Chandrashekhar Mahamuni

Why there is a Nishad at all#

Chandrashekhar Mahamuni sang for four years before he ran anything. The four years after his tenth standard — 1986 to 1990 — were his apprenticeship, worked across four Pune organisations: Sohan and Mohan Sabnis’s त्रिमिती कला मंच, ज्ञानज्योत, ऑर्केस्ट्रा - द टेम्पेस्ट, and शाहीर पुणे, founded by his maternal uncle Yashwant Vedpathak, where he sang lead. All of it ran alongside his graduation.

He had also worked something out about himself. Working under somebody else’s hand, at his pleasure, doing as he says, was never his temperament — कुणा दुसऱ्याच्या हाताखाली, त्याच्या मर्जीनुसार, तो म्हणेल तसे काम करणे हा शेखरचा पिंड कधी नव्हताच. That is the whole reason Nishad exists.

One habit came out of those years and never left. From the beginning he set himself a rule: whether he was going to sing a song or somebody else was, its words, its notations and its important phrases went into his notebook. He has no formal training in singing. The notebook stood in its place.

10 November 1990#

He was nineteen. The friends whose notes were already in tune with his were Jitendra Kulkarni, Amar Oak, Kedar More and his younger brother Girish; Dayanand Ghotkar and Umesh Chawak of ‘Zalak, Pune’ helped him a great deal in that period. On 10 November 1990 they laid the foundation of Nishad, Pune.

The first commercial show was Swarali, at Tilak Smarak Mandir on 20 May 1991 — mounted, in his biographer’s phrase, with little experience behind him and little money in hand. Vaishali Sevekari, Pratibha Inamdar, Sangeeta Bhide and Jyoti Ok sang; Dayanand Ghotkar anchored; Jitendra Kulkarni was on synthesizer, Amar Oak on flute, Raju Nirgude on guitar. The people who came were delighted. Only the people who came, came: his name was not established yet, and the show did not find commercial success.

The job, and the first resignation#

At twenty-three or twenty-four the two halves of his own life stopped fitting. He had finished his B.Com and taken the ordinary road of a job, and holding the job and the shows together had become a tightrope walk. The artist in him would not agree to a divided life. His father read the conflict and told him to take his own heart’s verdict. He resigned.

How he sings#

Singing in a vaadyavrund is its own discipline. What the lyricist meant, what the composer wanted carried, how the singer places it and how the hero played it on screen all have to arrive inside three and a half minutes — and then the next song starts, with nothing linking it to the last. Twenty-three or twenty-four of them, one after another, at the same strength. Dr. Manasi Arkadi, who wrote his biography, says he does it easily.

His range is what lets him. Her description: the voice goes round all three octaves as easily as taking a stroll, and inside a single song it leaps from the low register up to the high and comes back down without the swara’s place shifting at all. Her test case is ‘Mere Naina Sawan Bhado’.

The rarer skill is that he does not cover a song; he reproduces the singer who made it — the baaj, the mannerisms, even where the breath is taken. In ‘Sur Tech Chhedita’ the word सौख्य reminds you of Mahendra Kapoor. In ‘Na Tum Hamein Jano’ the word खामोशी is Hemant Kumar’s, straight. And then there is the one she stakes the claim on:

'धुंदी कळ्यांना' या गीतातील 'शब्द' मधला 'श' ऐका. हा 'श' ना शहामृगातला आहे ना षट्कोनातला, तो बाबुजीं स्पेशल 'श' आहे आणि शेखर तो अगदी तसाच उच्चारतो!

Listen to the श in the word शब्द in ‘Dhundi Kalyanna’. That श is neither the one in शहामृग nor the one in षट्कोन — it is Babuji’s own श, Sudhir Phadke’s, and Shekhar pronounces it exactly so.

The ear was never narrowed. From the start he refused to sit inside one song-form — ओवी, भारुड, धनगरगीत, कोळीगीत, लोकगीत, चित्रपटगीत, भक्तीगीत, भावगीत and more — and succeeded in each. इथेच त्याच्या आवाजाला, त्याच्या गायकीला पैलू पडत गेले: this is where his voice, and his gayaki, acquired their facets.

Whom he learned it from#

None of it came from a conservatory. What he had was the notebook, and three years in the company of the composer Ram Kadam, who was unbending about the rises and falls, the harkati, the murki, the laya and the taal, and would not tolerate a careless join. Kadam picked him for the chorus of the Marathi film ‘Janmathep’ — story by Vishwas Patil, playback by Asha Bhosle, lyrics by Kavi Sanjeev, music by Ram Kadam, recorded at Famous Studio, and possibly, his biographer writes, the last recording made with the players and the singers in the room together. Kadam kept choosing him as singer for his live shows afterwards. He died on 19 February 1997. Chandrashekhar still goes to the house every Guru Poornima; twenty-three years after the death, when that chapter was written, it had not lapsed once — कितीही अडचणी आल्या तरी, however many difficulties came.

1997#

For Swarali’s hundredth show he wanted to put his favourite composer duo’s songs in front of them; Arun Paudwal’s early death left that wish half-fulfilled, so he built the evening out of Anil–Arun’s songs anyway and invited as chief guest a senior playback singer he had never met. The programme ran at Balgandharva Rangmandir on 31 March 1997. Anuradha Paudwal was struck by it, telephoned the next day, and asked him to sing beside her at Gadhinglaj on 2 April. Through her programmes he came to share a stage with Sudesh Bhosle, Jolly Mukherjee, Mohammed Aziz and Suresh Wadkar. Twenty-three years on, in the chapter that records it, she was calling him माझ्या धाकट्या भावासारखा आहे तो — he is like my younger brother. His own résumé also records singing with Asha Bhosle and Usha Mangeshkar in their concerts.

He writes, too#

More than fifty articles on Hindi film music have gone out under his name in Daily Sakal, in Kesari, and in the Diwali annuals Apurwa, Kistrim and Paris — that count is his own résumé’s. Three survive as dated, bylined pages in Sakal’s Saptarang supplement: on R. D. Burman (4 January 2009), on O. P. Nayyar (25 January 2009) and on Shankar–Jaikishan (26 April 2009). Two more carry his byline on scans whose masthead is cropped away. He also ran a Daily Sakal column on anecdotes from film shoots, and in his tenth-standard vacation drew pencil portraits of film stars precise enough, his biographer says, that a course would not have improved them.

The second thing he built, and gave back#

In 2007 he had decided to move to Mumbai. His friend Anil Satpute stopped him with a counter-offer: a production house and a recording studio in Pune, on Anil’s money and Chandrashekhar’s work, time and ideas, with a salary attached. They spared nothing — recording equipment, the latest software, microphones, processors, digital mixers, artwork throughout, a reception room, guest rooms, a kitchen. At the time it was the only fully air-conditioned, state-of-the-art studio in the city. Anuradha Paudwal inaugurated it on 31 May 2007.

Its first release was not a commercial calculation. ‘Bol Sai Bol’ was a set of Sai Baba devotional compositions recorded in Hindi so that devotees anywhere could use them, and the two of them were firm about giving the work to newcomers rather than established names. The composer was his own younger brother, Nikhil Mahamuni. The lyricist was Mukesh Yadav, a poet who had come from Bihar to Pune for the sake of writing and was frying jalebi in a sweet shop to live.

The break came the year after. He co-produced the Marathi thriller ‘Checkmate’, which opened in eighty-five theatres, ran a silver jubilee in Pune and did well elsewhere in Mumbai and Maharashtra, and collected eighteen awards between Zee Gaurav, the State Government film festival, the Chitramaharshi V. Shantaram Puraskar and MaTa Sanman. The awards were the film’s. The money invested was not recovered.

Then the audio-cassette market fell away, music production at the studio stopped, Anil moved into film production, and Chandrashekhar — still drawing a salary — found his own singing being neglected. He resigned of his own free will, turning his back on the producer’s chair and the standing that came with it, and left what his biographer calls सोन्याचा पिंजरा, the golden cage. It was the second time he chose the singing over the salary.

Two decades of orchestra, then tracks#

For the group’s first two decades the orchestra was live. Assembling trained players — all of them, on the same day, for the exact instruments an original recording had used — had grown hard, and carrying it alone had grown heavy. He began slipping one or two track-backed songs into a show.

Dev Anand died on 4 December 2011. To pay tribute quickly he took the risk whole: on 4 January 2012, at Bal Shikshan Sabhagruha, an entire evening of Dev Anand’s songs on tracks, with the original picturisations projected behind them. It succeeded, and it opened a new room. He has never pretended the trade was free — लाईव्ह ऑर्केस्ट्राची मजा मी रसिकांना देऊ शकत नाही, पण परिपूर्णतेचा आनंद मात्र नक्कीच देऊ शकतो: ‘I cannot give the audience the fun of a live orchestra, but I can certainly give them the joy of completeness.’

Asked about the knocks, he names nobody: कधी माझं नशीब रुसलं तर कधी माझेच काही निर्णय मला भोवले… — sometimes my luck sulked, sometimes my own decisions cost me. His biographer’s summary is shorter: सगळे सेटबॅक्स तो स्वतःच्याच खात्यात जमा करतो. Every setback he credits to his own account.