Pandit Amarnathji, the first son of his father, Shri Shiv Dayal Chawla, and grandson of Lala Devi Dayal, was born in the year 1924 in Jhang, a small town close to Lahore, before the Partition of India and Pakistan. Panditji was proud of Jhang, famous for its makbarah or mazar of the Sufi saint Heer, which was a stone’s throw from the backlanes of their home.
He was a child prodigy. His mother used to sing folk songs, playing the dholak, and was specially sought after in those parts during weddings and other rituals, like the birth of children. She died when he was 4 years old, and this turned him into a loner…he would get up at the crack of dawn to listen to the Sufi fakirs who walked the streets of his home during prabhat pheri. Looking out of the little window of his room, he would be fascinated by their cries of ‘Alakh Niranjan!’ that rent the air and echoed a world between life and the after-life.
By the age of seven, he was much sought after for singing chaupais or verses from the Ramayan before satsang at the town’s holy temple, and in the same year that he began taking lessons from his first guru, Prof B. N. Dattaji at Lahore, in 1942, at the age of 18, he gave his first broadcast from the Lahore station of All India Radio, the youngest musician on the rolls of its galaxy of veterans.
