Girija Devi

Girija Devi was born in Benares on 8 May 1929. Her father, Ramdeo Rai, played the harmonium and sang, and she began learning at about five with Sarju Prasad Misra, who taught her khayal and the difficult tappa. She continued later with Chand Misra, in thumri and the lighter classical forms.

She was married at fifteen. Her husband supported her singing, but there was strong opposition within the household to a woman of the family performing in public. She persisted, and made her first broadcast on All India Radio Allahabad in 1949, followed by her first public concert at a conference in Bihar in 1951.

Over the following decades she became the leading exponent of the purab ang, the eastern manner of thumri, and one of the last singers at ease across khayal, thumri, tappa, kajri, chaiti and dadra alike.

In the 1980s she moved to Kolkata to teach at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, and she also taught at Banaras Hindu University. Her students include Malini Awasthi and Sunanda Sharma.

She performed almost until the end of her life, and died of cardiac arrest in Kolkata on 24 October 2017, aged eighty-eight.

The Hindu's account by Meena Banerjee fills in how the training began. She was born on 8 May 1929 in a village near Varanasi; her father Ramdeo Rai, a Bhumihar Brahmin zamindar, was passionate about music and would travel into the city for lessons with the child in tow, which led to her own early study under Sarju Prasad Misra, a vocalist and sarangi player. After his death she continued with Shrichand Mishra for as long as he lived, and she kept up the obligation afterwards, saying that she still looked after her gurus' families and expected the same devotion from her own students.

Her marriage shaped her career in a specific way. Madhusudan Jain, a Varanasi businessman who loved literature and music, married her when she was twenty-four and encouraged her singing on one condition: that she would not perform at private mehfils. The public route followed instead — a first radio broadcast from Allahabad in 1949 and a debut concert in 1951 — and Ravi Shankar introduced her to the Delhi circle around Sumitra Charat Ram, after which her reputation spread quickly.

The tabla player Aneesh Pradhan, writing for Scroll, describes the singing itself: a voice "bold and strident, albeit with a sharp metallic edge and a nasal twang", a thumri elaboration carrying "poise and dignity matched with the pukaar", the cry of the nayika, and sparkling tappa, a form demanding "immense vocal dexterity". Chaiti, kajri and jhoola sat in her concerts beside khayal, sung by someone for whom they were not exotica but the music of her own place. As Pradhan puts it, her singing "was a lesson to those in the present generation who treat the thumri-dadra genre as an afterthought".

She taught for many years as a guru at the ITC Sangeet Research Academy, which on her death called her "a doyen of Hindustani classical music and beloved ITC Sangeet Research Academy Guru". Her age at death is reported inconsistently: The Hindu and Meena Banerjee give 88, Scroll gives 87. She died in Kolkata on 24 October 2017 after a cardiac arrest, with concerts at Jaipur and Pune still in her diary.

The purab ang thumri that Girija Devi carried is built on bol-banao — turning a single line of text over and over, drawing a different shade of feeling from it each time. Where the Punjabi manner of thumri leans on rhythmic play, hers worked through melodic elaboration, and required both classical grammar and an actor's sense of a phrase.

She also kept alive repertoire that could easily have been lost: tappa, with its rapid broken runs, and the seasonal songs of eastern Uttar Pradesh — kajri for the monsoon, chaiti for the spring. By singing them with full classical seriousness she moved them from the salon to the concert hall, and made the case that the semi-classical forms were not a lesser art.