The opening of Mani Kaul’s famous documentary on the Dagar gharana has a clipping of little Bahauddin wielding his rudra veena with great finesse.Ĭarnatic music seems a proverbial hotbed of young geniuses. In dhrupad, we have the rudra veena maestro Bahauddin Dagar, who began playing from a very young age. Having trained under his father, the legendary Ustad Allah Rakha Qureshi, from his childhood, Hussain debuted on the stage before he was 10. Tabla maestro Zakir Hussain also began early in life. Then there was Rais Khan (1939-2017), who was recognized as a child prodigy on the sitar as a 12-year-old. He had begun performing in smaller villages across Karnataka from the age of 5. Born Shivaputra Siddharamayya Komkali (1924-92) in Karnataka, he was only 12 when his major debut at the All India Music Conference in Mumbai in 1936 made headlines. In Hindustani classical music in north India, one knows of the vocalist Kumar Gandharva. India has had its share of child prodigies in classical music. Going by the ancient philosophy of “rebirth" enshrined in Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and other parallel schools of thinking, they concluded that many of these child prodigies might possibly be carrying forward some unfinished business from another lifetime. Oliver Wolf Sacks (1933-2015), the author of Musicophilia: Tales Of Music And The Brain, wrote: “There are some people who can scarcely hold a tune in their heads and others who can hear entire symphonies in their minds with a detail and vividness little short of actual perception." How else can one explain how a small child, incapable of writing a simple sentence, rattles off the names of ragas or melodic scales within 5 seconds of hearing them? How does one explain what brings about this detailed musical imagery in the mind of a child? After a great deal of research in the West, several scientists have concluded that this phenomenon is a carry-over from another birth. For several decades now, musicologists and researchers have been trying to understand the phenomenon.
While a part of that popular legend might be true, what is worth thinking about is how child prodigies happen. The world of Western classical music never fails to mention that the great composer Mozart began composing at the age of 5 and wrote his first symphony by the time he was 8.