaunt them as proud ornaments. I once sang one of Kumarji’s bandishes, in his presence, for Ramubhaiyya Date, king of connoisseurs. In his typical style, reminiscent of impassioned Urdu shayari, Ramubhaiyya said to Kumarji, “Kumar, this kid doesn’t only sing like you, he even starts looking like you when he sings!”. 

There were also other famous musicians visiting us at that time. They would come to discuss points of musical import with my father or to sing something for him, and I’d be a fly on the wall, taking it all in. But I remember thinking, every time I’d meet Kumarji, that there was something very different about this man. The first time this really struck me was when I requested him to sign my little autograph book.

In those days, I’d go around asking my father’s accomplished friends for a sahi and a sandesh — an autograph and a message. Hirabai Barodekar wrote ‘Maintain the sanctity of gharana-music’, and I was left wondering which gharana she meant. Someone else wrote ‘Practice for eighteen hours every day’. The poet Raja Badhe’s sandesh was the best. He wrote: 'संदेश काय द्यावा ? संदेश नित्य खावा ! '[‘Giving sandeshes is so passé. But you must eat one everyday!’]

When I went to Kumarji however, he thought about it, pen in hand, for a good two hours, and then wrote:

Kalā kā svād lenā sampark par nirbhar hai. Kalākriti kā nirmāṇ karnā bhī āsān hai, magar kalā kā marm samajhnā mahāऽkaṭhan hai.

[The savouring of art depends upon the company one keeps. Even creating art is easy, but understanding the essence of it is very difficult]

This is a sandesh I still haven’t been able to fully digest!

It was because of things like this that Kumarji stood out more and more for me from amongst everyone else. The freshness of his music, and really his whole personality had begun to cast its spell on me. Around this time, in 1963, he took me along on a concert tour with him. We traveled by first class - Nagpur, Amravati, Riva, Jabalpur, Bhopal and then a long stay in Dewas. I’d hum unceasingly, like a leaking tap, but Kumarji would make me present a fifteen-minute ‘program’ before his audiences in each of these towns. I even sang for a whole forty-five minutes in Bhopal. My menu was the bada-khyal ‘Jiyo Karo Kot’ in Yaman, and, as trousers to go with this ‘coat’, the drut bandish ‘Kal Nahi Aae’, followed by Kumarji’s Tod Laai Raja and Nirbhay Nirgun. 

What fun it was to be in Dewas! In the month I spent there, Kumarji never brought out his tanpuras to give me or anyone else a formal lesson. Instead, what I heard there was Kumarji’s humming — while doing his gardening or travelling by tanga, and most often on the dining table. How beautiful and multifarious his humming was! His tarana in Bhimpalas and the lokgeet ‘Suno sakhi sainya jogiya hoi gaya’ are etched in my memory. I already knew my father’s version of the Shuddha Kalyan bandish ‘Batiya dura’, but there, on Kumarji’s dining table, I learned that the actual words were ‘Batiyā daurāvat aiso sughar banā’ [he repeats sweet nothings, my beautiful beau]. His manner of singing this bandish, and the lilt with which he spoke these words in song, still gives me goosebumps. [Visit satyasheel.com to listen to these bandishes]

From everything I saw and heard in Dewas, I realised that there was music even in how Kumarji dwelt in his home. The idea that music was meant for the stage, that it was a definite product to put on display, and that one did one’s riyaz only to achieve stageworthiness had no place in his home. I also realised, during this stay with him, that music is the process of revisiting a raag, of unpacking the dhun that lives inside it anew each time. It is not a fixed product that you formulate once and for all. You can memorise a bandish, but the music inside it must keep flowing like water from a spring. You cannot fill a pot with a spring. You can only fill it with water. A spring is an outburst in flow.

All the musicians I had seen — the popular ones, who’d perform often, or others who’d spend their days waiting for the opportunity — the riyaz I saw them do was always an effort to arrive at a music that was a definite product, sculpted for the stage. The work they put into their music was directed towards the crafting of the epic of the khyal; they never thought of their music as a haiku perhaps, something to turn over in their minds, to mull over, to hum to themselves. And even the khyal they sang was meant for the regular concert-goer, always happy and content with regular concert fare. This is what music means to most singers - it is almost as if it does not exist outside of the public performance of it. Kumarji was an exception to this. He once told me, ‘Beta, not all singers are blessed with the ability to hum!’ So many singers acquire voices suited only to the public stage. Their speaking and singing voices are very different, and many cannot hum at all! But Bade Ghulam Ali Khansaheb and Kumarji sang in the voices they spoke in. They both spoke right in the middle of their singing range, right around their panchams. And they could both hum, they were fond of humming and, of course, they could both also bring their full, roaring voices to the concert stage. I believe that singers who can do both are able to inhabit a much wider field of sensitivity.

My companion in Dewas was Kumarji's son, the talented and diligent Mukul, and we became fast friends. Kumarji got us to listen to 78 rpm records of the elder singers during this stay, and initiated us into what became a lifelong preoccupation. Faiyyaz Khan, Rahimat Khan, Roshan Ara Begum, Barkat Ali, Kesarbai -  the unique flavors of each of these voices stamped themselves on our young minds. In a letter from Dewas to my father, Kumarji wrote ‘Satyasheel and Mukul’s riyaz of listening to music is going very well’.

In that month in Dewas, Kumarji had me in his thrall - not just for his music, but for the child in him, his infallible aim when playing marbles, how clever he was at chess, his affinity for language and the inimitable way in which he used it, his unexpected and spontaneous responses to things people said. In Bombay, the ceiling fan in our 58/B Walkeshwar Road flat was as steadfast and stoical as my father. Its speed hadn't wavered for years. I grew up under this fan, and it was only in Dewas, in Kumarji's company, that I woke up to the vicissitudes of day and night, and even to the seasons. I had, for the first time, come into the company of a man who savoured so much and lived with such relish, and I returned to Bombay overwhelmed not just by Kumarji’s music but by his entire personality, by the man himself.