I started attending Girija Devi’s concerts in Delhi in the mid-1970s but met her only once at the Bhubaneswar airport in December 2014. She was surrounded by her disciples and others who had come to see her off.
One could feel the warmth that she exuded and the love and affection she showered on her students and admirers. In those moments, she did not look like a top-notch, celebrity singer but just like a grandmother who was enjoying the company of her family.
I had gone to Bhubaneswar to attend a Spic-Macay programme where she had come to perform. And this is what I wrote in Friday Review (The Hindu, January 2, 2015): “ One will have to mention once again that the 85-year-old Girija Devi stunned everybody by hitting lower as well higher notes so beautifully, accurately and powerfully that it was a treat to listen to her singing.” Very few musicians have been able to defy age as she could.
After the greats like Rasoolan Bai and Siddheshwari Devi had departed from the music scene, Girija Devi emerged as the main representative of the Banaras-ang thumri, dadra and tappa.
Her voice did not have the flexibility, called loch in Hindi, but had a strange magic of its own. It had a steely tinge with a nasal twang that irritated in the first few moments but took the listener under its spell completely thereafter. In contrast, Shobha Gurtu, another great singer of the same genre, had a deep, husky and sensuous voice.
Emotive content
And yet, Girija Devi excelled because her singing had a diamond-like luminosity, displayed all the characteristics of the Banaras style and stole the hearts of the listeners by the sheer virtuosity and emotive content of her bol-banao.
When I began to listen to her, I used to be intrigued by her practice of invariably singing a khayal to start her recital and then move on to thumri, dadra and tappa that were her real forte.
Musical hierarchy
For a long time, I like so many others thought that since the prevailing musical hierarchy placed khayal higher than thumri or dadra, she in her vanity wanted to prove that even as a khayal singer, she could carry the day. However, much later when I read famous Hindi fiction writer Amritlal Nagar’s interview with Vidyadhari Bai, who in the late 1950s could describe Siddheshwari Devi as “this girl”, I came to know that in the days of yore, music had not been compartmentalised and connoisseurs never cared for the spurious hierarchies of classical, semi-claasical and light music. Perhaps, they were not even aware of them. Singers were expected to offer good music, be it dhrupad, khayal, thumri, dadra, tappa or folk tunes like kajri and chaiti.
Vidyadhari Bai told Nagar about her most memorable performance at a princely mehfil where, despite suffering from a severe headache, she had sung a khayal and tarana in Malkauns and stolen the show.
Girija Devi was a worthy torch-bearer of this great tradition. One would not be ritualistically repeating the old cliché by saying that the void created by her death would not be possible to fill in any foreseeable future. Presently, one fails to see any thumri-dadra singer who could step into her shoes.