Padma Vibhushan N Rajam reflects on Banaras, music and a lifetime with the violin

In present-day Varanasi, where the overlapping strains of temple bells, the azaan and folk and classical traditions are increasingly filtered through hardened ideas of identity and belonging, a not-so-distant memory of shehnai maestro Ustad Bismillah Khan in a musical dialogue with a young BHU professor and violinist N Rajam almost 40 years ago, still evokes the cultural memory of a city somewhat receding from us. A city untouched by modern politics and held together by diverse cultural and musical traditions; the famed Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb that once imbued into music, language and the fabric of daily life.The texture of that time is captured in a grainy video recording from the ’80s available on YouTube, where one sees Rajam play Maithili poet Vidyapati’s Piya mora baalak (My beloved is a mere boy), on the banks of the Ganga. It is the anguish of a young bride mourning her wedding to a child with no scope of companionship and no place for desire played in Pilu, a fluid raga with longing at the heart of it.For Rajam, born and raised in a Tamil-speaking family in Chennai, this was her ode to the writing and composition of the 15th-century poet/composer still revered in the Purvanchali belt. Khan and tabla giant Pt Kishan Maharaj, sitting on either side of her, listened in sheer delight as Rajam, bent over her violin, took a deep dive into the popular folk piece. But her violin did more than just render a beloved melody. It echoed the quintessential Banarasi lehja, the unhurried grace of its cadence, in turn becoming inseparable from the city she had come to call home then. Khan is heard saying ‘wah’ at regular intervals. He joins her with his shehnai, extending the melodic thread. Khan had heard her play a solo at the university and was struck by the evocative nature of the young violinist’s music. That is when he decided to collaborate with her. N Rajam with Ustad Bismillah Khan“Though he was from a generation above me, Khan saab probably saw that what I was trying to do with the violin was in some ways similar to what he had already done with the shehnai. He had been playing khayal on the shehnai for years by then,” says Rajam, about the wind instrument that was associated with weddings, temples and folk music until Khan put it on the proscenium. “Playing with him, where he would just close his eyes listen, will remain memorable for me,” says 88-year-old Rajam. Khan’s version of Banaras was always at the centre of his affections. He considered it responsible for his music. In Rajam’s playing, he, perhaps, heard his Banaras, which surfaced in the tenderness of every glide, pause and the delicate tonal shifts. This violin could sing. And Rajam’s brilliance lay in transforming the sound of the violin by adapting the technique of a European instrument, which she learned through the grammar of Carnatic music, to the demands of Hindustani vocal music. The result was a complete reimagination of the violin with a gayaki ang (the vocal style), which hadn’t been heard on the instrument before. Because no violinist had done this before her. Rajam’s effortlessness only revealed just how much labour lay beneath the process. In Rajam’s hands, for over seven decades now, the violin has never sounded external to the Hindustani tradition. From complex classical ragas to thumris and kajris, she has absorbed them all into the medium. “Although the violin has been in practice in the south for about 300 years with a highly sophisticated technique, that technique was not sufficient for reproducing Hindustani vocal music on the instrument. I had to work very hard and do a lot of research. Even for a short phrase, I would struggle for months to get it right. The music was not just a reproduction of the existing ocean of Hindustani music; it needed to have life,” says Rajam in a conversation with The Indian Express a day after her lifelong reimagination of the violin won her a Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civilian honour, last month. She was