Ustad Bismillah Khan

Bismillah Khan was born Qamaruddin Khan on 21 March 1916 in Dumraon, Bihar, into a family of court musicians of the Dumraon Raj. His grandfather Rasool Bux Khan, a shehnai player himself, is said to have greeted the newborn with the word "Bismillah", and the name stayed.

He grew up in Varanasi, where he trained with his maternal uncle Ali Bux "Vilayatu", shehnai player at the Kashi Vishwanath Temple. He first played in public in his early teens, and his performance at the All India Music Conference in Calcutta in 1937 brought him wide attention.

On the morning of 15 August 1947 he played at the Red Fort in Delhi as the Indian flag was raised, a role that tied his instrument to the story of the new nation. A devout Muslim who played at both Hindu and Muslim ceremonies, he was widely regarded in Varanasi as a figure of shared religious life.

He long declined to travel, and gave his first performance abroad only in 1966, at the Edinburgh International Festival. He played shehnai for the film Goonj Uthi Shehnai (1959) and appeared in Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar.

He died in Varanasi on 21 August 2006, aged 90. A day of national mourning was declared, and he was buried with one of his shehnais.

His ancestors were court musicians at Dumraon, a small principality then in the United Provinces and now in Bihar. His uncle Ali Bux sat with his accompanists on the parapet beside the entrance to the Vishwanath temple, playing at once to Shiva within the precincts and to the public outside — an arrangement that, as Frontline observed, quietly negotiated a society still divided by class, caste and religion. He was twenty-one when he astonished the All India Music Conference in Calcutta in 1937, and for close to fifty years afterwards he had no rival on the instrument: other fine players worked in the same period — Ali Hussain of Calcutta, Anant Lal of Varanasi, Jagadish Prasad Qamar of old Delhi — but none matched his tone or his sense of harmonics, and he could move listener and connoisseur alike with a simple folk tune or a majestic Yaman. He attributed his gift jointly to Allah and to Saraswati. He refused repeated invitations to settle abroad, answering one offer to build him a replica of Banaras in America by saying they would not be able to bring his Ganga there, and he supported a household of some seventy dependents. He was the third musician, after Ravi Shankar and M. S. Subbulakshmi, to receive the Bharat Ratna. He died of cardiac arrest at 2.20 a.m. in a Varanasi hospital, and the government declared a day of national mourning; he was survived by five sons and three daughters.

Before Bismillah Khan the shehnai belonged to weddings, temple ritual and processions. He showed that it could sustain everything a classical recital demands — a slow alap, the patient exposition of a raga, the long arc of a full performance — and in doing so created a solo concert repertoire for an instrument that had none.

His tone, plaintive and vocal, is the sound most listeners in India associate with auspicious beginnings, and his career remains the clearest example of an instrument's status being changed by one player's seriousness.