he Grammy Award won by Arooj Aftab has raised quite a few questions about the award itself and the criteria against which it is won. Generally, when an international award and a prestigious one at that is won, it is very gratifying for the people of the country particularly when it is not from what is deemed to be the developed part of the world. It is a sort of vindication of their cultural existence – that their culture too matters. They are satisfied that they are acknowledged but at the same time the criteria which may have been adopted leave many to wonder for it leaves out many about the very deserving artistes back home. It is clear that the benchmark against which we assess music has become much more eclectic and compulsively calls for an aesthetic appeal to a very diverse audience. It is also generally assumed that there may be other non-artistic variables that influence the choice.

Despite two hundred years of European rule, no subcontinental artiste or musicians made a significant impact on the West though many of Western maestros, scores and compositions infiltrated our scheme of music. Ironically, the first artiste from the subcontinent whose record was cut in the West was Ustad Ali Akbar Khan. In the early 1950s, violinist Yehudi Menuhin visited India and became aware of the power of Indian music. Menuhin invited sitarist Ravi Shankar to the US in 1955 to present a concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York but he declined and a reluctant Ali Akbar Khan — whom Menuhin called “the greatest musician in the world” – took his place. The concert introduced Indian music to the West. While in New York, Ali Akbar also made his first US recording of Indian classical music on Angel Records and gave the first performance of Indian music on Alistair Cooke’s programme Omnibus, which then aired on CBS-TV.

Upon returning to India, Ali Akbar Khan opened his college in Calcutta but was invited back to the US to teach under the auspices of the American Society for Eastern Arts in Berkeley, California. From that foundation, he was encouraged to start the Ali Akbar College of Music initially in Berkeley and then in Marin County. Over the years, he has trained an estimated 10,000 Americans on the sarod and the tradition of northern Indian music.

Born in 1922 in Shivpur, now Bangladesh, he began playing the sarod – a 25-stringed instrument — and other instruments as a boy under the tutelage of his father, Ustad Allauddin Khan, widely considered one of the greatest figures in north Indian music in the Twentieth Century and made his first public performance at fourteen in Allahabad. Ustad Allauddin Khan, whose ashram in East Bengal produced some of India’s most celebrated musicians, notably Ravi Shankar, Pannalal Ghosh and Nikhil Banerjee had elevated the status of instrumental music, previously regarded as inferior to vocal performance, by synthesising various regional styles into a modern concert style. His son absorbed his encyclopaedic knowledge of North Indian music and eventually outstripped him as an instrumentalist. Khan’s younger sister, Annapurna Devi, who later married Ravi Shankar, developed into an equally accomplished master of the surbahar, but custom prevented her from performing in public.

By his early twenties, Ali Akbar Khan was the music director of All India Radio in Lucknow, broadcasting as a solo artist and composing for the radio’s orchestra. For part of a series of 78s that he recorded in Lucknow for HMV in 1945, he composed and performed the three-minute raga Chandranandan a blend of four evening ragas, which became a national hit and a signature piece. He later recorded a 22-minute version for the album Master Musician of India on the Connoisseur label.

He became a court musician for the Maharajah of Jodhpur, a post he held for seven years until the Maharaja’s death in 1948. Defying his father, Khan moved to Bombay and began writing scores for films, including Chetan Anand’s Aandhiyan (1952), Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960) and Tapan Sinha’s Hungry Stones (1960). His father, a friend of the director of Hungry Stones, went to see the film and said: “My goodness, who composed the music? He is great.” On being informed that it was his son, the elder Khan sent him a telegram of forgiveness.

In 1971, Ali Akbar Khan performed at Madison Square Garden with Ravi Shankar, Allah Rakha and Kamala Chakravarty with Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and other rock stars at the Concert for Bangladesh, a benefit organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar. In 1989, he was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian honour. In 1991, he became the first Indian musician to receive a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”. He was also awarded the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Heritage Fellowship, the highest US honour in traditional arts, in 1997. Khan recorded more than 95 albums. He was nominated for five Grammy Awards and composed scores for both Indian and Western movies, including the 1963 Merchant-Ivory film The Householder and the 1993 Bernardo Bertolucci film Little Buddha.

The author is a culture critic based in Lahore