On the Legacy of Bismillah Khan

Bismillah Khan died Monday at the age of 91. Khan was the renowned master of the shehnai, an instrument that sounds a bit like an oboe. I’ve never mourned the death of a musician before.

My parents had a large collection of audio cassette tapes. When I grew up in Alabama, Indian culture was hard to come by. Back then, we had to drive five hours to reach the nearest Indian grocery store. There was no Netflix or satellite TV. You could not download Indian music from iTunes. People brought back music and video recordings from India, which were then systematically copied and shared. In our family room, there was a cabinet full of these pirated tapes with hand-written labels. My parents had a habit of writing the labels in Gujarati, a language they did not teach me to read. During the languid hours of my childhood – I’m astonished by how much free time I had – I popped the tapes into my Walkman one by one. Usually I was frustrated by them. Most of the recordings were of Hindi film songs or folk songs I couldn’t understand. The Bismillah Khan tape, however, didn’t have lyrics. Just the shehnai.

I listened to that one tape over and over. On one bus trip I took, I tucked myself into a cloth seat and played the tape into my headphones at least three times in a row. The recording was of an hour long performance. Everybody on the bus was a musician. It was an orchestra trip. My friend wanted to know what I was listening to, but when I passed the headphones to him he shook his head. “This isn’t very good,” he said. For my friend, Khan’s music couldn’t stand up to Mozart or Mahler. I realized that he couldn’t hear the subtlety I heard. And that made the listening experience even richer for me. I relished Bismillah Khan’s music all the more because my friend could not understand it. The music gave me a way to draw a line around my Indian identity, which felt so unstable and fragile. Khan’s music itself was tenuous and yet epic. A Himalayan brook flowing into the Ganges.

I later learned that Bismillah Khan was a devout Muslim and that he also worshipped the Hindu goddess Saraswati. He often played in the Hindu temples of Varanasi. His most famous performance was at the Red Fort in Delhi on the eve of Indian independence. My parents played his music before any puja. His recordings were played at our wedding. During a century of horrendous communal bloodshed in India, no one represented the history of dialogue between Muslims and Hindus like he did.

Ultimately Khan's music took on two significant meanings for me. He was the end of my self-loathing as an Indian American and the beginning of my pride and love for my family’s culture. He was also the fluidity and flexibility that gives me strength to step outside narrow definitions of that same Indian culture, the strength to immerse myself in other American cultures without losing my roots. I really want to pass those two, seemingly opposing states of mind on to my daughter.