Kishori Amonkar (1932-2017), a name which inspires reverence, rebellion and raga. She was more than a voice; she was a movement. One of Hindustani classical music’s most iconic and revolutionary figures, Amonkar, did not merely sing, she revolutionised the paradigm of how music could be sensed, articulated and, therefore, changed.
Born in Bombay in the dying embers of British India, music was Amonkar’s inheritance and battleground. Taught by her mother, the iconic Mogubai Kurdikar of the Jaipur Gharana, young Kishori learned the strict discipline of classical technique and the flame to challenge it. Her formative years were spent on tanpura-accompanied journeys with her mother, observing silently, soaking up and planting the seeds of a future musical revolution.
Amonkar was already a force to be reckoned with in the classical scene by her late teens and early twenties. Then illness intervened a hiatus that, in retrospect, proved her turning point. While forced out of music, she didn’t withdraw; she reinvented herself. When she resumed performing in the 1960s, her music wasn’t confined within gharana orthodoxy. She grasped the solid foundation of Jaipur Gharana’s precision and extended it, deepened it and even ventured to break its rigidity. To Amonkar, music was never intended to be contained by lineage—it was designed to fly.
She once proudly asserted, “There is nothing called agharana. There is only music.” This feeling permeated her every recital, a sonic khyal boom, a delicate thumri or a spirituality-evoking bhajan. She sang with such expressiveness, such romanticism, such spiritualism. Her technique was infused with such authority over men (gliding between notes) that it approached not singing but the art of colouring with sound.
But she wasn’t always cherished for her defiance. Amonkar was criticised by purists who felt she was watering down the tradition. Her answer? Integrity and isolation. She didn’t play to the gallery; she played to the divine. “Music is a dialogue with the divine,” she said. Her stage presence was commanding, her rehearsals intense and her silence before a concert sacred. She asked for respect, not applause and delivered transcendence.
Offstage, she was no less powerful. Amonkar was strongly outspoken regarding how women were treated in music. She demanded equitable pay for artists and notoriously stormed out of performances over rude audience conduct an action still discussed today as a defence of artist integrity.
Her musical understanding went beyond performance. She taught extensively on rasa (emotion) in music, wrote a book Swaraartha Ramani in Marathi and left behind a rich tradition of students who bear her name with pride. Even in films, she left her imprint, lending her voice to movies like Geet Gaya Patharon Ne and Drishti briefly before moving away from commercial music led by her conviction that film sacrificed the soul of swaras (notes) for words.
Amonkar’s legacy is inscribed in her awards—Padma Bhushan, Padma Vibhushan, Sangeet Natak Akademi Fellowship and many others. Yet her real award lay in each listener who remained transfixed, each raga she reimagined and each boundary she transgressed.
She died in her sleep on April 3, 2017 almost in time for her 85th birthday next week. But her voice, haunting and therapeutic, remains.
As tabla maestro Zakir Hussain said, “Her performances were landmark events that echo centuries.”
Today, we do not simply recall Kishori Amonkar, we return to the revolution she sang.
