Ustad Akbar Ali Khan Sahib (not to be confused with Ustad Ali Akbar Khan the Sarodist) was descended from a distinguished house of music going back to Tan Sen and even further back to Amir Khusro. Like his predecessors Ustad Abbas Ali Khan Sahib (father), Ustad Waris Ali Khan Sahib (grandfather) and Ustad Bade Mohammed Khan Sahib (great-grandfather), he was trained in the disciplines of Indian vocal classical music, as well as Rudr Vina of which he was a great master. He belonged to the Banaras as well as Gwalior gharana of music. He was born in Hyderabad and lived and died there in 1984 at the age of 90 and over. He was one of the last great Ustads of the old tradition of Indian music where purity of ragas and bandishes and the techniques of playing classical instruments like Rudr Vina and Sitar were jealously preserved and imparted from father to son. His style of playing these instruments was the vastly more difficult tantkari ang (style) and preceded the gayaki ang which was later developed by Vilayat Khan Sahib. Ustad Akbar Ali Khan Sahib’s nephew and adopted son Mujtaba Ali Khan is presently employed as an A Grade Sitarist at All India Radio Hyderabad. Janab Ustad Akbar Ali Khan (also known as Munnu Mian sahib) was a model of humbleness and simple living. He was also the author of a book written in Urdu titled Rahnuma-e-Moosiqui.
I learnt the basics of Indian classical music including Sitar from him in the 1950s and 60s. One tragedy that occured in his old age was that a voluminous book of old compostions and rare ragas which had been handed down to him from his great musician ancestors and which he had kept under a slab of stone in his room was eaten away by ‘deemak’ or white ants. He was completely devastated by this and did not survive long after this tragedy. The music of Ustad Akbar Ali Khan Sahib is largely gone with him, and the world is poorer because of this. I know some old bandishes that he taught me on the Sitar, but the taankari that would have accompanied the rendering of these, as well as the mizraab bol baant that was such an essential part of instrumental music in the mid-nineteenth Century and vestiges of which had survived until the early 20th Century with rare individuals, is now gone.
My poem is a tribute to a man at whose feet I first learnt to appreciate a musical tradition which was already fast vanishing, and which has since been replaced by a culture of greed and video-CD commercialism among many of the present practitioners of music.
Click the link below to read the poem (2 pages)
UrduPlatform.com 