Ustad Ghulam Haider Khan of the Qusur Gharana pays a tribute to Ustad Amanat Ali Khan of the Patiala Gharana by examining the various aspects of his persona and writing his short biography in words of a virtuoso. Writing in TIME, he says Amanat Ali was in love with his own voice. Indeed it was a special voice, endowed with a nasal quality that in any other throat would have sounded like a flaw (and some of the more rigid followers of classical music still maintain that it was Amanat’s main limitation as a singer). But it worked for him, and even enhanced his distracted charm, confirming the persona that he had both inherited and set out consciously to cultivate.
He was born in 1931 at Patiala, the grandson of Ustad Ali Bakhsh ‘Jarnail’, co-founder of the already well-known Patiala Gharana of singing. Amanat studied music with his father, Ustad Akhtar Hussain Khan, and along with his younger brother Fateh Ali Khan began to sing for the radio in Lahore a little before Partition. The teenagers Amanat and Fateh would travel from Patiala to Lahore, air their transmissions and go back home to Patiala. But then the Partition happened and Amanat’s family, being Muslim, was compelled to migrate to Lahore. Like so many musicians of the time, they lost much of what they had owned; Amanat’s father Akhtar Hussein Khan was a particularly arrogant man who now had to give music lessons to the tawaaifs of Heera Mandi to make ends meet. Maintaining the façade of grandiosity, the kind the clan had come to assume in the princely state of Patiala, was no longer possible. It was in this upside-down post-Partition world that Amanat Ali Khan came of age. Always well-dressed and patricianly handsome, he was also outspoken and rude: he was prone to making haughty remarks that only offered glimpses into his own insecurities. For example, when asked why he only sang in the slow tempo and never in the fast, he said that rapid vocal movements were likely to distort the beauty of a man’s face and that he would always rather look beautiful. Now in those days, in the same city, the great Roshanara Begum was singing her lightning-fast taans. And unlike Amanat, who was acutely aware of his beauty, the poor woman was short, fat and black. But she became transformed, as Noor Jehan correctly pointed out, into an ‘apsara’ or fairy when she began to sing, her unbelievably beautiful voice endowing her physical form with a palpable glow. So no one really believed Amanat when he cited a concern for the integrity of his facial expression. But everyone indulged him anyway.
Some men are fated to receive that kind of attention. Still, social conditioning has a role to play in the making of a man’s character. In Amanat’s case it was the boundless love of his mother that destroyed him. It was she who raised him to believe that he was a prince, worthy of every praise and honour, she who facilitated from an early age his every whim and need. His maternal uncle, the great Ustad Umeed Ali Khan of Gawailor, also never hid his special fondness for Amanat, coaching him in the arts of dressing, speaking and behaving like a classical singer. All these things gave young Amanat an often empowering feeling of entitlement. But they also produced in him a kind of burden that Amanat carried all his life like a cross of suffering: it was he who came to embody the rising reputation of the Patiala Gharana of singing; and so it was he who had to be publicly nonchalant as well as privately anxious about how it fared. The Amanat-Fateh duo did well by all accounts. By the early 1960s they were considered the leading stars of Pakistan’s classical music scene, stealing the show at every major venue, from the radio station’s Jashn-e-Baharan festival to the newly launched All Pakistan Music Conference. In private mehfils too the brothers were in high demand, easily earning the favor of generals, bureaucrats, landlords and industrialists. They got some competition from that other illustrious duo of Shaamchaurasi, Ustads Nazakat Ali and Salamat Ali, but it only served to sharpen their attentions and add a healthy distinctiveness to their respective styles.
And yet Amanat Ali Khan wanted more from life, or was eager to prove that he was capable of more. In the daytime he would hang out with writers, journalists and intellectuals at the famous Pak Tea House on Mall Road. Then he would play billiards at Laxmi Chowk. At night you could see him loafing about in Heera Mandi, which is also where he picked up his drinking habit. For a long time he was convinced that his real vocation lay in the world of the cinema. He was desperate to be cast as a hero in a hit film. Then he wanted to be a music director. Then a playback singer. The last of these wishes came true when Saifuddin Saif, a friend of his, gave him the chance to record a song with Noor Jehan in the film ‘Darwaza’. This was the duet ‘Piya nahi aaye’, composed in the Raag Kalavati, and Amanat was delighted when it became a hit. During the 1965 war with India, Ustad Amanat Ali Khan recorded some memorable patriotic songs, most notably ‘Ay watan pyaarey watan’ and ‘Chaand meri zameen, phool mera watan’. Soon after this he recorded some ghazals for the radio. But here he ran into that force of nature called Mehdi Hasan. It is said that the two men once had a discussion about the merits of ghazal gaayaki while they were both drinking. Mehdi rendered some rare classical compositions (he was eager to prove himself in that field!) and insisted that he was made for the superior form; he had only succumbed to ghazal gaayaki because that was what earned him a living. And perhaps Amanat allowed Mehdi on that occasion to rubbish his own vocation, though the truth is that no one could sing a ghazal like Mehdi Hasan. In a way Ustad Amanat Ali Khan was the quintessential artist: seductive, distracted, instinctive, compulsive, restless and tortured in the depths of his soul. No one could not notice him; and no one could forgive him for wearing his genius so lightly. Even high-ranking radio officials envied his narcissism, his excellent clothes, his undisputable good looks, his humorous conversation and especially his lady-killing gestures. (Amanat was a lay-killer but not a womanizer; he would dare to start a romance but never lived up to the challenge.) The doctors warned him: if he continued to drink whiskey, he would die of alcohol poisoning. Only when his father died in the summer of 1974 was Amanat pushed into sobriety, but only temporarily: he remained “clean” for a total of one month and twenty-three days (he counted all the days himself). On the twenty-fourth day he went to a friend’s house and drank so much that it burst his appendix. He was rushed to a hospital but could not be saved.
He was only 45 years old.
He is survived by his younger brother Fateh, who kept singing and eventually consolidated the Patiala reputation. Amanat’s own son Shafqat is an accomplished singer now and a well-known pop star. As for Amanat’s own voice, you can hear it today in a number of high-quality recordings: there are his classical renditions (Raag Darbari and Raag Malkauns in particular), a few patriotic songs, and some ghazals, the most emblematic of which is ‘Insha ji uttho, ab kuch karo’. All of them are strange, beautiful and haunting.
