- Lived:
- born 10 April 1932, Bombay (Mumbai); died there in her sleep on 3 April 2017, a week short of her 85th birthday, after sixty years at the summit of Hindustani music
- Field:
- Hindustani classical vocal music — khayāl — raised inside the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana as the daughter of one of its greats, and famous above all for refusing to stay inside it
- The Big Idea:
- A raga is not a grammar to be displayed but a state of mind to be entered. She treated every note as a living thing with feelings of its own, every concert as an act of worship rather than entertainment — and every school, lineage and audience as having exactly no claim on the music.
- In their words:
- "There is nothing called a gharana. There is only music."
- If you remember one thing:
- A widowed singer who rode third-class trains to feed her children trained her daughter so completely that the daughter could afford to say the unsayable — that the proud schools which had preserved India's classical music mattered less than the music itself — and then prove it, note by note, every time she opened her mouth.