NAINA DEVI’s arrival in New Delhi in 1953 coincided with the post-Independence cultural revival, visionaries who were in the right place at the right time, and moments of history that shaped a new national capital into a cultural capital. Through the good offices of Sharda Rao, she had met Mrs Sumitra Charat Ram, the wife of industrialist Charat Ram who, along with her collaborator Nirmala Joshi, was about to regenerate an artistic atmosphere in the city. As a result, the Bharatiya Kala Kendra was established in 1952. In due course, Naina Devi was appointed as it’s Resident Director and moved to 5 B Pusa Road, a house hired for it’s activities. It was a dazzling array of teachers who gathered there. The senior Dagar brothers, Ustad Nasir Moinuddin and Nasir Aminuddin Khan sahibs, Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan, Ustad Vilayat Husain Khan, Vidushi Siddheshwari Devi, Ustad Ishtiaq Hussain Khan, Ustad Hafiz Ali Khan of course, and the Kathak masters, Guru Shambhu Maharaj and Guru Sundar Prasad. Naina Devi helped to guide this nascent institution into the future and was an essential part of the threesome that worked closely together.

At the behest of Naina Devi the Kendra would host an artiste passing through Delhi, and in this manner it became a centre where musicians and dancers could meet informally and share their experiences. One of her most important contributions was her empathetic dealings with the artistes. It helped that she herself was a singer. Her instinct as a musician guided her to discern what a particular person needed or wanted and she could communicate with artistes on familiar ground which built up a special rapport.

After Pusa Road , her next home was at Ferozeshah Road, then Jangpura, Birbal Road, Vinay Marg, and finally her home in Kaka Nagar. Each of her homes was an open house for her friends, especially musicians and more especially those who needed shelter and caring through periods of ill-health. Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Ustad Vilayat Khan were amongst the many who stayed with her as they recuperated from ailments often accompanied by spouses and other family members. Sometimes they stayed for weeks or months but it did not seem to matter to Nainaji. Her primary concern was the wellbeing of the artiste.

In the second half of the 1950s, the Bharatiya Kala Kendra was joined by the great singer, Ustad Mushtaq Hussain Khan of the Rampur-Sahaswan gharana, and Naina Devi used this opportunity to become a student again. She knew then that she was past the age and stage of learning where she could do any justice to the performance of khayal, but she saw this process as a means of adding a vocal training to her thumri singing that would strengthen its foundation and enhance its richness. It was to him that she owed her introduction to the Dargah in Bareilly, and to its revered Pir, Hazrat Shah Mohammed Taqi, also known as Aziz Miyan, of whom Naina Devi became a devotee. The feeling of safety made the Dargah a place of refuge that healed and nourished her. It was also the beginning of her involvement with Sufism and her increasing fascination for syncretic philosophies.

After the years at Bhartiya Kala Kendra Naina ji was now ready to enter a new phase of her artistic life by creating a structure of her own, the institution of Raag Rang, whose main objective was “to propagate the traditional arts of music and dance…to create an atmosphere of music and widen the awareness of this aspect of our culture.”. In many ways Raag Rang was an embodiment of her deeply-held belief in the syncretic culture of India and she invited the well-known artist, M F Hussain, to design the logo for Raag Rang. The list of Founders included Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Ustad Vilayat Khan and her guru-bhai Sunil Bose, as also Keshav Kothari, a former student of Shambhu Maharaj, who later became the Secretary of the Sangeet Natak Akademi. Some of the Raag Rang events were elaborately planned, where music and dance were accompanied by seminars and discussions which drew in other disciplines. The growth of Raag Rang owed its success to Naina Devi’s ability to bring musicians together and bind them as family, her enveloping sense of a musical “biradari.

In 1965, Naina Devi was asked to work on performing arts programmes for All India Radio and later Doordarshan. It was a job tailor-made for her, giving her ample opportunity to exercise her creative imagination and share her vast knowledge of music with a much wider audience. She worked on this side by side with her work for Raag Rang which was ongoing and intensely active. But she conceived and executed some brilliant programmes, such as her interviews with many renowned musicians including the tabla genius Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi and many others. In one television series she gave a vivid description of the history of Hindustani music by setting its principal genres in the courts where they were nurtured. Another programme “Tarikh-e-Thumri brought together great exponents of the form, Badi Moti Bai, Rasoolan Bai and Siddheshwari Devi.

Just over ten years after she started Raag Rang, Naina Devi had cause to look back with quiet satisfaction. The list of artistes who had performed at formal concerts and informal mehfils was long and distinguished and included legendary musicians like Ustad Bismillah Khan, Pandit Ravi Shankar, Smt Gangubai Hangal, Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa, Pandit Radha Mohan Moitra, and Kumar Gandharva, to name only a few. Raag Rang had presented Badi Moti Bai of Benaras, the only surviving disciple of the great Moizuddin Khan, for the first time in Delhi. More importantly, a deep concern for artistes and their well-being was always on her mind. After Rasoolan Bai’s house was burnt down during communal riots in Ahmedabad, she invited the homeless singer to come to Delhi and stay with her along with her entire family. Other measures included medical insurance for artistes and scholarships obtained through the Ministry of Education for needy students of music or dance. She had also envisaged establishing an Artistes' Centre, to be called Aditya Bhavan, in Delhi. Though the foundation stone of the Centre was laid in 1968, unfortunately the project came to naught. What succeed instead was her efforts to establish an Artiste’s Colony in Munirka, New Delhi. Naina Devi’s contribution to the cause of the performing arts and music in particular brought her public recognition through the award of the Padma Shri in 1974.

Her informal mehfils at home were legendary in the world of music. Nobody was ever sure who would be present or would simply decide to drop in at the last moment. But everybody knew that each would be warmly welcomed and that the evening would flow with music and stories and – who knows – perhaps impromptu recitals by maestros. On one such evening, Ustad Ahmed Jan Thirakwa began singing a thumri in Piloo and was joined by the likes of Ustad Amir Khan, Ustad Yunus Hussain Khan and Pandit Debu Chaudhuri, Pandit Shanta Prasad and Naina Devi herself.

She was always keenly aware of how much talent languished on the sidelines for lack of attention or promotion; and she was tireless in promoting all such artistes. One of them was the singer, Ustad Jafar Hussain Khan of Badayun, whose mellow rendition of qawwali was tempered by the fine nuances of the Rampur gharana.

The Silver Jubilee celebrations of Raag Rang in 1986 included three evenings of stellar performances, among them a jugalbandhi between Ustad Bismillah Khan and Naina Devi; also featuring dancers Uma Sharma and Ram Mohan, and singers Munawwar Ali Khan, Ustad Jafar Hussain Khan and Shipra Bose. And, most fittingly, Girija Devi, who had been the artiste of the evening all those years ago at Raag Rang’s Inaugural Mehfil in 1962, also sang at this celebration twenty-five years later.

Age was not on her side and now increasingly neither was her health. Her first stroke came in the late 1980s after which she began to lose her voice. A second stroke followed. Through all those years of pain and struggle it was her music that had carried her, she had blocked out her problems and the compromises that she was forced to make in her life by pushing herself deeper and deeper into music: and now, even that was being taken away from her. She cut down on her activities and started going out less. She was no longer at the centre of things and a certain emptiness set in and she was becoming more aware of her own physical frailty. The third stroke was the fatal one. Uma Sharma, a protégée who was a dear friend, remembers well the morning of that same day. She received a telephone call from Naina Devi to tell her that she had found an old cassette of her recordings and that she should come over so that they could listen to it together. For two hours they listened to the music playing back from that small tape player, Naina Devi singing all the forms she was so famous for, thumri and ghazal, dadra and holi and chaiti….they soaked in that glorious voice, the skills, the emotions, the range of repertoire. That night she and her grandson had just finished dinner when he noticed that she was trying to say something. She pointed to the jar of glucose and he gave her a spoon of it. A little later he saw that her mouth was drooping and went to the phone to call his cousins but she clung to his hand as if begging him not to call, as she did not want to go into hospital again.

A few days later she passed away, still in the Intensive Care Unit of Jaslok hospital, at the age of 76.