The playfulness with which Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia greets you is infectious. His child-like smile and enthusiasm helped me calm down for the interview, which went beyond the usual set of routine questions and answers and became more of an insight into the legend’s life.
At the onset of his film, Bansuri Guru, a documentary based on the flute maestro directed by son Rajeev Chaurasia, Panditji says that he is extremely happy that a new trend in filmmaking is emerging. “It was my son Rajeev who suggested this project. It’s all his contribution and his direction. I just followed whatever he said. And most often, he shot me when I was playing or teaching, so from my end I didn’t have to specially act or say pages of dialogues,” he laughs.
His association with the film industry is long and close. Having composed for films like Silsila, Chandni, Lamhe and many more along with Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma as Shiv-Hari, Panditji says that these efforts helped him evolve as a musician. “Every musician has the desire to work for the Hindi film industry and I was lucky to have landed there so early in life. I got a chance to team up with Shivji, who is so dedicated and talented…it was an opportunity of a lifetime. All we kept in mind while composing music was to ensure that we don’t treat any music differently. Music is music and we just stuck to our sensibilities,” he says.
Taking us through a journey of his life Panditji says that music wasn’t an obvious choice as his father was a wrestler. For the first few years, his family didn’t know that their son was a talented and gifted musician. It was a taboo of sorts for him to think of music as a career. “My father was a wrestler and single-handedly brought us up after my mother passed away. He was a disciplinarian. I began studying music at the age of nine from Pandit Rajaram and he opened the doors to the world of music for me. When I was 15, I heard Pandit Bholanath play the flute on Allahabad radio and I was mesmerised by the melodious sound. It was much later in my teens when I started working for the Cuttack radio that my father found out that I was a musician,” he says.
If one observes his life closely, Panditji has always laid importance on learning music from a guru who you admire and revere instead of going by the instrument he/she plays or the gharana. “It’s not mandatory to learn music from someone who plays the instrument you are interested in. It took me three years to convince Annapurna Devi to teach me. Many years ago, when I was a young boy, I would often go with my best friend to listen to her father Ustad Baba Allaudin Khan as he would come often to Allahabad. One day, when he heard me play the flute, he asked me to come and become his disciple. I couldn’t take up the offer then because my father didn’t know about my love for music. Ustad Khan told me that if I couldn’t come while he was alive, I could go to his daughter Anna-purna. That stayed with me and I went to Bombay to meet her. By then I had entered the Hindi film industry and was composing music and playing for several musicians. So when I met her, she wondered why I wanted to learn from her and not her then husband Pandit Ravi Shankar. After three years of persistence, she agreed to teach me, on the condition that I would learn from scratch,” he reminisced.
“She would sing the ragas and teach me as she couldn’t play the flute. But I wish that she would be my guru in every birth. She is the incarnation of Goddess Saraswati for me. I still go to her for guidance,” he adds.
Highlighting the importance of the gurukul system, Panditji says, “True education can only happen at a gurukul. The education there goes beyond just studying. Our children should study music extensively. I hope we expand our knowledge, and share and grow with it.”