Finding Begum Akhtar

KAUN BEGUM AKHTAR? There I am at Mateen Manzil, following the map of Lucknow and clutching my copy of Yatindra Mishra’s Akhtari: The Life and Music of Begum Akhtar. “The queen of ghazal, one of Lucknow’s most famous inhabitants, a woman who chose to live and love on her own terms,” I mut­ter as much to myself as the man who greets me at the gate. This is where she lived with her husband, Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi, a barrister and man of great taste, I say to the uncomprehending man in front of me.

In Lucknow, all roads do not lead to Begum Akhtar, who came to the city as Akhtaribai Faizabadi, the daughter of a tawaif, Mushtaribai. Mushtaribai established her home in the middle of Qaiserbagh, once part of the palace of the last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid Ali Shah. It was an audacious move by Mushtaribai, who had no wish to oper­ate from Lucknow’s red-light district. It is here, in what was called Akhtari Manzil, that Akhtaribai became Begum Akhtar, one of the country’s greatest singers. She married Abbasi, living a respectable life, which by all ac­counts almost killed her. For five years, she did not sing, because that is not what respectable women did in those days. But when she resumed, partly on medical advice, she did not stop, giving musical meaning to the words of some of the greatest poets of her time.

“She could sing any form of semi-classical music,” says Yatindra Mishra, the grandson of the last princess of Ayodhya, Rajkumari Vimla Devi. “I grew up listening to her stories, and to her music.” Mishra’s remarkable storytelling skills enable him to recall anecdotes with ease. There is the famous story of the tailors of Ayodhya being sum­moned to the palace to copy a blouse, with puff sleeves, worn by the actor Meena Kumari in the film Kohinoor (1960), because Begum Akhtar had told the princess to do so. “She was the epitome of grace and great taste,” says Mishra. Moreover, she was teaching the princess to sing. How could she not have the blouse—even if it involved cutting the scene out of the film that was running at the Man­mandir theatre, that was sent back to Mumbai and having a fine of Rs 16,000 imposed upon the family by the Indian Motion Picture Association.

That was the power of Begum Akhtar. And yet Lucknow remembers so little of her that the city’s amiable cultural advocate Madhavi Kuckreja had to struggle to give her grave a graceful setting. Thanks to the efforts of Begum Akhtar’s disciple Shanti Hiranand and her admirer scholar Saleem Kidwai, the little plot of land in Pasand Bagh, once part of Begum Akhtar’s estate but now little better than a slum, her tomb is now a beautiful pit stop in the chase for her legacy. The little red brick structure, with her photographs and Shanti Hiranand’s remembrance of things past, is where Kuckreja organises a musical soirée every year on the day she died, at a mere age of 60, on October 30, 1974.

What was once just an untidy cement-and-brick platform next to her mother, has now become two marble tombs, under a harsingar tree. But the fields and mango orchard have now been dismembered by her various heirs, and sold for cash, fitting for a country where heritage is now noth­ing more than real estate. Before they started work on the tomb, it was a place where goats would graze, there would be routine flooding, and wild grass would grow underfoot. “It was where we would go and people would ask us, ‘Kaun Begum Akhtar’? It was a constant refrain,” says Kuckreja.

Kuckreja, a long-time civil rights activist who set up Vanangana in Chi­trakoot, Madhya Pradesh, and Banda, Uttar Pradesh, working for the poorest of the poor, is an unusual woman. A Punjabi, who grew up in Kolkata, but whose mother’s roots were in Delhi (she belongs to the family that set up Nirula’s, India’s oldest fast-food restaurant chain), she set up Sanatkada, a handicraft store in Lucknow, within a few years of shifting to the city in 2004. It is here that she felt Begum Akhtar’s presence in spirit but not in reality. “Ev­ery city has an icon, Mirza Ghalib for Old Delhi, or Satyajit Ray for Kolkata. Lucknow has its aesthete too, and none greater than Begum Akhtar,” she says.

KUCKREJA HAS ANOTHER connection with Begum Akhtar. “My grandmother and grand-uncle were great fans of Begum Akhtar. When Begum Akhtar would come to Delhi for her baithaks, she would inevitably stay in a specific, elaborately painted room of the Nirula’s Hotel, which they owned. She never paid her last bill apparently,” says Kuckreja, “so everyone jokes this is her way of paying back.”

Much of Lucknow, built by the Nawabs of Awadh, was destroyed by the British in rage and revenge after the First War of Independence. As the author Ira Mukhoty says, “The British were so horrified by the uprising against them that they went on a spree of destruction of vast parts of Qaiserb­agh, built by Wajid Ali Shah.” It was in the remains of Qaiserbagh, which the British broke up into small holdings for the talukdars, that Mushtaribai decided she would house the home of Akhtaribai, in a kothi (mansion), not a kotha (a tawaif’s home), then located mostly in Lucknow’s Chowk Bazaar. And it is from here that her fame spread. As Kidwai writes in Akhtari: “The art of ghazal singing nurtured in the kothas might easily have turned into an embarrassing skeleton in our cultural closet had Begum Akhtar not claimed a space for it in the esteemed music sammelans.”

Like most performers of her time, radio was where she first earned fame, recording her first 78 rpm disc in an ex­clusive contract with the Megaphone Company when she was only 13. By the mid-1930s, she was acting in movies but gave up after her voice was replaced in Mehboob Khan’s Roti (1942) because of contract issues.

She made Lucknow her home and eventually moved from her mother’s Akhtari Manzil to her husband’s Mateen Manzil. This is not the Mateen Manzil I went to, in Almasbagh, Lucknow. The home of Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi, an England-educated lawyer, in Lucknow’s Naya Gaon doesn’t exist anymore. “It was pulled down in 2003, before I came to Lucknow,” says Kuckreja. But it was here that Akhtaribai, a tawaif, or nautch girl as the British renamed them, became a wife, a begum, and a performer without the baggage of her past. It was not a past she considered shameful but society did, and perhaps it was a small price to pay for the music.

There are many reasons for Lucknow’s amnesia about Begum Akhtar. One is the general disdain the new middle class of an emerging new India felt for the tawaifs, who were seen in purely sexual terms. The other is that she was a woman who dared to break the glass ceiling, ascribing to herself the status of a female ustad or guru. And yet another reason is the rise of a post-liberalised India where materialism has replaced an engagement with the arts, with civilised forms of entertain­ment, and with the beauty of poetry.

There is also the inevitable onslaught of democracy. The abolition of zamindari in 1952 meant not merely a redistribution of land. It also meant the end of a way of life, a cutting off of the patronage extended to the tawaifs and their fine arts.

Begum Akhtar managed to find a new life as a recording artist for LPs, which in no small measure has contributed to her legacy. She means so many different things to different people. To Mishra, she is foremost the durbar gayika of Ayodhya between 1937 and 1947 and a great influence on his grandmother. “A city’s life lies between the tangible and the intan­gible. For Lucknow, you need to know about Birju Maharaj, Amritlal Nagar, Yashpal, Majaz. Before Begum Akhtar, there was no ghazal genre. It’s exactly what Bismillah Khan did for the sheh­nai, liberating it from its tradition as a musical instrument to be played only at celebratory events,” he says.

Why has Lucknow forgotten one of its greatest residents? “Lucknow has forgotten Urdu, it has forgotten adab [etiquette]. Lucknow now has hookah bars, parties,” he says. “There are two distinct phases before Begum and after her when it comes to ghazal as a classical form. She gave it gravitas and a status, wearing a Banarsi sari, with a pallu on her head, a Kashmiri shawl wrapped around her, singing Kaifi Azmi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, and Mirza Ghalib, and knowing exactly what parts to sing.”

‘Tabiyat in dinon begaana e gham hoti jaati hai/Mere hisse ki goya har khushi kam hoti jaati hai’ (I am beyond sorrow now/The last few friends I had are also deserting me now)—let her musical interpretation of Jigar Moradabadi’s composition not be her lasting legacy. And let Kaun Begum Akhtar? no longer be a question that the people of Lucknow ask.

Watch: Interview with Yatindra Mishra, author of Akhtari: The Life and Music of Begum Akhtar

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