Why musician Annapurna Devi locked herself away for decades

A still from 6-A Akash Ganga shows Annapurna Devi performing with her then husband Pandit Ravi Shankar. Pics courtesy/Film Southasia

There is a segment in the documentary 6-A Akash Ganga on the life and legacy of Hindustani classical musician and guru Annapurna Devi where vocalist and writer Sakuntala Narasimhan recalls watching the surbahar player and her then husband Pandit Ravi Shankar performing a concert. "Ravi Shankar would play something, then wait for Annapurna ji to reproduce. And she would reproduce first-class, even better than him," relates Narasimhan who was then a student at The Music Academy in Chennai where the duo was performing.

"After the jhala, he started playing very fast phrases. And she played faster than him… They just went on. It was like a competition. When she played even faster than him, the whole hall burst out clapping. He got very angry… he took his hands off the sitar. Threw up his hands, saying - I accept defeat." We are told that it was the last time he played with her.

Annapurna Devi was trained by her father Ustad Alauddin Khan who was a musician at the court of Maharaja Brijnath Singh of Maihar State and who founded the Maihar gharana

Voiced over a black-and-white photograph of the two musicians, we hear Annapurna Devi reminiscing about the concerts she played with Shankar in the '40s and '50s, how the papers began praising her performances over his, how such reports often upset him, and her decision to ultimately withdraw from the spotlight in a bid to save her marriage.

The documentary, commissioned by the Annapurna Devi Foundation and directed by Nirmal Chander, takes us to the address in the film's title, an apartment that the legendary surbahar player withdrew into - the home that she eventually turned into a sanctuary of musical meditation and teaching. The film will screen at Parda Faash 2.0: The Poetry of Presence, a film festival being held on April 26 and 27 at The Little Theatre, NCPA, and organised by Asia Society India Centre in collaboration with Film Southasia and NCPA.

Chander's research for this documentary coincided with work on another film he directed on Annapurna Devi titled Guru Maa (2019), which was produced by the Sangeet Natak Akademi. While that film focused on her as a guru and helped put Chander in touch with several of her disciples, 6-A Akash Ganga, facilitated undoubtedly by the access to her home and her immediate surroundings, offers a more intimate look "of her as a guru but also as a woman, a mother, a daughter".

Nirmal Chander

Even so, the film's team wasn't allowed to shoot inside her room or make recordings of her, an instruction that Chander says was strangely freeing. "Had she allowed me into her room, I might have pushed her unnecessarily… There were days when she was in her room and I was sitting outside in the drawing room enjoying the sea breeze. Those moments washed away all my pre-decided notions of making a film as a filmmaker. I realised that I would have to understand her position and her take on her art," observes Chander. He says that her firm decision to withdraw from the performing life brought the very public demands of his own medium to the fore. "Don't you think it would be so much easier if as artists you didn't have to worry about the audience's reaction?" he wonders.

Flautist Nityanand Haldipur, one of Annapurna Devi's most devoted disciples, who in her last years became a caregiver to the ailing musician, is the film's sutradhar (narrator), letting "Maa's" story unfold through old photographs, diary entries, a visit to the house in Gwalior where she grew up, and through conversations he has with a host of people, from tabla player and researcher Aneesh Pradhan and Ravi Shankar's biographer Oliver Craske, to Annapurna Devi's loyal disciples Hariprasad Chaurasia, Basant Kabra and Hemant Desai. We learn that on Ravi Shankar's request, she had once allowed Beatle George Harrison to sit in on her riyaaz, even as Haldipur wishes that she had occasionally allowed some recordings of her music to be made.

While Chander believes that Annapurna Devi would have had her relationship with Ravi Shankar been better, he argues in favour of her having built a quieter and equally valuable legacy nonetheless. "It's much easier to be a performer, more difficult to be a guru because the guru doesn't get the applause," he points out. "You have to give so much more as a guru. Imagine Hariprasad ji [Chaurasia] arriving at her house to train at 2 in the morning and she would still open the door, feed him and teach him. She may have stopped performing, but she never stopped giving back to the world of music."

One only needs to look at her disciples, reminds the director. "Even if you can create one good disciple as a guru, that is enough, but she managed to nurture so many. Isn't that a huge legacy? We are brought up on certain ideas about the performing arts but music can be a quiet solo thing too."