Pandit Pannalal Ghosh

Amal Jyoti Ghosh, known as Pannalal, was born in Barisal on 24 July 1911, into a musical household: his father played the sitar and his grandfather sang dhrupad. He began on the sitar, but the bamboo flute took hold of him early.

In 1928 he moved to Calcutta, where he worked in theatre and film while continuing to study. He took lessons from Khurshid Ahmad Khan, and later from the vocalist Girija Shankar Chakravorty, who helped him translate vocal phrasing onto a wind instrument.

He moved to Bombay in 1940 and worked in the film industry, composing and playing for studios including Bombay Talkies. His wife, Parul Ghosh, was a well-known playback singer; his younger brother, Nikhil Ghosh, was a tabla player.

In 1947 he became a disciple of Ustad Allauddin Khan at Maihar, which grounded his flute playing in the slow, dhrupad-derived raga development of that tradition.

In 1956 he moved to Delhi to conduct the national orchestra, Vadya Vrinda, at All India Radio. He died there on 20 April 1960, aged forty-eight.

The flute reached him by accident before it reached him by choice. At nine, swimming in the Kirtankhola near the family house, he found a bamboo stick that was half walking stick and half flute, longer than any flute he knew, and began practising on it. At eleven, by an account repeated in most tellings, a holy man carrying a conch and a flute asked him to play, then blessed him and said music would be his salvation. He was married in 1924, at thirteen, to Parul Biswas, sister of his friend Anil Biswas; she became a well-known playback singer. In 1928 he joined the independence movement, learning boxing and stick fighting at a gymnasium, and moved to Calcutta at seventeen when the authorities began watching him.

His redesign of the instrument was deliberate engineering. Wanting a pitch and sonority that could carry classical weight, he tried metal and several woods before settling on bamboo and a flute thirty-two inches long. He added the teevra-madhyam or dhruva-madhyam hole, set off the line of the finger holes at the foot of the flute, so that the sharp fourth of the lower octave — and the meend from madhyam to pancham that Puriya, Darbari and Bihag ask for — became playable; his disciple Nityanand Haldipur has explained that even the way the flute is held had to change for the little finger to reach it. For ragas needing sustained work in the lower octave he built a four-hole bass flute of forty to forty-two inches.

He came to Bombay in 1940, scoring Sneh Bandhan that year as an independent composer, and shared the background score of Aandhiyan (1952) with Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar. From 1956 until his death he directed the National Orchestra of All India Radio in Delhi. His brother Nikhil Ghosh was a Padma Bhushan tabla player; his daughter Shanti-Sudha married his disciple Devendra Murdeshwar.

Sources differ on his teachers' names and dates: Darbar names Khurshid Ahmad Khan and Girija Shankar Chakravorty before Allauddin Khan, while Wikipedia gives his first guru as the harmonium player Ustad Khushi Mohammed Khan, taken under ganda bandhan for two years in the early 1930s, followed by Girija Shankar Chakraborty. Both agree the systematic lessons with Allauddin Khan began in 1947.

The bansuri Pannalal Ghosh inherited was a short, high folk flute, suited to pastoral melody and little else. He made it longer and thicker — instruments of over thirty inches — to reach the lower octave, where the slow unmetered alaap of Hindustani music lives, and to give the tone the body it had lacked. He is also credited with adding a seventh hole, which made the sharp fourth and fuller chromatic movement available.

With the instrument rebuilt, he set about proving what it could do: sustained meend, the vocal gamak, the full three-octave development of a raga. His Maihar training gave the playing its architecture. Every classical flautist since — Hariprasad Chaurasia among them — works on the instrument he designed.