In Raag Dehlavi

The Dilli gharana of Tanras and Chand Khan has a gentle prima donna.

- Sreevalsan Thiyyadi

THE alleyways were too narrow for even a rickshaw to enter; so the two girls would walk down to Mausiqi Manzil, their master’s Mughal-vintage haveli, a particularly storied one among the many in Delhi-6. Animated by the genteel spirit of Ustad Chand Khan (1899-1980), the paterfamilias of Dilli gharana, it was a hub of soirees back in the day. Ustads of all timbres would drop in, from Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Amjad Ali Khan’s father Hafiz Ali and Amir Khan. So would Begum Akhtar, Siddheshwari Devi and a certain K.L. Saigal, as transiting disciples.

The young Chakravarty sisters—from a Bengali family that had migrated to Delhi at the turn of the century—didn’t have to cover much of a physical distance from their house in the new city to this jumble of civilisational shards nestled in the banyan-like shade of Jama Masjid. But their sorties to the Walled City in the early 1960s were to make a different kind of inflection in the journey of Hindustani music. Specifically, in the ‘gender’ of music.

Of the two siblings, the younger went on to be an illustrious legatee of a school with a long footprint in history—but there’s more to it than that. Gharana lore traces the lineage back to vocalist brothers Hassan Sawant and Bula Kalawant, contemporaries of mystic Sufi poet Amir Khusro (1253-1325). The more recent, less hazy lines on the family tree go back to exponents from the early 19th century— Miyan Achpal and his iconic disciple Tanras Khan (so named by the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar), the key personages around whom the gharana coalesced. For generations thereafter, through all the disruptions it faced, khayal gayaki was a male bastion in Dilli gharana. The privilege of being the first-ever female khayal vocalist of the Delhi family falls on Dr Krishna Bisht who, at 74, wears it with all the grace befitting her music.