Lata Mangeshkar remains, in my euphonious esteem, the greatest singer ever to be heard in Hindustani cinema. But for Lata’s inspirational vocalizing, I would never have started writing on music.
When more than 15 years ago Lata Mangeshkar: A Biography (written by me) was published, there were very few books on music idols. But with the passage of time, a variety of publications in this genre made an appearance, crystallizing into a trend. What one misses, however, is a kaleidoscopic work that views –vintage musically –Hindustani cinema through the luminous prism of the galaxy of stars upon whom all those vintage numbers came to be audio-visually immortalized. In other words, a book cinematically highlighting the tuneful contribution, to our film lore, not only of music makers, lyric writers and singers but also of such exceptionally creative wavemakers as Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Vijay Anand, Guru Dutt and Yash Chopra.
A Journey Down Melody Lane is ideated as such a breakaway book epitomizing the ‘Musey’ musicality of the motion picture in India. It examines, in sonorous detail, how the timeless music we (at least the aficionados) so cherish came to be crafted by a Naushad Ali via a Mohammed Rafi; a Madan Mohan via a Lata Mangeshkar; and an O. P. Nayyar via an Asha Bhosle. It expressively explores our treasure trove to spread out, before rasiks, gems so polished as to make our silver screen an eye-filling phantasmagoria. It comes up with fascinating nuggets of information that whet the appetite to know more about films in general and film music in particular.
I am grateful to Doordarshan (as Indian TV’s torch-bearer) for conferring upon me the title of ‘film historian’. For all that, I am a listener first, a chronicler after. That is why I feel bewildered when I find a slew of writers and commentators (both in print and electronically) today presuming to hold forth on the nitty-gritty of Hindustani cinesangeet as if they were ‘there’ when it all happened in the golden age of film music. If they were there, I never saw them. I regularly beheld, at such 1950s– 1960s song recordings and music ‘sittings’, only Jitubhai Mehta (of the Gujarati Vandemataram and Bombay Samachar) alongside SCREEN photographer-reporter R. M. Kumtakar.
While a music recording happens with everything rehearsed and ready, a song sitting is where you get to witness the number’s writer, composer and singer indulging in the scale of nok-jhonk (give and take) bringing a certain rounding to the tuning. Like, for instance, lyricist Hasrat Jaipuri apostrophizing it as Chashm-e-bad door to complete Teree pyaaree pyaaree soorat ko kissee kee nazar na lage as the Jaikishan take on B. Saroja Devi–via the 1961 ‘come-over-to-Sasural’ overtures of a Rajendra Kumar vocally vindicated by Mohammed Rafi. You think the Teree pyaaree pyaaree tune was final and ready for recording after that? Perish the thought! A week passed in further refining the tune for it to acquire the razzledazzle it did on the screen.
As a fresher still, I watched entranced as, first, Jitubhai Mehta and then R. M. Kumtakar softly ventured to offer their mellifluent impressions to the tune’s composer. If O. P. Nayyar genuinely valued Mehta’s insights, Madan Mohan habitually turned to Kumtakar for final ghazal approval. To think that I joined the Mehta–Kumtakar twosome only because cinema coverage got to be contemptuously assigned to me – after all those intellectual heavyweights (manning The Illustrated Weekly of India in The Times of India Building at Bombay’s Bori Bunder) considered it beneath their dignity to handle something so demeaning as ‘films’!
Thus did popular cinema and quality music mingle in my bloodstream –over a period of 60 years. It therefore amuses me no end upon being ‘authoritatively’ told, on TV, that ace composer C. Ramchandra created all nine songs of Azaad (1955) during a single night’s sitting! ‘It’s but the mere outline of a tune you could get in a flash,’ C. Ramchandra enlightened me. ‘Recording the song after that is a humdrum process consuming a minimum of two-to-three days even when rushed, as we were on Azaad. No composer on earth could conjure a tune and “take”it in the same breath. Each Lata tune needs nursing in the heart and mind.’
Let no one therefore dare tell you that any tune got ‘done’ in two shakes of a duck’s tail. It might sound great to hear that R. D. Burman ‘songscaped’ Asha Bhosle (to go on Zeenat Aman) as Dum maaro dum with a snap of the fingers, but the ground reality is quite something else. The aim of this book, therefore, is to set the gramophone record straight –for instance, by noting that Lata Mangeshkar’s entry of 30,000 songs in the Guinness Book of World Records was officially expunged in 1990 itself. In underpinning such fragments of fact, the integrated effort is to orchestrate our evergreen music in an idiom designed to offer a grandstand view of the 60 song-laden years spanning the 1947–2007 musical spectrum. Nor is the music made before 1947 and after 2007 by any means underplayed for I have updated my musings to embrace the period up to the arrival of A. R. Rahman.
It was in a Rahman-era newspaper supplement, HT Café of the Hindustan Times, that I resumed writing on our song treasury via a column titled Mausam Hai Musicana–at the invitation of cineaste Khalid Mohamed. After doing a number of such columns, I obtusely lost, on the computer, each piece so written! This was when my perceptive musical admirer, Rupa Dore (sitting in the Hollywood heart of Los Angeles), magically materialized, on my computer, to retrieve each such piece for me. But for Rupa and her spot audio-visual feedback, this book could not have been undertaken. If only because those HT Café contributions represent some of the source material in shaping this book –something for which I sincerely thank the HT Group in the face of having proceeded to expand each such 450-word column! The stimulus for the book’s mood-setting opening chapter (‘The Talkie in Its Walkie Teens’) came from a musical odyssey I undertook for the prestigious Sangeet Natak journal in its centenary issue –something I acknowledge with pride. ‘The Divine Touch’ chapter is a vastly enlarged edition of my tribute to composer Vasant Desai carried in Filmfare (during end-January 1976). For the rest, it is amazing how little I have drawn from the extensive music writing I did for Filmfare, The Illustrated Weekly of India, SCREEN, MID DAY, rediff.com and others.
My long-time fan Shiva Shetty was remorselessly at me, never losing hope of motivating me into actualizing this book. Even as I sat down with Shetty to check out on certain song details, he brought heaps of xeroxed material whose originals I had never bothered to collect. I could use but a fraction of it all, given my habit of ‘writing into’ my writings! Many others helped, notably the soft-toned Ashok Rege, whose memory-bank recall (of pre-1965 music visuals) I employed to the hilt. My cinesangeet-committed friends, Mukesh Geet Kosh compiler Harish Raghuwanshi (in Surat) and Shanker-Jaikishan biographer Padmanabh Joshi (in Ahmedabad), were always on tap to clear any doubt that suddenly arose.
But real assistance came from my phenomenally computer-savvy wife Girija Rajendran –as an eminent movie journalist and film music specialist herself. Her totally unexpected death on 18 December 2009 proved a body blow. It was the signal for our only child, Shilpa Bharatan Iyer (given her journalistic association with Variety International), to take me –our eyes still moist –through the 1980s–1990s music, which is her strong suit. I have praised our musical legends generously where due but not spared the holy cows of our songdom from critical scrutiny. For all that, Lata Mangeshkar remains, in my euphonious esteem, the greatest singer ever to be heard in Hindustani cinema. But for Lata’s inspirational vocalizing, I would never have started writing on music. If only because cricket is my passion, music is my pastime. Lata Mangeshkar is thus still the impetus to my writing a second book on music. An irreverent book that, hopefully, turns out to be as ‘unputdownable’ as the Mangeshkar of Mangeshkars has been from 1949 Dulari down:
Mohabbat hamaaree zamaana hamaara
Tuu gaaye jaa ae dil taraana hamaara …
Raju Bharatan