Pandit Amarnath, a musical genius, was widely acknowledged as the foremost exponent of the Indore gharaana, pioneered by his guru, the late Ustad Amir Khan Saheb. Born in 1924 in the village of Jhang near Lahore, he was voted by critic Dr. Raghava Menon in The Times of India as one of the four great genius-musicians of Hindustani music in the 20th century.
Panditji’s genius was evident in the fact that he was a rare complete musician; he was a singer, a composer, a teacher, a musicologist, a scholar and an author who compiled a lexicon of terms of Hindustani music.
He passed on in 1996 at the age of seventy-one, leaving behind a treasure of his art that is both majestic and sublime.
The landscape of the raga should be on the canvas of the mind. You have to start from shoonya — nothingness — and that shoonya is the starting point of humility.
