Pandit Ravi Shankar was unhappy as I was drawing more applause: Annapurna Devi
Tathagata Ray Chowdhury,TNN | Sep 1, 2014
KOLKATA: In the extremely rarefied atmosphere of the finest exponents of Indian classical music, she is a "virtuoso's virtuoso". Ironically, only a handful of people have been fortunate enough to have heard her play. Now, nearly 60 years since legendary surbahar and sitar exponent Annapurna Devi completely vanished from the public eye (and ear), she has finally broken her silence on why she left her promising concert career and became a recluse: it was to save her marriage with Pandit Ravi Shankar.
"Panditji (Shankar) was not happy, as I received more appreciation than he did from both the audience and the critics whenever we performed together in the 1950s," the 88-year-old told TOI at her apartment in Breach Candy, Mumbai. "And that", she said, "had a negative impact on our marriage. Though he never categorically stopped me from performing in public, he made it clear in several ways that he wasn't happy with the fact that I was drawing more applause."
She said she had to choose marital bliss over professional recognition " and she chose the former. "I was an introvert, more of a family person. I was keener to save the marriage than to earn name and fame."
It was one of the cruellest ironies of fate that the marriage between two of the country's most gifted musicians could not ultimately be saved, despite her enormous sacrifice. "I tried all I could, because I did not want to hurt my father, Ustad Allauddin Khan, who taught us whatever we know of music. He was a devout, god-fearing person. He certainly did not like to see his only daughter's marriage falling apart. But Panditji already had other women in his life," she said.
Annapurna was born to sarod maestro Allauddin, one of the country's foremost classical musicians of the 20th century, in Maihar, then in the Central Provinces (now Madhya Pradesh), in 1926. Along with her brother Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and many others who became famous later, she took training in music from her father since childhood. Shankar, aged 18, came to Maihar to learn from Allauddin in 1938.
Allauddin first trained Annapurna in dhrupad and sitar. But he later asked her to concentrate on the surbahar, an instrument that is similar to the sitar but heavier and more difficult to play.
In 1982, decades after her separation with Shankar, she married her student Rooshikumar Pandya. Pandya did everything possible to take care of his guru till he breathed his last in April 2013.
The marriage between Annapurna and Ravi Shankar was actually the idea of the latter's elder brother, Uday Shankar, who popularised Indian dance in the world by adapting European theatrical techniques to it. Uday had sought Allauddin's permission so that two of the country's best-known families in the performing arts could be united by marriage, and Allauddin was known to have given his consent after initial hesitations.
The marriage happened in 1941, following Hindu rituals. A year later, their only son, Subhendra Shankar (Shubho) was born. But Subho was destined to meet with what Devi claimed was an "untimely, unattended and miserable death" in 1992 in a charitable hospital in the US. Why this neglect? "Panditji said he could not take care of Shubho because he had his own family then (Sukanya and Anoushka Shankar). I wondered why he did not consider Shubho also to be a part of his own family," Annapurna said.
There is, however, no such allegation when it comes to Ravi Shankar's duty towards Allauddin. "Panditji had absolute guru shraddha," Annapurna stressed. "He did what he could (for Allauddin)."
After their marriage, Shankar and Annapurna initially performed together to thunderous applause in various parts of the country, including at Talkatora Gardens and the Constitution Club in New Delhi and at Eden Gardens and Park Circus in Kolkata. A few of those who were fortunate enough to have witnessed the historic duets have immortalized those through their tales and memoirs.
Things, however, started to go awry between the duo soon afterwards and she began to gradually withdraw herself from the outside world.
She last performed in public in 1956, and decided to confine herself to her Breach Candy apartment after Shankar left for the US with his family acquaintance-cum-live-in partner Kamala Shastri in the next decade. Shankar came to meet her only once, in 1980.
As long as health permitted, she taught her father's music to only a select few students who had to overcome Himalayan obstacles to reach her home and approach her. The most notable of them would be flautists Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and Pandit Nityanand Haldipur and sarod players Ustad Aashish Khan, Pandit Basant Kabra, Pandit Pradeep Barot and Pandit Suresh Vyas.
Many of Allauddin's students, whose lessons remained incomplete following his death, had no one to look up to but Annapurna. They included Allauddin's nephew Ustad Bahadur Khan, grandson Ustad Aashish Khan and disciple Pandit Nikhil Banerjee.
"Though Parkinson's has kept her confined to the bed, she is still mentally alert as she has always been," said Haldipur, who looks after Annapurna along with another of her disciples, Suresh Vyas.
"She regularly watches news on TV and listens to classical music renditions on the radio. She does not meet anyone and has long stopped teaching. There are attendants who look after her. I only try to ensure that she doesn't face any difficulty and that things run smoothly," Haldipur added.
Since she retired from the public eye, Annapurna guarded her privacy so zealously that she has declined requests by numerous national and international figures " including former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, whom she admired " to come out and play. She has been bestowed several of the country's most prestigious honours in absentia " Padma Bhushan (1977), Deshikottam (1999) and a fellowship of the Sangeet Natak Akademi (2004).
The awards could never be a measure of her true position in the pantheon of classical music, but perhaps an idea of her genius could be got from something Ustad Ali Akbar Khan had once said: "Put Ravi Shankar, Pannalal (Ghosh) and me on one side and put Annapurna on the other. Yet, her side of the scale would be heavier."
By Rebecca Frayn
When I began to research a screenplay about Aung San Suu Kyi four years ago, I wasn't expecting to uncover one of the great love stories of our time. Yet what emerged was a tale so romantic - and yet so heartbreaking - it sounded more like a pitch for a Hollywood weepie: an exquisitely beautiful but reserved girl from the East meets a handsome and passionate young man from the West.
For Michael Aris the story is a coup de foudre, and he eventually proposes to Suu amid the snow-capped mountains of Bhutan, where he has been employed as tutor to its royal family. For the next 16 years, she becomes his devoted wife and a mother-of-two, until quite by chance she gets caught up in politics on a short trip to Burma, and never comes home. Tragically, after 10 years of campaigning to try to keep his wife safe, Michael dies of cancer without ever being allowed to say goodbye.
I also discovered that the reason no one was aware of this story was because Dr Michael Aris had gone to great lengths to keep Suu's family out of the public eye. It is only because their sons are now adults - and Michael is dead - that their friends and family feel the time has come to speak openly, and with great pride, about the unsung role he played.
The daughter of a great Burmese hero, General Aung San, who was assassinated when she was only two, Suu was raised with a strong sense of her father's unfinished legacy. In 1964 she was sent by her diplomat mother to study Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford, where her guardian, Lord Gore-Booth, introduced her to Michael. He was studying history at Durham but had always had a passion for Bhutan - and in Suu he found the romantic embodiment of his great love for the East. But when she accepted his proposal, she struck a deal: if her country should ever need her, she would have to go. And Michael readily agreed.
For the next 16 years, Suu Kyi was to sublimate her extraordinary strength of character and become the perfect housewife. When their two sons, Alexander and Kim, were born she became a doting mother too, noted for her punctiliously well-organised children's parties and exquisite cooking. Much to the despair of her more feminist friends, she even insisted on ironing her husband's socks and cleaning the house herself.
Then one quiet evening in 1988, when her sons were 12 and 14, as she and Michael sat reading in Oxford, they were interrupted by a phone call to say Suu's mother had had a stroke.
She at once flew to Rangoon for what she thought would be a matter of weeks, only to find a city in turmoil. A series of violent confrontations with the military had brought the country to a standstill, and when she moved into Rangoon Hospital to care for her mother, she found the wards crowded with injured and dying students. Since public meetings were forbidden, the hospital had become the centre-point of a leaderless revolution, and word that the great General's daughter had arrived spread like wildfire.
When a delegation of academics asked Suu to head a movement for democracy, she tentatively agreed, thinking that once an election had been held she would be free to return to Oxford again. Only two months earlier she had been a devoted housewife; now she found herself spearheading a mass uprising against a barbaric regime.
In England, Michael could only anxiously monitor the news as Suu toured Burma, her popularity soaring, while the military harassed her every step and arrested and tortured many of her party members. He was haunted by the fear that she might be assassinated like her father. And when in 1989 she was placed under house arrest, his only comfort was that it at least might help keep her safe.
Michael now reciprocated all those years Suu had devoted to him with a remarkable selflessness of his own, embarking on a high-level campaign to establish her as an international icon that the military would never dare harm. But he was careful to keep his work inconspicuous, because once she emerged as the leader of a new democracy movement, the military seized upon the fact that she was married to a foreigner as a basis for a series of savage - and often sexually crude - slanders in the Burmese press.
For the next five years, as her boys were growing into young men, Suu was to remain under house arrest and kept in isolation. She sustained herself by learning how to meditate, reading widely on Buddhism and studying the writings of Mandela and Gandhi. Michael was allowed only two visits during that period. Yet this was a very particular kind of imprisonment, since at any time Suu could have asked to be driven to the airport and flown back to her family.
But neither of them ever contemplated her doing such a thing. In fact, as a historian, even as Michael agonised and continued to pressurise politicians behind the scenes, he was aware she was part of history in the making. He kept on display the book she had been reading when she received the phone call summoning her to Burma. He decorated the walls with the certificates of the many prizes she had by now won, including the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize. And above his bed he hung a huge photograph of her.
Inevitably, during the long periods when no communication was possible, he would fear Suu might be dead, and it was only the odd report from passers-by who heard the sound of her piano-playing drifting from the house that brought him peace of mind. But when the south-east Asian humidity eventually destroyed the piano, even this fragile reassurance was lost to him.
Then, in 1995, Michael quite unexpectedly received a phone call from Suu. She was ringing from the British embassy, she said. She was free again! Michael and the boys were granted visas and flew to Burma. When Suu saw Kim, her younger son, she was astonished to see he had grown into a young man. She admitted she might have passed him in the street. But Suu had become a fully politicised woman whose years of isolation had given her a hardened resolve, and she was determined to remain in her country, even if the cost was further separation from her family.
The journalist Fergal Keane, who has met Suu several times, describes her as having a core of steel. It was the sheer resilience of her moral courage that filled me with awe as I wrote my screenplay for The Lady. The first question many women ask when they hear Suu's story is how she could have left her children. Kim has said simply: "She did what she had to do." Suu Kyi herself refuses to be drawn on the subject, though she has conceded that her darkest hours were when "I feared the boys might be needing me".
That 1995 visit was the last time Michael and Suu were ever allowed to see one another. Three years later, he learnt he had terminal cancer. He called Suu to break the bad news and immediately applied for a visa so that he could say goodbye in person. When his application was rejected, he made over 30 more as his strength rapidly dwindled. A number of eminent figures - among them the Pope and President Clinton - wrote letters of appeal, but all in vain. Finally, a military official came to see Suu. Of course she could say goodbye, he said, but to do so she would have to return to Oxford.
The implicit choice that had haunted her throughout those 10 years of marital separation had now become an explicit ultimatum: your country or your family. She was distraught. If she left Burma, they both knew it would mean permanent exile - that everything they had jointly fought for would have been for nothing. Suu would call Michael from the British embassy when she could, and he was adamant that she was not even to consider it.
When I met Michael's twin brother, Anthony, he told me something he said he had never told anyone before. He said that once Suu realised she would never see Michael again, she put on a dress of his favourite colour, tied a rose in her hair, and went to the British embassy, where she recorded a farewell film for him in which she told him that his love for her had been her mainstay. The film was smuggled out, only to arrive two days after Michael died.
For many years, as Burma's human rights record deteriorated, it seemed the Aris family's great self-sacrifice might have been in vain. Yet in recent weeks the military have finally announced their desire for political change. And Suu's 22-year vigil means she is uniquely positioned to facilitate such a transition - if and when it comes - exactly as Mandela did so successfully for South Africa. As they always believed it would, Suu and Michael's dream of democracy may yet become a reality.
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