Hundreds of people turned up at Rabindra Sadan on Wednesday to pay their last respects to vocalist Ustad Rashid Khan.
The large crowd bore testimony to Khan’s ability to straddle the classical and the popular. There was not a minute without a queue in the auditorium where Khan’s body was laid on a bed for three hours.
The body was flown to Delhi late on Wednesday, from where it will be taken to Khan’s ancestral home in Uttar Pradesh’s Badaun.
Khan, who passed away at Peerless Hospital on Tuesday afternoon, was kept at his home in Ramgarh at night.
An official of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation said the civic body sent a team with a movable refrigerator to preserve the body.
Biswarup Ghosh, a resident of Ramgarh where Khan lived, was one of those who came to Rabindra Sadan. Ghosh said his sister was a student of Khan. “I spoke with my sister after he passed away on Tuesday. My sister told me that I should go to Rabindra Sadan. I am here on behalf of my sister, who is in London,” said Ghosh.
Shruti Ghosh, a performance artiste, never met Khan. Coming from a family where art and culture were taught to children from a young age, Ghosh felt an urge to come to Rabindra Sadan to pay her respects to the vocalist.
Khan’s body arrived at Rabindra Sadan around 9.40am on Wednesday.
Pandit Ajoy Chakraborty, Srikumar Chattopadhyay, Usha Uthup and Haimanti Shukla were among those present. Chief minister Mamata Banerjee and many of her cabinet colleagues were there, too.
Khan’s wife, his son and two daughters remained close to the body as people kept coming.
Mamata arrived close to 1pm and spoke with the family for a while. The body, kept inside Rabindra Sadan, was taken out and kept in the open for a gun salute.
Once the gun salute was over, the body was again taken to the Khans’ Ramgarh home.
“A 9pm flight to Delhi has been booked to transport the body. From Delhi we will travel by road to Badaun. The road journey will take about five hours,” said Nadimul Haque, Trinamul’s Rajya Sabha MP who accompanied the family to Badaun.