A few days before Gangubai Hangal, the grande dame of Hindustani vocal music, passed away, I was reading a book on Louise Bourgeois, the French-born artist and reigning queen of the New York avant-garde scene. I kept marvelling at the parallels between the lives of these two great nonagenarians. Born within a couple of years of each other, both women overcame severe hardships to attain legendary fame. They kept reinventing themselves all their lives — Gangubai gave her last public performance at 94, while Bourgeois, now 97, continues to make new work. Austerity and intensity, expertise and intellect came together in their arts to produce eccentric, and frequently intriguing, results. Seldom in the history of art have there been such extraordinary women, possessed by a relentless creative energy, drinking life to the lees.

Like Bourgeois, Gangubai’s early career was shaky; she suffered from a prolonged period of public amnesia after her initial success, until she was rediscovered in the autumn of her life. If Bourgeois had to face the scorn of the Surrealists, a largely male bastion when she was starting out as a sculptor, Gangubai had much more than sexist jibes to deal with. The daughter of a low-caste boatman, she had the temerity to pursue the khayal, regarded as an elitist genre more suited to ustads and pandits than to bais and tawaifs, who were expected to confine themselves to lighter forms like thumri, dadra, chaiti and hori. Gangubai even managed to learn from the great Sawai Gandharva, disciple of Abdul Karim Khan, founder of the Kirana gharana. Although she spent her learning years in august company — Bhimsen Joshi and Basavraj Rajguru were her gurubhais — Gangubai was ridiculed as a gaanewali by local Brahmin boys in Dharwad, Karnataka, her native village. They threw water mixed with cowdung at her and made a racket the moment she sat down to her riyaaz.

In spite of these upheavals, Gangubai’s life was marked by a quiet, almost staid, dignity. It may even come across as a tame, boringly predictable existence compared to the turmoil that filled the lives of other women artists. One only has to think of the glamour and panache with which divas like Hirabai Barodekar and Kesarbai Kerkar (to say nothing of Louise Bourgeois) dealt with the cult of celebrity that grew around them. Unlike the countless admirers who flocked around Hirabai and Kesarbai, Gangubai lived with a liberal-minded husband, Gururao Kaulgi, a Brahmin lawyer, with whom she had three children. But instead of basking in the success of her marriage, she persuaded Kaulgi to take another upper-caste wife, feeling that it would be the proper thing for a man of his stature. Perhaps the singer who came closest to Gangubai’s temperament was the self-effacing and supremely gifted Mogubai Kurdikar, mother of Kishori Amonkar. It is not surprising that Gangubai and Mogubai became close friends, and even less surprising that they spent more time exchanging notes on their culinary, rather than musical, knowledge when they met.

Both Gangubai and Mogubai initiated an exclusively female line of familial taalim, training their respective daughters, Krishna and Kishori, to become fine singers. As founders of matrilineal gharanas, Gangubai and Mogubai are exceptions in the patriarchal gharanedar system. They also became disseminators of a tradition of music (khayal) that once used to be the exclusive right of male teachers. As late as the 1940s, female singers were looked down upon by their male counterparts. The bais and tawaifs — who belonged to the courtesan class — were regarded as repositories of light classical bandishes, and not as authorities on serious genres like khayal and dhrupad. Aspiring gaanewalis and nautch girls went to these entertainers for training; even grand old ustads like Faiyaz Khan were influenced by Zohrabai Agrawali, and would often sing her celebrated thumris and ghazals as encores.

Gangubai’s uncompromising fidelity to high classicism was at the core of her teaching. Unlike Hirabai and Mogubai, both veterans of the Marathi stage, Gangubai kept away from the limelight. She was never really interested in the easy pleasures of the natyasangeet, abhang, thumri or tappa. A rigorous approach to the purity of the swara informed her sensibility to the exclusion of even playful deviations from the norm. Her voice, which had morphed from a soprano into a sonorous baritone after a spell of illness, was best suited to weightier ragas like Asavari, Todi, Marwa, Darbari Kanada, Malkauns and Bhairav. She always managed to bring out the grandeur of these ragas.

Although Gangubai did not have the astonishing vocal range of Roshanara Begum or the honeyed mellowness of Hirabai’s badhat, she made up for this lack of virtuosity with her visceral understanding of the distinct mood evoked by each raga. She stayed away from rare or complicated jod-ragas — Mogubai had a penchant for these — nor did she indulge in dizzying games with tempo. Her approach was crystal clear, marked by a pristine simplicity, devoid of cheap inflections. Beyond grammar and syntax, she saw deeper into the structures of feelings latent in a raga. Kumar Prasad Mukherji recalled a mehfil where Gangubai had sung Bilaskhani Todi without a trace of sargam or taan — for her, such embellishments did not have any place in Bilaskhani’s scheme of things.

Gangubai’s stern refusal to compromise with her intuitive good taste left her outside the fold of popularity, although she did manage to draw attention for the wrong reasons. From fellow musicians to critics, everyone was awed, sometimes amused, by her ‘masculine’ voice — an unfortunate description that fails to capture the rich sonority and depth of her timbre. This mannishness often turned Gangubai into an object of wonder; a fate that had also befallen Kesarbai. However, there was little common ground between Kesarbai and Gangubai apart from the similarity in their voices. Kesarbai’s gift was her flawless singing. She seldom deviated from her stock-in-trade vilambit teental khayal in the classic Jaipur ang, and her singing, though highly complex, was never quite emotionally charged. She led a colourful, but reclusive, life and was known for her mercurial temper, and love of food and gossip. Gangubai could not be more distant from Kesarbai’s beau monde.

With both of them, audiences were often unable to separate the stereotype of the woman with a thunderous voice or given to fits of rage from the actuality of the inspired performer. Such stereotyping is also the fate of women regarded as having excessively shrill, ‘feminine’ voices. Someone I know gleefully recounts how, years ago, a high-pitched taan by Sunanda Patnaik, delivered at lightning speed, had made a sleeping man tumble out of his chair at a soirée, much to the singer’s chagrin and the audience’s amusement.

Gangubai was swamped with honours in her old age. Her more than nine decades, seven of which were spent singing, had turned her into a spectacle. Audiences found it oddly humbling, but also empowering, to look at her frail body perched on the stage, one hand covering an ear, eyes closed in concentration, willing herself to steady the quiver in her voice, yet weaving a web of melodies as fine as gossamer. But there was a maternally enveloping quality in Gangubai as well. Her voice would sometimes resonate like rumblings from the depths of the earth, nurturing and nourishing her listeners. Louise Bourgeois calls her gigantic spiders Maman or Mother. Looking at these towering, delicate creatures, I am reminded of the curious mix of fragility and fierceness that I will always associate with Gangubai’s music.