Times Online August 22, 2006
Ustad Bismillah Khan March 21, 1916 - August 21, 2006 Virtuoso musician who promoted the shehnai into concert halls and became a living symbol of Muslim-Hindu reconciliation
USTAD BISMILLAH KHAN was the world's foremost player of the shehnai, perhaps the most popular of all instruments in Indian music.
Somewhat similar to the Western oboe, its hypnotic sound has for centuries been widely used in temples, during holy festivals, at weddings and on other auspicious and ceremonial occasions. Khan singlehandedly gave the shehnai classical respectability and introduced it to the concert platform and recital hall.
His mastery of the instrument made him a national hero. The name "Ustad" denotes master or guru, and he was awarded all four of India's top honours. He also played widely outside India, following such pioneers as Ali Akbar Khan on the sarod and Ravi Shankar on the sitar in introducing classical Indian music to Western audiences.
Despite his renown, he remained a modest and simple man whose favoured form of transport was the cycle rickshaw and whose only vice appeared to be the Wills cigarettes that he smoked with obvious relish.
A pious Shia Muslim who lived almost all his life in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi, he came to symbolise Hindu-Muslim unity in India. It was indicative of the veneration in which he was held that on news of his death the Indian Government declared a day of national mourning and announced that he would be accorded a state funeral.
Born in 1916 in the village in Bihar, he was named Qamaruddin by his parents, but when his grandfather first saw the newborn, he uttered the word Bismillah ("in the name of Allah" and the first word in the Koran) and the name stuck. His ancestors were court musicians in the princely state of Dumraon, and he spent his childhood in Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, where his uncle, Ali Bux Vilayatu, was the official shehnai player in the Viswanath temple.
Khan and his older brother became his pupils. He remembered his uncle as a hard taskmaster who demanded that they rose before dawn to practise, but he was nevertheless an enthusiastic student.
"I was never interested in studies. While others were at their books, I used to sneak out and play marbles or blow on uncle's shehnai. He always knew I would be a shehnai player," he recalled.
Despite its widespread use in Indian music, the shehnai is not an easy instrument to play well, demanding a mastery of difficult circular breathing techniques and an enormous amount of breath control for the long, sustained solo passages, often in an extravagantly fast tempo. By his early teens Khan was an acknowledged master, outstripping his older brother in skill and rivalling his famous uncle.
Despite being a devout Shia, he also became at the age of 12 a devotee of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of music. He believed that he had received a sign from the goddess and for the rest of his life found nothing strange in combining Muslim and Hindu elements in his personal religious practice.
He came to national prominence — and brought the shehnai to centre stage in Indian music — when at the age of 21 he gave an acclaimed recital at the All-India Music Conference in Calcutta in 1937.
By the time of Indian independence a decade later, he was one of the sub-continent's best-known musicians and was invited to perform at the Red Fort in Delhi on the eve of India's independence ceremony. His recital became an annual part of the Independence Day celebrations held each August 15, broadcast live from the Red Fort directly after the Prime Minister's speech.
He began recording for EMI India in the early 1940s and enjoyed a prolific output. Among his greatest recordings was a duet (known as a jugalbandi) with the sitar player Vilayat Khan, which launched EMI's Music of India series in Britain, and which was one of the first Indian recordings to be widely available in the West.
His first invitation to tour Europe came in 1965 but he declined because of a fear of flying. The following year he was invited to play at the Edinburgh Festival and tried to get out of the invitation by making a series of impossible demands. When the promoters met them all and he still demurred, Khan was pressured by a senior figure in the Indian Government, who told him it was his duty to go as a cultural ambassador. He eventually agreed to make the journey but extracted a price, insisting that he and his entourage were first taken at the Indian Government's expense on the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. The request was granted, and with his state-funded haj completed, he arrived in Scotland for a rapturously received concert.
In 1967 he made his first visit to America and, having overcome his fear of air travel, thereafter he became a regular performer on many of the world's most famous concert stages. Several of his most acclaimed recordings were made on subsequent visits to London. In addition to his classical recitals, he worked in Bollywood with some of India's top film singers, including Lata Mangeshkar and her sister Asha Bhosle.
In his old age Khan continued to live modestly in Varanasi, and took a number of students. He did not groom a particular disciple to assume his mantle, in the way, for example, that Shankar has trained his daughter Anoushka as his heir. Indeed, until the end he modestly claimed that he himself remained but a pupil. He said in one of his final interviews: "This music is still an ocean. I want to cross it. But I have barely reached the shore. I haven't yet even taken a dip in it."
Over the years he received a number of honorary degrees and was awarded the four highest civilian awards that the Indian Government has at its disposal. The highest, the Bharat Ratna, was bestowed in 2001 when he became only the third musician to be thus recognised.
He is survived by five sons and three daughters.
Ustad Bismillah Khan, musician, was born on March 21, 1916. He died on August 21, 2006, aged 90.