Kishori Amonkar

Kishori Amonkar was born in Bombay on 10 April 1932, the daughter of Mogubai Kurdikar, one of the foremost disciples of Ustad Alladiya Khan, founder of the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana. Her earliest training was with her mother, in the complex rhythmic architecture and uncommon ragas that mark that school.

As a young woman she lost her voice for a period. Accounts of these years describe a time of withdrawal and reflection, after which she returned with a changed sound. She also studied with Anjanibai Malpekar of the Bhendibazaar gharana, and took from other traditions the long meend and grace notes that were less used in the Jaipur style.

She was a famously independent artist, willing to say in public that a strict adherence to gharana grammar could leave music dry. That position made her a difficult figure for some in the classical establishment, and a liberating one for many younger singers.

Alongside khayal she was widely loved for devotional song — bhajans of Meerabai and Kabir among them — sung with the same seriousness she brought to a raga. She required silence and attention before she would begin, and her concerts often opened with a long stillness.

She taught steadily in her later years, and remained active until her death in Mumbai on 3 April 2017, days short of her eighty-fifth birthday.

The break with orthodoxy was deliberate and she defended it in public. The Hindu's obituary records her as "both criticised and praised for her bending of the Jaipur tradition", and describes a musician who had built her position out of long study of the older texts on music rather than out of gharana authority alone. Her own composition Sahela Re, set in raga Bhoop, became the piece audiences asked for wherever she sang, along with the Meera bhajan Mhaaro pranam; at a late Mumbai concert she answered a request for lighter music with "I have trained for years in Indian classical music. Why don't you make the best of it?" — and then sang Kedar.

Film music she kept at arm's length, and the reason was her mother. The Hindustan Times records that she was persuaded to sing the title song of V. Shantaram's Geet Gaya Pattharon Ne in 1964, and that it angered Mogubai Kurdikar, who had taught her that classical music was sacred and warned her she "might gain money and fame but lose much more". She never took the film path regularly afterwards.

Two details of the record are unsettled. Her Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship is dated 2009 in this archive's honours list and 2010 in The Hindu's obituary; both readings are noted here. The Guardian's obituary puts her among "Hindustani music's finest classical singers", a specialist in khayal "known for her rich, soulful voice and for combining innovation with tradition".

Amonkar's contribution was to shift the centre of gravity of the Jaipur-Atrauli style from structure to rasa — the emotional essence a raga is meant to evoke. The gharana's intricate taan patterns and rhythmic design remained, but they were placed in the service of feeling rather than displayed for their own sake.

She drew freely on other traditions, particularly the Bhendibazaar manner she learned from Anjanibai Malpekar, and built from them a personal style marked by long, sculpted phrases and a quality of address that was closer to speech than to display. Her insistence that music was sadhana, a spiritual discipline rather than entertainment, shaped how a generation of singers spoke about their work.