What a singer, Asha Khadilkar is! Not perfectly in tune all the time, perhaps, but highly appealing, nonetheless. She so often touches the shrutis right that one forgets her temporary lapses otherwise. Along with the great Vasantrao Deshpande she has enthralled the audience with her mesmeric renditions of Marathi Natyasangeet. The emotion that she projects and her modulations with effortless ease set her apart as a performer nonpareil on stage and lend credence to the proposition that the Maharashtrians are avenues ahead of the rest of India when it comes to vocal music. When Vasantrao Deshpande sings, he holds the audience in thrall with his beautiful rendition of this poetic, dramatic genre of music that Marathi Natyasangeet is.
Over three and a half decades ago, my friend Bireswar Kumar who was an accomplished Kathak dancer and a disciple of Bandana Sen at that, had remarked thus : "Sugata, you must come over to Bombay once just to see these young Marathi girls sing. You will see that each one is a potential Hirabai Barodekar. The climate there also helps them. The voice remains always good and one seldom suffers from all these ailments of cough and cold as is the wont of Calcutta singers to suffer from. Moreover, the culture of the place is such that in every other house there is the culture of Hindustani classical music and the result is that there is such a huge pool of talent there. Compared to the Marathis, we, Bengalis, are nowhere in the world of vocal music. The tradition is such. See, some of the greatest stalwarts in the world of Hindustani vocal music hail from Maharashtra. Consider Kesarbai Kerkar, Vishnu Digambar Paluskar, Narayanrao Vyas, Vinayakrao Patwardhan, D.V. Paluskar and a host of others and you will understand why Maharashtra keeps producing musical titans one after the other in every generation." I kept mum for I did not quite comprehend the vastness of the statement and the sheer depth of perception behind it. Incidentally, Bireswar Kumar was an accomplished khayal and thungri singer, too, and, hence, his statements were not to be taken lightly. But I failed to understand its import then.
It was only the other day that I chanced to come upon a few of the beautiful compositions that the great Bal Gandharva used to famously sing in his times. When I reheard them in the voice of Kumar gandharva and Bhimsen Joshi among others of lesser fame but no mean calibre, I was struck from a distance of 36 years by Bireswar's words and understood the truth behind every word that he has spoken then. I have lost trace of my friend in all these years and do not know if I will ever see him again in this life. However, his memory lingers on in these poignant words of his and in the musical soirees we used to have in our house, 'gharowa baithaks' as one would ascribe them in Bengali. Those were wonderful days when Pandit Partha Bose, the renowned sitarist, Pradipta Biswas, the tabla player and disciple of Pandit Swapan Choudhury, Bireswar, the khayal and thungri singer, my uncle, Tuntun Mama, who was a classical vocalist, my Guru and uncle, Pandit Ajoy Sinha Roy, the sitar maestro who was a senior disciple of Ustad Allauddin Khan, and Rebatinandan Dasmahapatra who was the scion of the estate of Panchetgarh and a connoisseur of music, used to assemble in our house on occasions and set the atmosphere alight with melodic strains that have remained etched in my memory ever since. Decades hence when I look back on those days, I cannot help marvelling at the culture excellence we had exposed ourselves to then and gained delight perennial from the khamaj thungri sung by my Guru, the Durga sung by Tuntun Mama or the Bhairavi bhajan rendered by Bireswar or his Bageshree and Ahir Bhairav khayals. Pradipta was simply brilliant on the tabla even as he was a raw talent but dexterous to the core yet. I used to accompany them on the harmonium and played it with great aplomb then and, dare I say, with considerable skill, too.
Winter was setting in and the music conferences began. The Sadarang, the Tansen and, the coup de grace, of course, the Dover Lane Music Conference besides a host of others filled our schedule. Whole night conferences were the order of the day and
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