Ustad Bade Gulam Ali Khan
- Swanandi Deshmukh
- 6 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
"I know only one thing – Music! I am little interested in other things. I am just a humble devotee of God and Music."
Before Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan sang a single note, the listener sensed a quiet shift in the atmosphere. It was as if the room leaned forward in anticipation. There was nothing hurried in his presence. Each note arrived with purpose, settled fully, and then moved on only when it had revealed all it could.
His voice carried a rare combination of weight and tenderness. It was expansive and powerful, yet supple enough to turn within a single breath. In this recording of his Raageshri, slow, heavy gamaks unfold with patience, and without a warning, a swift and dazzling tana flashes through the melody, precise and effortless. While the ear rests on a plain, unadorned lingering of notes, the next moment reveals a finely worked pattern of delicate grace notes, brief yet inventive. Certain phrases surge ahead with a surprising, while others unfold in gentle, clearly shaped curves.
Born in 1902 in Kasur, then a thriving cultural town in Punjab, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan was shaped early by an environment where music was a way of life. He belonged to a distinguished lineage of the Patiala gharana. His father, Ali Baksh Khan, and his uncle, Kale Khan, were revered court musicians of Patiala. Training in that household was uncompromising. It is said that as a young boy, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan practiced for long hours every day, often repeating a single phrase until it lost all effort and became second nature. Later in life, when students asked him about the secret of his voice, he would simply say that music demands one’s entire life, nothing less.
Though firmly rooted in the Patiala tradition, he was never bound by it. He expanded its expressive scope, bringing to it a rare emotional depth and lyrical freedom. Audiences often remarked that despite his towering stature as a musician, there was an unexpected warmth in his presence. Once, after a concert where listeners sat spellbound for hours, he is said to have remarked lightly that if even one heart had truly listened, his effort was worthwhile. Here's a beautiful Pahadi thumri of his.
A Concert That Refused to End
From "PILLARS OF HINDUSTANI MUSIC' by B.R. Deodhar
In 1945, during a recital in Kolhapur, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan found himself dissatisfied with the percussion accompaniment. Sensing that the musical support was not meeting his expectations, he curtailed the pure classical portion of the concert within the first forty or forty five minutes and moved on to thumris. Yet the feeling of having offered an incomplete performance stayed with him. Late that night, around 2.30 a.m., he returned to his lodgings at the Deval Club, only to find fifty or sixty listeners quietly following him there. Seeing them, Khansaheb paused and said simply, “All right then, sit here in the verandah. I will sing for you.”
With no formal arrangements, he asked one of his disciples to keep a basic rhythmic cycle on a dagga, placed his beloved swaramandal on his lap, and began to sing. What followed was an unplanned concert that lasted until six in the morning. His voice carried through the still night, drawing in theatre audiences heading home, who stopped, listened, and stayed on. No one seemed eager to leave. It was only when Khansaheb himself fell silent that the gathering slowly dispersed, having witnessed not a performance bound by stage or schedule, but music offered out of sheer responsibility to listening ears.
"Khansaheb had an extraordinary creativity. One could never predict how he would suddenly slide from one note to another. He would move from one raga to another with such ease that one would not even know where one ended and the other began. One actually faces limitations while structuring phrases in Punjab style, but Khansaheb had no constraints; even after half an hour of elaboration he would come up with something new. To experience that one has to listen to his Pahadi or Sindhubhairavi."
From THREE MASTERS: Bade Gulam Ali, Ameer Khan, Bhimen Joshi by Dr. Prabha Atre
To listen to Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan today is to encounter a voice that feels whole. Strength and delicacy exist together without contradiction. When the last note fades, it leaves behind more than memory. It leaves a heightened awareness of what the human voice, shaped by devotion and restraint, can truly become.
References
1) THREE MASTERS: Bade Gulam ALI Khan, Ameer Khan, Bhimsen Joshi- https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.23888/page/20/mode/2up
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