My name is Anthony Gonsalves

This profile had first appeared in the Rave magazine, by Avinash Mudaliar. It has been repurposed. E Niwas, director, Shool, Dum, Love Ke Liye Kuchh Bhi Karega, is back with a film titled My Name is Anthony Gonsalves. Needless to say, the film will have little to do with the man whose name is best remembered in this line from a song and whose name continues to find its way into popular culture, under myriad guises.

Popping out of a giant Easter Egg in 1977, Amitabh Bachchan sang the famous line, "My name is Anthony Gonsalves!" in the Bollywood classic Amar Akbar Anthony. But the line, which has caught the fancy of practically everyone who has heard it ever since, is said to be composer Pyarelal's tribute of sorts to his violin teacher – Anthony Gonsalves.

While the name may fail to strike a chord with anyone from this generation, the song and indeed the man's memories continue to send shivers down the spine of the many who saw and heard him, right from the 40s.

It was in 1943 that Gonsalves decided to join the film industry. Naushad, a big name at the time hired him. He worked there for about four months. But soon found his calling at Bombay Talkies. The ARP party (then a famous trio of three musicians Albuquerque, Ram Singh and Peter, who had ingeniously used their names to form this acronym, which in those days stood for Air Raid Police) took him there and introduced him to the lovely Devika Rani. "I met Devika Rani," Gonsalves says, "Anil Biswas was their music director then. He even told Peter, 'this boy is going to be a great man someday'. Anil became my student later on. I never considered myself a great man. In fact, his brother in law, Pannalal Ghosh also said, 'you'll be great one day.' Those days, we used to play jugalbandi – me on the violin, and he played the flute. When musicians went out for tea or to smoke, we used to have jugalbandi sessions. I was 16 or 17 then. Around this time, the shares of the company were sold by Devika Rani to Shiraj Ali."

But what truly made Gonsalves assimilate himself into the Hindi film industry, was his ability to appreciate the Indian harmony; this despite his upbringing that essentially imbibed into him western music sensibilities. Unlike many of his Goan peers, he actually developed a deep passion for music based on the Indian Ragas. "A raga isn't like a ladder, on which you take one step at time. It's like a path up the mountain. It winds more and there are unusual intervals between stages," he was once quoted as saying.

So Gonsalves began blending light melodies with Western orchestral elements while composing music for cinematic background scores. His intuitive aptitude for attaining the right blend of lightness and shade in music, lent a whole innovative perspective to compositions in films. As a teacher, he trained and guided musicians playing in both Indian and Western schools to absorb the motifs of Indian instrumentation, to result in a performance in keeping with the pure Indian classical style. Each Sunday, he threw open the doors of his Mumbai house to aspiring musicians, two of whom went on to become great composers themselves – RD Burman and of course, Pyarelal.

Music for Anthony Gonsalves was partly hereditary, partly out of interest and partly out of a passion for life. His father, a renowned musician and teacher, was a choir director in Majorda, Goa. Being born in an environment that respected and loved music, left its mark on the growing Gonsalves. He began learning music at the age of three. And in a matter of a few years, Gonsalves knew to play the violin, viola, organ and clarinet, and had understood the theory of music and voice.