After the sad demise of the sarod maestro Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, everyone now knows that he is survived by his American wife Mary and eleven children from three marriages. Latest buzz is that Ali Akbar Khan’s burial became a bone of contention between his wife Mary and the daughter from his previous wife Rajdulari, Aneesa Chaudhuri. Mary intended to perform the last rites of the genius in San Francisco, but Aneesa had accused her of denying Khan Sahib’s last wish to be buried beside the graves of his parents in Maihar, Madhya Pradesh in India. She also accused Mary of not hospitalising the maestro well in time. Khan Sahib died of renal failure at his San Anselmo home, California, on Friday, 19th June 2009.
It is no secret that Ustad Ali Akbar Khan was married early, in 1938 to his first wife Zubeida. Many of us however, do not know much of his second wife, Rajdulari. She apparently was a renowned vocalist of her time, who won several awards, including the first prize in an All India music competition in Allahabad.
Not many recordings of Rajdulari are availabe now. I happen to possess two very rare compositions sung by her. These exotic and sensual renditions represent the highest art of classical singing, and are further enhanced by the accompaniment of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan on the swarmandal and Mahapurush Misra on the tablas.
Rajdulari Ali Akbar Khan – Raga Kirwani : (Download)
Rajdulari Ali Akbar Khan – Raga Imni Bilawal : (Download)
The record label was Connoisseur Society, and the LP was released sometime in 1967. It definitely sounds extraordinary to me.
Comments are welcome.
indianraga
RG said,
June 29, 2009 at 7:25 am
From my association with him for a few years, mainly attending his classes and occasionally in social get together’s, I was convinced that large parts of his brain was devoted, at the lowest level, to melody and beat. He had trouble playing and teaching at the same time, none could keep up and at the same time he had to ’surface’ to teach, that killed the flow. His concerts, once Alam started accompanying him on stage, lost some of the depth, again for the same reason, that he had to ’surface’.
Between 1995 and 2000, he mostly performed solo, and these concerts are truly spell binding. So much so that in one of them in Berkeley, once he finished the alap on Raga Shree, Swapan C., the tabla player took a few moments to compose himself before could start playing. He too was hypnotized.
This same man, who could play equally with ease in 16 beats as well as many fractional beats, like his body carried the beat, had enormous difficulty in calculating the 10-15% tip after a restaurant meal. Like I said, his brain was music at the junctions, synapses and the connections. As an aside he, and his music , attracted women to him in droves, from all over the world, even in his seventies and beyond.
Amie Maciszewski said,
July 9, 2009 at 3:49 am
Thank you so much for sharing this fascinating information and exquisite music! I’ve always had an unanswered question in my mind: was Rajdulari a baiji/tawaif? I’m not clear about during what years they were married, but we all know that in the 1940s very few women from mainstream families were professional musicians. Was she indeed professional? She certainly sounds like it!
My guru, his first-born son Aashish, doesn’t seem to know much about the background of his “chhoto ma.” But he and his direct siblings seem to have a good relationship with their half-siblings, whose mother Rajdulari was.