When Kumud Diwan Jha regaled her audience to the strains of the Mishra Khamaj thumri of the Benaras school, Unke manaaye bina na manung, a shadow of a smile goaded the memories of her elegant audience. Long known as the bastion of thumri genre, the Benaras school has fielded legends who have defined the art. From among its emergent lot, artiste Kumud Diwan Jha is acknowledged to have carried forth this legacy from its traditional bedrock to a level of higher discourse.
And yet, intertwining her professional-level thumri pursuit with banking practices would sound at odds. But Kumud did just that, by reinventing herself from being a banker at one of the country’s top international banking establishments into a much-sought-after thumri performer. In fact, her eloquent presence and her likeable repertoire of golden thumri numbers have charmed audiences at mehfils as far as Trinidad and Guyana, not to forget the recognition she got by the titans of the Benaras-Lucknow Doab region.
Her radical entry into the genre, Kumud says, is a conjoining of several subtle inputs in her life. “I started my training in music as a Rabindra Sangeet singer under the tutorship of Anima Dasgupta, who had pointed out that with Rabindra Sangeet singing, my voice would be oriented to a melodious pitch and automatically imbibe a gentle flow, very intrinsic to thumri’s soul.”
A more formal orientation into light classical compositions came about under the tutelage of Shanti Hiranand, at the Bharatiya Kala Kendra in New Delhi. The accents of Lucknow thumri were imbibed as her guru was a senior disciple of the famed Begum Akhtar.
Scaling up the thumri ladder, Kumud had shed her nuanced engagement with music into a concerted professional approach as she enrolled for a PhD programme alongside learning music from Pandit Bholanath Mishra. “But there was no design to be an artiste,” Kumud clarifies. “It was beautiful and fulfilling in itself to do a daily riyaaz, and listen to a plethora of recordings from the yesteryears, where the Benaras thumri had been expounded by stalwarts such as Siddheshwari Devi, and legends like Rasoolan Bai, Badi Moti Bai and Pandit Hanuman Prasad Mishra.”
In putting it this way, Kumud is glossing over an essential truth, that learning, particularly musical learning, is not a linear, teacher to pupil hand-me-down. It is a multi-layered composite preparation; so, what had begun as simple riyaaz exercises soon embraced ambivalent developments. One of these inbuilt embellishments that her guru pointed out was her inherent vocal timbre whose resonating quality lent itself to thumri rendering.
Added to this, her revered guru took in hand a musical mapping on a clean slate. “I had to unlearn everything, and using the ragas Yaman and Bhairavi for a start, I was taught the technique of raga development.”
In the specialised field of thumri singing, the essential yardstick was the technique of phrasal arrangements for introducing variety. “He also taught me how to be comfortable with tala, and I ingrained the structure of the thumri through the majaaz dari route of total immersion into the mood of the lyric. I became sensitive to the pathos imbued in the lines, and absorbed what I’d heard in the recordings of the greats, till I found I was imperceptively in sync with this musical flow.”
Bringing in a further musical stamina into her thumri art, Kumud has also learnt from another of Benaras greats, Pandit Chanulal Mishra. The half-decade-long association with him has “added lustre to my gayaki”, confesses the artiste. About this time, formal concert openings had surfaced with a first at Gurgaon’s South City Mall. Invitations to sing elsewhere had poured in thereafter, and today, the artiste has left her imprints on prestigious platforms such as the Sankat Mochan Festival, the Sawai Gandharv Festival, to mention a few.
A committed learner despite her rising popularity, she continues her regimen of self-criticism. “The small things about the stage conduct — I am like a ring master training myself with intelligent application,” she surmises. “I internalise these lessons through my sadhana, and on stage, I externalise these inputs before the audience,” is the passing comment, as the curtains part and she moves forward to take her initial bows before her listeners.