Requiem for Rashid Khan: The Finest 'Khayal' Vocalist Knows No Language Other Than Music

I was a perpetually unhappy 13-year-old. I was losing faith. I had somewhat discovered nihilistic writers, but I also loved Marx. And I romanticized a country that no longer existed.

Growing up, we were never formally introduced to music. With the exception of a mini Casio keyboard that my father gifted me when I was quite young, I have no childhood musical memories. The keyboard had pre-recorded melodies in its “Song Bank”. While randomly listening to them — as I cheerfully pretended to play the keys — I always wondered why would certain melodies sadden me.

Sadness, in our home, was always tied to words. How could something wordless, after all, make me feel sad?

It’s not that no one liked music at home. There were, of course, old Bollywood and Pakistani songs, as well as ghazals by iconic artists, to a certain extent. However, the latter were always appreciated solely for their lyrical material. Ghazal singers were often judged whenever they mispronounced any Urdu words. All the praise belonged to the poets alone. I remember once my mother politely, and rightly, told me it was really embarrassing not to remember the words accurately while quoting a poet. I must have forgotten a couplet while reciting it at a family gathering. In the Quranic tradition, the universe came into being after God commanded a singe word: “Kun. Be.” In our home, no medium was as considered as sacred as text and no other art form could be taken as seriously as poetry. However, this was about to change.

One early morning in 2002 — when I was 13 — I met something new. It was as if a new language opened her warm embrace for me. She carried an unknown melancholia, intertwined with an otherworldly pleasure. I heard a random old Hindi song on TV. The song deeply saddened me, as if it had broken something inside me. The haunting sadness was not linked to the song’s lyrics. By this time, thanks to my childhood friend, the little Casio keyboard, I had taught myself to play song tunes to some extent. Even though I had just heard that song for the first time, it deeply resonated with me, and its essence and the basic melody of the mukhra had remained in my heart.

There was no way to find it. The internet was slowly creeping in but we didn’t have access to it all the time. And of course, there was no YouTube. How could one find a song then if one didn’t even remember the lyrics? At the music society of our school, I went to meet the instructor. When I hummed the melody and tried to play the notes on the keyboard there, the instructor smiled and uttered two words I did not understand: “Puriya Dhanashree”. I had no idea what that meant. He told me it was the name of an evening raga, belonging to the Purvi that, and the song had been composed in that raga. None of that made much sense to me.

These words “Puriya Dhanashree”, however, I memorized. Or did I note them down? I can’t recall now. But there was something about that melody, something about these strange sounding words, and something about that morning, which left me in a dreamlike valley with an everlasting evening. I had found the song. But the mystery, I was told, had a deeper, an older source. I could not wait to explore this new universe.

In order to quench my thirst for what I had recently discovered, I checked a few of Lahore’s music stores within my reach — which were on the verge of transitioning from cassettes to CDs — but no one had any idea about what I was looking for. Everything was changing fast. It seemed everyone wanted to speed up to match the pace of the new millennium. Like any millennial, I had witnessed the transformation from audiocassettes to CDs and MP3 players to IPods, just in a few years. And here I was, an early teenager, trying to find something with ancient roots.

A few days later, when we went to a newly constructed shopping mall, I finally found a CD at a big music store – the album was titled “Purvi Thaat”. In the contents, the name of raga I was looking for was mentioned.

This was my first formal introduction to the Khayal. And this was my first meeting with the maestro Ustad Rashid Khan saheb. I remember weeping silently in my dimly lit room while listening to his rendition of Puriya Dhanashree that evening.

***

Lahore feels colder than usual this early January evening. As I write these lines, the 55-year-old ustad has slept an eternal sleep. It's astonishing to think that he delivered such miraculous performances at such a young age. It's difficult to believe that the particular rendition I am talking about — from 20 years ago — is by an artist barely in his mid-thirties.

I break down in tears while talking to Saqib, a musician friend in London, on the phone. When my house-help, Nawaz, hears me cry, he leaves the kitchen and comes to me worriedly. I subtly ignore his question about who am I mourning. “Koi nahi. No one.” I say, trying to control my emotions. When he insists, I tell him a gayik has passed away. He whispers a phrase in Arabic, “Indeed, to Allah we belong and to Allah we shall return.”

No words and meanings make sense to me this evening. Nawaz has joined me in the recent past. He doesn’t know about my personal losses. He has never seen me like this. “Did he pass away in Lahore, sir?” he asks with a concern. “When is the funeral?” “It doesn’t matter” I coldly respond. He seems a little perplexed. “Was he really close to you, sir?” I don’t know how to answer him. I’m almost embarrassed to tell him that I’m crying for a man I had never met in my life and who did not even know I existed. After some time, he brings me tea in the living room. “Sir, you know I’m poor. A villager. I can’t understand everything. But I know this pain.”

He is right. This pain is universal. But how would he react if I told him my association with Rashid Khan? Would he consider me a spoiled bourgeois brat? Is it a privilege to mourn an artist just because you know him through his art? Is a tear really an intellectual thing, as suggested by Blake in one of his poems?

Why are we expected to visibly grieve only the ones close to us? In the absence of any rituals, how do I grieve someone I had never physically met, or even tried to contact, and yet who played a profound role in my emotional, or, dare I say, spiritual life through his art? To me, Ustad Rashid Khan was the living embodiment of the Khayal. Now, hardly a day after his death, when I think this, I find myself surprised that I lived in the times of Rashid Khan.

He was often known in the classical music fraternity to be the finest Khayal vocalist of his generation. With his passing, without leaving behind any significantly trained, or, at least, known disciples in his tradition and signature style, a strange fear has arrested me. Are we witnessing the death of the genre? I am reminded of C.S. Lewis's poignant exploration of grief in A Grief Observed: "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

The tradition of the Khayal gives a lot of importance to the alaap, a rhythmless exploration of the raga, unfolding its emotional nectar, the rasa, by creatively improvising phrases within the fixed structure. This structure relies on the ascending and descending order of notes, prominent notes, among other things. The alaap leads to a structured composition, known as bandish, set to a certain rhythm cycle in vilambit, slow tempo. The performance culminates with fast tempo, known as drut, in which an artist expresses their virtuosity and complex understanding of the rhythm, demonstrating their vocal ability by singing various sorts of taans, paltas, and so on. These formal intricacies, however, are pleasing to the ear only if the raga comes into being — if its essence, rachao, is established, in the seemingly formless improvisations of the alaap. “After great pain,” writes Emily Dickinson, “a formal feeling comes.”

Rashid Khan really knew how to awaken a raga through his alaap. As traditional musicians in Lahore often say while praising the artists of yesteryears, ragas could be felt in physical form when certain artists sang them. In such baithaks, we are told, the presence of ragas as beings would be undeniable. Although I was not fortunate enough to experience him live, I have met many ragas in my room through the recordings of the great Khan.

Lastly, why does death feel so shocking when it comes to certain people? Why do we assume some people to be eternal? What does it mean for an artist to die at the peak of their career? Jaun Elia in an elegy-poem written for a poet friend wishes his friend’s grave to be filled with light so that he can write. In some sources of Islamic eschatology, angels are said to visit the fresh grave once the funeral and burial is over, and interact with the deceased in the language they spoke while being alive. This time it won’t be easy for the celestial beings, for Rashid Khan knows no language other than music.

Ammar Aziz is a poet from Lahore. His debut book The Missing Prayer is forthcoming in 2024. He is officially selecting and translating the works of the Urdu poet Jaun Elia. He can be reached at ammar.aziz@me.com

The Wire is now on WhatsApp. Follow our channel for sharp analysis and opinions on the latest developments.