Aa raat jaa rahi hai yoon jaise chaandni ki baaraat jaa rahi hai
Aa raat jaa rahi hai yoon jaise chaandni ki baaraat jaa rahi hai
Chalne ko ab falak se taaron ka kaarvaan hai
Chalne ko ab falak se taaron ka kaarvaan hai
Aese mein tuu kahaan hai duniya meri jawaan hai
Awaaz de kahaan hai …1
IT SOUNDED AS IF NOORJEHAN HAD RETURNED TO INDIA ONLY TO RE-LIVE – for a fleeting evening – that 1946 Anmol Ghadi during which she came to immortalize Awaaz de kahaan hai for Naushad. Yes, the year of 1946 it was as our composing monarch recorded, first, with Noorjehan and then with K. L. Saigal. The 1944 Rattan trail that Naushad had blazed was set to view our musical landscape undergoing a sea change through 1945–46. Those were the key years leading up to Partition. Years having Noorjehan returning to her Lahore base even as Lata, significantly, happened in India during the August of 1947. Naushad speaks with feeling about K. L. Saigal, Noorjehan, Lata and the effect of Partition upon vintage music. In the era that followed, our Sangeet Samrat held on to his prime position through 1951–60. The golden decade of our film music was 1951–60, a decade finding Lata, with her mellifluence, to be ubiquitous. Those finest years of Lata also heralded the decisive decade through which fledglings Shanker-Jaikishan made giant strides as the go-go duo. All empathy in his commentary is Naushad as he re-creates musical moments, musical events, in the life of the nascent nation.
How the fur flew as, in my tribute, I hailed Naushad as ‘The Composer of the Century’ (in rediff.com) upon our sangeet savant passing away on 5 May 2006. The movie-viewing cognoscenti wondered if any musician, just any musician, qualified for such a ‘Composer of the Century’ rating. To each his own. To me, a full 65 years at the composing job, and still in Taj Mahal saddle, is musical qualification enough in this cut-throat industry that sends you up like a comet, only to have you disappearing like a falling star. Even as we prepared to enter a.d. 2000, Naushad demonstrated that, at 80, he had shed none of his classical lustre. This following his attention-holding scores for Sanjay Khan’s The Sword of Tipu Sultan (1989) and for Akbar Khan’s Akbar The Great (1994), both captively viewed upon Doordarshan’s national TV network. Two historic TV serials that captured watcher imagination as Naushad, nearing 70 by 1989, reinvented himself as one who could uplink his music to the small screen too. The vocals of rising idol A. Hariharan – as the one set to pioneer fusion music in India – were heard to vintage advantage, under the still coveted baton of Naushad, in both serials. It therefore came as no surprise when the telegenic Hariharan became Naushad’s first male playback choice for the Akbar Khan cine saga, Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story (releasing on 5 November 2005). That Naushad retained the vision and the passion to welcome the opportunity to score for something so insightfully demanding as Taj Mahal was a happy augury.
Our composing virtuoso thus refused to rest on his ‘Mughal’ laurels when only one musician of his breed was still truly functional on a wider canvas – Khayyam. Naushad, by the end-2005 time Taj Mahal came to the screen, was all but 86, having outlived almost all our top-notch composers. Naushad spryly argued that age was but a stage to gauge oneself afresh as still there. Which other composer, tell me, was seen to enter the twenty-first century, geared to the task of fulfilling the mission of encompassing the dimension of music needed for a theme so imposing as Taj Mahal? Naushad alone retained the optimism and the dynamism to seek to score such an opus to make up for the fact that his Love and God – that K. Asif epic in no way complete – had been released in such a cash-and-carry manner on the 27th of May 1986. Why only Naushad, even the doughty Lata Mangeshkar – as one who began her Hindi playback-singing innings only in the latter half of August 1947 (as Noorjehan chose to go to Pakistan) – was finding herself under valiant challenge by the younger order as the 1986 Love and God show saw the light of May.
By Lata starting out only in August 1947 I mean, of course, the maiden proceeding of her playback singing in the Noorjehan rivalling field of all-India Hindustani cinema. Always remember that – on her own submission made in April 1967 – Lata Mangeshkar took a start, as a playback singer in Hindustani cinema, only with that solo written by our mythological hero Mahipal. That is a Lata solo going as Paa laaguun kar jori re Shyam mose na khelo Hori. The man who composed that sensitive Lata solo for Vasant Joglekar’s Aap Ki Sewa Mein (1947), Datta Davjekar, had attested to the fact of his having recorded the number, momentously, in the third week of the August month in which India became independent. Thus with freedom came Lata Mangeshkar to Hindustani cinema. To the cinema in which Noorjehan had set the vocal yardstick for Lata and all other singers to follow. Admittedly, from Aap Ki Sewa Mein (1947) to Love and God (1986) is no mean haul. Who but a thoroughbred like Lata could have so stayed the course as to bring such a depth of vocal wealth to the Khumar Barabankvi–Naushad duo’s Pyaar kehte hai jise shola hai woh shabnam nahein in Love and God? In the K. Asif extravaganza that came to be so ham-fistedly released on 27 May 1986.
Some four years before that Love and God ‘non-show’ – on the Wednesday of 10 February 1982, to be precise – Naushad had demonstrated himself to be a live wire still. The undercurrents here were such that thespian Dilip Kumar, too, simply had to be there on the podium. For who if not Noorjehan, as the Malka-e-Tarannum still, had returned to India from Pakistan after close to 35 years. A reunion occasion it thus was, an occasion seeing Naushad to be busy as a bumblebee, sharing the on-stage limelight with Dilip Kumar. To view the magnetic Dilip Kumar on the same stage as Jugnu Noorjehan was to do a rewind laden with all the nostalgia in the world and beyond. It was to go back in time to the 1947 Noorjehan–Mohammed Rafi duet to end all duets – Yahaan badlaa wafaa ka bewafaaii ke sivaa kyaa hai. Ambiently composed is that one by Feroz Nizami, B.A. – for Jugnu Noorjehan to ‘mood’ it opposite a Dilip Kumar on the threshold of a breakthrough by 1947. That Noorjehan–Rafi Yahaan badlaa wafaa ka duet I now espied as credited – upon my 66-year-old GE3904 double-sided 78-rpm disc record – to Asghar Sarhadi. Something ‘lyrical’ that – a piece of information not to be easily gleaned. Of course, we well knew that Yahaan badlaa wafaa ka had been tuned by Feroz Nizami as one belonging to the galaxy of high-class composers opting for Pakistan – with Noorjehan – come August 1947.
How, possibly, could an evening so misty with memory be complete without a Noorjehan–Naushad evergreen to light up the show? Even as Noorjehan and Dilip Kumar embraced on the stage in a show of subcontinental solidarity, Naushad had his act for the evening rehearsed and ready. Affably had Naushad got singing star Surendra to take a close-view front seat during the evening. He had Surendra sitting alongside an Anil Biswas pondering, maybe, where and how Naushad had stolen a march over him. For the Naushad-driven audience, it was an Anmol Ghadi to cherish as Noorjehan, overcome by the sentiment going with the moment, announced from the podium that she was poised to render, solo, that composer’s 1946 nugget-duet: Awaaz de kahaan hai.
That saw Naushad, too, getting up – from his convivial perch by the side of Anil Biswas and Surendra – and emerging as The Great Conductor at Bombay’s Shanmukhananda Hall during that hallmark evening of Wednesday, 10 February 1982. As for Noorjehan, she just transported the audience with the first notes of Awaaz de kahaan hai that she evoked from her ultra-supple throat – as a voice cutting across all borders. Her Anmol Ghadi co-singer Surendra just sat there and looked on, haplessly, as the old firm of Noorjehan & Naushad came to exercise a hypnotic hold upon the audience. Naushad, Noorjehan and Dilip Kumar – could the blending have been more emotive than it was during an hour in which viewers knew no Line of Control, no Attari–Wagah boundary? Who there would not have given his right ear to get to savour Noorjehan under Naushad’s wand afresh? The audience could just not have hoped to encounter such an open 1982 setting for delirious rejoicing, given the political landscape then in India and Pakistan alike.
If the evening was distinctly awkward for anyone, it was for that celebrity of celebrities called Lata Mangeshkar. Amidst all that good cheer of seeing her singing ideal and idol Noorjehan in the flesh again, Lata had to perform during that daunting evening. She shrewdly took her turn before Noorjehan. Lata had already ascertained that Naushad was planning to unfold Noorjehan in Raag Pahadi that evening via Awaaz de kahaan hai from Anmol Ghadi, releasing in the critical year before Partition. Lata now studiedly chose Shyam Sunder’s Raag Pahadi classic from Bazaar (1949), Saajan ki galiyaan chhod chale, as written by Qamar Jalalabadi. The vocal shading that she brought to Saajan ki galiyaan chhod chale might have suggested to Noorjehan that Lata was still enmeshed in the Malka-e-Tarannum syndrome.
Even as Noorjehan was possibly thinking along those just-after-Partition lines, surging on came Lata with Sahir Ludhianvi–Jaidev’s 1961 Hum Dono gem in Raag Gaud Sarang: Allah tero naam Ishwar tero naam. Pointedly apprising Noorjehan – snugly seated there right in front of her – of the fact that Lata’s song thesaurus, by 1982, was such that Allah came as easily as did Ishwar to her limpid lips. As Noorjehan joined the applause, Lata tactically took her leave and just left the happening-happening hall. Naushad and his Noorjehan were welcome to their Awaaz de kahaan hai rostrum! So what if Dilip Kumar, briefly, had forgotten all about Lata being his little sister (‘chhoti bahen’)? The Lata message for the evening that still came through was not lost upon Noorjehan for one. The message that the Malka-e-Tarannum would have had serious vocal competition to face in India, if she had perchance elected to drop anchor here after Partition, Naushad or no Naushad.
A Naushad who, for his part, had been ruling the waves in India from the time Noorjehan plumped for Pakistan. A Naushad wave that touched its high meridian by mid-August 1947 with Partition coming as the moment of decision not only for Noorjehan. In that 15 August 1947 light did I now (as late as the 12th of March 1986) make bold to pose to our composing supremo – as pertinent rather than impertinent – the quintessential query: ‘Were you not, Naushad Saab, the only composer left in India after Partition for whom two such extraordinary singers as K. L. Saigal and Noorjehan had performed? Did you not, as a voice connoisseur, miss Noorjehan after she went away to Pakistan? Did Pakistan ever beckon to you?’
‘I won’t say that the suggestion was not made,’ responded Naushad, astonishingly candidly. ‘But first Noorjehan – who didn’t miss her? Hers was the brighter voice compared to Lata, it had more volume, it was more weighty. My Mere bachpan ke saathi mujhe bhool na jaana from Anmol Ghadi [1946] exemplifies Noorjehan‘s vividness, her vivacity. But Lata was a fast learner. In no time at all she had come to comprehending grips with the Urdu language. Lata also, crucially, picked up from Noorjehan the art of giving tuneful expression to a mood. Lata had a vaster arena in which to operate, whereas Noorjehan, once she went away to Lahore, could sing primarily in Punjabi and Urdu.
‘Always remember that the more the languages, the more the variety of composition. This priceless primacy Noorjehan surrendered to Lata when she moved away to Pakistan. Having said that, Noorjehan was a singer of a timbre not altogether easy to match for Lata, even with a throat pliant as pliant could be. Noorjehan with her maasoomiyat [that child-like innocence distinguishing her voice] came first, Lata with her latafat [finesse of presentation] six years after. Therefore any comparison now is pointless; you could have really judged only if Noorjehan had stayed behind and Lata had been called upon to measure up. As for Noorjehan performing, of course I would have loved to record more with a voice so transcendental. Noorjehan’s going away to Pakistan, when still at her vocal zenith, came as a real blow.
‘But Pakistan itself, it never was an attraction for me – let us, here and now, be crystal clear on that cardinal point,’ underlined Naushad. ‘Truth to tell, once all those composers with a Lahore grounding moved away to Pakistan after Partition, I was already – and I say this in all humility – being hailed as number one here in India. Who would have walked away from such an all-powerful position, little knowing what lay in store? My future was here in India and in India alone. Almost all composers who headed for Pakistan lost more than they gained – at least immediately. There was no film industry worth the name there. Plus these master composers, in going away to Pakistan, actually limited themselves. Here in India, you had the scope to make music for the whole of Hindustan as your audience. There in Pakistan, those composers ended up doing music for what had been, at best, a part of India. No, my choice was obvious from the word go. India is where I had made my name; India is where my destiny lay.’
While being emphatic on that, Naushad would not easily admit that competition did narrow for him, as a whole band of music makers, starting with Master Ghulam Haider, either confined operations to Lahore or switched headquarters there. In Pakistan, the fate of quite a few of these truly gifted composers became similar to that of a titan like Anil Biswas in India. Anil Biswas had openly admitted that no one so revolutionized his outlook on music as Master Ghulam Haider did. Anil Biswas had adjusted exemplarily then (1941–47) as Master Ghulam Haider exploded on the film scene. Anil Biswas so came to musical terms with Master Ghulam Haider only to catch a tartar in Naushad. Our composing chieftain, somehow, remained one mental jump ahead of each one of them, at all times, in adapting his music to the infectiously catchy Arabian rhythm that Master Ghulam Haider had brought with him from Lahore.
At another level, Naushad’s stock was high, very high, as he followed up on having been the one to record with Malka-e-Tarannum Noorjehan in Anmol Ghadi. Naushad next got Kundan Lal Saigal, no less, to perform for him in A. R. Kardar’s Shahjehan during the same Anmol Ghadi year of 1946. It is illumining to hear Naushad on K. L. Saigal, the one whom he repeatedly styles as ‘Apnaa Kundan’ (‘our own Kundan’).
‘Has there been a voice more perfect than this in our song lexicon?’ Naushad now demanded to know. ‘Apnaa Kundan, when he first came to render for me, in Shahjehan, Majrooh Sultanpuri’s Jab dil hi toot gayaa, needed a dummy harmonium! That is to say, unless he could lay his fingers upon the keys of a [dummy] harmonium, Kundan Lal Saigal would not be able to sing. So habituated had K. L. Saigal become to such an accompaniment that he could get into sur [tune] only with that dummy-keys harmonium placed in front of him upon a stool under the mike. I have already, in different fora, spoken at length about how I got Apnaa Kundan to render Jab dil hi toot gayaa, not once, but twice. The first time when he was sober. In the second instance, after he had entreated me for both a retake and a drink. In the case of each one of the five solos that he recorded with me for Kardar’s Shahjehan, Kundan tried his level best to turn up sober. Since my first take always was my last, maybe I managed to record K. L. Saigal in a better vocal grain than any other composer did.
‘From among the five solos that he sang divinely for me in Shahjehan – I discount his Roohi Roohi Roohi as being Rafi and chorus accompanied – I view Majrooh Sultanpuri’s Jab dil hi toot gayaa as Apnaa Kundan’s masterpiece for me. Jab dil hi toot gayaa set me upon the course to making Raag Bhairavi my signature tune. Then there was Khumar Barabankvi’s Chaah barbaad karegi humen maalum na thha, which I so set in Raag Bageshri that only Apnaa Kundan could have negotiated those notes for me. Khumar Barabankvi’s Ae dil-e-beqaraar jhoom found Kundan to be in splendid vocal shape as I crafted it in Raag Bihag. Majrooh’s Gham diye mustaqil, as cast by me in Raag Kaafi, would have tested any singer except Kundan. Majrooh’s Kar lijiye chal kar meri jannat ke nazaare came as the fitting finale: Kundan Lal Saigal had done each one of my five solos in as sober a tone as I could expect to get from one so sadly a prey to drink.
‘If I say that these are my five best compositions ever, I would be wrong, because they are, in truth, five of K. L. Saigal’s best renditions ever. Also, to single out Kundan Lal Saigal as the best of them all would be a case of my being manifestly unfair, not only to Noorjehan, but to Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi too. I leave the K. L. Saigal debate there, placing on record the fact that it was my lifelong ambition attained when Apnaa Kundan agreed to sing for me as many as five solos in Shahjehan. Compellingly did K. L. Saigal enact those songs on the screen, too, as he acted out a Sohail singing his way into the heart of Roohi [played by Ragini]. Another like Apnaa Kundan there cannot be and will not be.’
Kundan Lal Saigal thus became the vocal touchstone for each singer, male or female, coming after him and that included Lata Mangeshkar. A Lata who began to grow in performing stature from the 1947 timeframe in which Noorjehan took off for Pakistan. So meteoric was Lata’s rise, as the performer’s performer, that, by 1970 – that is, 20 euphonious years after she rose to number one position – she had decimated all vocal opposition, bar her younger sister Asha Bhosle. Asha was the lone one to survive the ultra-melodic Lata onslaught – as the lady going on to carve out her own vocal niche alongside. No wonder that composers, who had shaped our supernova’s career, were heard to be complaining that Lata was no longer available to them for rehearsal in the dedicated manner in which she used to give them five-six tries before the recording date. They had moulded her only to become clay in her hands. Some of these inventive musicians judiciously rationalized it as the flavour of the hour. Others resisted, notably Shanker (of the SJ team). Shanker was just not the type to take such Lata disdain lying down. He belligerently carried the battle straight into the rival Laxmikant-Pyarelal camp. This as Lata had Shanker-Jaikishan’s very own Raj Kapoor selecting, almost willy-nilly for RK’s Bobby (releasing in the September of 1973), the younger duo of Laxmikant-Pyarelal over a Shanker rendered pitifully single. This had come about with Jaikishan no more – that ‘glam slam’ of our music world having passed away on the Sunday of 12 September 1971. An afternoon during which traffic on Bombay’s Marine Drive promenade – on vantage view from his Gobind Mahal residence just seven buildings away from my Tulsi Vihar establishment – came to a crawl, following seafront news of his demise spreading like a tidal wave.
Let us, therefore, here fast forward LP’s Bobby music as RK-heard, so as to be able to travel further – into 1974. Wasn’t that the landmark year in which Lata Mangeshkar sang, so prestigiously, at the Royal Albert Hall in London? Before holding her first overseas concert there, Lata had made a cozy proposal to Naushad. Her 1974 offer to him was one lakh of rupees, cash down, if Naushad would agree to grace the exalted Royal Albert Hall show at which she had been invited to perform. Her request was straightforward – that Naushad would be seated upon the podium (as a status symbol?) while she rendered, in his august presence, such perennials of his as: Uthaaye jaa unke sitam (in Raag Kedara from Andaz); Mohe bhool gaye saanwariya (in Raag Bhairav from Baiju Bawra); Marnaa teri gali mein (in Raag Pahadi from Shabab); Na miltaa gham to (in Raag Yaman from Amar); Mohe panghat pe Nandlal (in Raag Gaara from Mughal-e-Azam); Phir teri kahaani yaad aayi (in Raag Maand from Dil Diya Dard Liya); and so on.
Naushad politely turned down such an orchestrated projection of Lata Mangeshkar as militating against his self-esteem. While narrating the episode to me, said Naushad: ‘I couched it in a nice vein by excusing myself upon the ground that I myself planned to hold such a nite of my timeless hits. Was this indeed the Lata speaking who had looked scared out of her wits as she executed for me, in Mehboob’s Andaz [1949], Uthaaye jaa unke sitam in the Kalyan thhaat?2 Lata then empathizingly delivered on Uthaaye jaa unke sitam with Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor present at the recording, firm in their conviction that a Maharashtrian girl just could not make the Urdu cut as a singer. Lata proved them wrong and how! Yet a lakh of rupees, now, from a lady whom I myself had taught how to sing with the correct Urdu diction?’
Naushad related this to me a decade, and more, after 1974. Smiling mischievously, therefore, I slyly drew Naushad’s attention to the fact that we were into the March of 1986. A time by which, I pointed out, he had collected a similar one lakh of rupees going with the 1984 Lata Mangeshkar Award bestowed upon him by the Government of Madhya Pradesh.
‘The significant thing there,’ shot back Naushad, ‘is that the award came, not from Lata Mangeshkar in person, but from the Madhya Pradesh Government. An award created in the name of Lata Mangeshkar by an institution I have no objection to accepting. What if there had been, say, a Mohammed Rafi Award from a similar government agency? How possibly could I have spurned such a Mohammed Rafi citation? The award has to be by an institution; no matter if, after that, it is in the name of a personality.’
Did anyone ever win an argument with Naushad? Without once losing his cool, Naushad would deflect a journalist’s leading question with rare savoir faire. He handled the media with the same dexterity with which he scored his music. This is where Anil Biswas really underrated Naushad. But no such fatal error of judgement was there on the part of the ones due to displace Anil Biswas from that 1956 movie classic, Basant Bahaar (based upon Ta Ra Su’s Kannada literary pathsetter: Hamsageethe (the swan song). Never ever did the Lata-beholden SJ duo commit the strategising blunder of underestimating Naushad – ‘Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai’ understood that ‘Mughal-e-Azam’3 was not to be easily dethroned!
Why have I suddenly turned the spotlight upon Ms Lata Mangeshkar and Messrs Shanker-Jaikishan after having been so enchantingly on the Naushad–Noorjehan trip? With due deference to each one from the passing parade of composers scoring with such distinction from 15 August 1947 down, this part of the debate still is about those charismatically vying for the top three slots in our musical hierarchy. Here C. Ramchandra had rapidly lost ground after 1958. The one to make a quantum leap in the ratings as a result, O. P. Nayyar, had shot himself in the Radio Ceylon foot by 1959. What a time for OP to decide, as the Rhythm King, that he had a bone to pick with the Binaca Geetmala VIP presenter Ameen Sayani – as the one to coin the Nayyar-irking ‘Shanker-Jaikishani sangeet’ catchline!
That opened the ring, miraculously, for SJ to be able, ruthlessly, to cut through as the neo contenders and go zooming on to vie for the number one spot. Yes, by 1959, SJ had begun coming across as track-setting enough to venture to take on – in their own maverick way – even Naushad. Shanker-Jaikishan thus, as sure-fire hit makers, began posing a positional threat to Naushad in terms of something more than sheer orchestrating novelty. Till the 1949 Barsaat point when Shanker-Jaikishan materialized, C. Ramchandra had been the one instrumental in keeping Naushad on his orchestrating toes. The Shanker-Jaikishan duo, being still comparative newcomers at the Awaara turn of the 1950s, probably saw the future with more clarity than did most others, as they began composing with flair and imagination. SJ certainly had the wisdom to discern that there would have been no Shanker-Jaikishan if there had been no Lata Mangeshkar. Ironical when you think of the audibly false note that Shanker subsequently came to strike as he put up a ‘scarecrow’ like Sharda as competition to Lata – by the Aayegaa kaun yahaan 1965 Gumnaam stage. This after Shanker-Jaikishan had devised a totally swaying-away Bhairavi to be, by the 1961 turn, a Naushad competing force in the specialist sphere of raag weaving too.
Yet Naushad was king right up to end-1960. No matter that the crest he sported now rested there by Dilip Kumar favour, seeing how the 1960 year-end Kohinoor had been preceded by the Prince Salim-prominent Mughal-e-Azam. The Mughal musical rule in our films then, how much longer was it going to last? A querulous query raised, while Mughal-e-Azam and Kohinoor were set for noteworthy silver jubilee runs, as we headed for 1961. Indeed the 1961–70 ‘Yahoo! Yahoo!’ decade had begun as nothing less than a Junglee jamboree. A jamboree proving a witness to Shammi Kapoor going skiing, chasing the nubile Beauty Queen Saira Banu, as the lady killer star maker set to give the ‘athletics of screen romance’ a feisty new form and meaning. Cinesangeet market values too, as ordained by the SJ dispensation, were visibly undergoing a degree of transformation that made it imperative for Naushad to adopt a heroic new stance calculated to free him of the Dilip Kumar yoke – ultimately.
Whether the Shanker-Jaikishan duo did advance enough to overcome Naushad’s numero uno status is even today a matter for conjecture. But SJ enjoyed an enviably dominant standing as we moved into the 1960s. Naushad, following the high musical success of his Mughal-e-Azam and Kohinoor (both coming in the latter half of 1960), was still by no means easy to supersede, as his Gunga Jumna, all acclaim, mounted the screen in the November of 1961. Still SJ could be viewed, by this juncture, as being the sole obstacle to our maestro’s continuing hold on the commanding heights of the film music economy. Some argue that Shanker-Jaikishan, at best, were ‘black statuesque’ Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai pretenders to the Filmfare crown. Others submit that SJ innovatively moved with the times while Naushad – as the ‘Madhuballadeer’ of the K. Asif epic – was observed to be the monument of classical enchainment, following Mughal-e-Azam. No matter to which school of thought you subscribe, the fact remains that, as ring tones changed by the time when Dilip Kumar’s Gunga Jumna arrived, it took a grim rearguard action by Naushad to level the field, anew, via Mere Mehboob (releasing by the end of October 1963). That was the game-changer Rajendra Kumar starrer so signed by Naushad as for him (by end-1961) – in one stroke of the pen – to go racing past Shanker-Jaikishan. Yet Naushad could hold on to such a plush ranking but fleetingly. His Mere Mehboob gambit only galvanized SJ into the style of action that saw the duo’s fees soaring as never before.
To get back to basics, the music of Shanker-Jaikishan was under discussion with Naushad – about how the gales of change had blown since early 1963. For all the name that the SJ duo had made by that juncture, the vibes in that camp were no longer sounding too positive. This as Sharda, set to obsess Shanker, and Pallavi, yet to wed Jaikishan, had sharpened the edge of duo-duelling by bluntly baring their claws. Indeed Shanker and Jaikishan, by 1964, were even beginning to sign films separately, if still compulsively under the SJ brand name. This at a point in time when Jaikishan, on his own steam, had taken a music director’s fees galloping to an astronomical new high. By brashly standing up for, and stylishly pocketing, Rs 500,000 for Ramanand Sagar’s Arzoo (releasing in the first week of November 1965). It so came about that Jaikishan was away abroad (during August 1965) as the last song for that Arzoo blockbuster still remained to be recorded. Whereupon Ramanand Sagar, as producer and director of Arzoo, had logically turned to partner Shanker for succour. Only for that sharp-spoken composer, nonchalantly, to ask Ramanand Sagar to put down Rs 25,000 for completing the Arzoo score. Yes, Shanker, not Jaikishan, it was who went on to compose – with nerve and verve – the N55024 double-sided Asha Bhosle, Mubarak Begum and chorus Arzoo qawwali: Jab ishq kahein ho jaata hai. ‘I know nothing about your deal with Jaikishan,’ Shanker now told Ramanand Sagar. ‘From hereon, if you want Shanker to compose for a film going under the name of Shanker Jaikishan, my fee, like Jaikishan [after Arzoo], is Rs 500,000, take it or leave it.’
That Shanker Jaikishan (even in the credit titles) were glimpsed to forget all about the hyphen connecting their names – while they were engaged in the one-point programme of overtaking Naushad on the rate-war front – is a telltale pointer to the vicarious leverage that our composing ace came to exercise in the after-gleam of Mere Mehboob (October 1963). By assiduously jacking up his price for Mere Mehboob, Naushad, it was apparent, had pushed Shanker Jaikishan to the wall. He had stampeded the two into a self-destruct mode by which the one was trying to pull down the other. In the process it was Shanker Jaikishan’s aura that was taking a beating in our eyes and ears. As Shanker and Jaikishan ceased to be on speaking terms, that deadly duo’s near inseparable colleague, songwriter Hasrat Jaipuri, sullenly shaking his head, identified it all as the doing of one woman: Sharda. About Pallavi – by then married to Jaikishan (on 31 August 1963) – Hasrat said nothing, since he now worked only with the younger composer in the duo.
As I impishly brought up with Naushad the ticklish Sharda–Shanker matter resulting in all this hullabaloo, that composer – blandly posturing as if he knew nothing at all about suchlike goings-on – came up with a memorable quote. ‘It has been my film industry experience,’ said Naushad, ‘that outside your home you could fight a hundred of them. But, once there’s a problem inside your home, you would be amazed at the speed with which you lose your authority to hit back. Shanker is a deft composer, one well versed in the finer points of music. If he has a thing going with this one whom you name as the huge new influence in his life, it’s okay as his personal matter. But why does he bring it into his fann, into his art? The instant you mix the two, your musical pursuit and your personal life, you’re asking for professional trouble.’
‘But Shanker insists that Sharda is the answer to Lata!’ I pointed out. ‘In fact, Shanker brought Sharda into the industry aiming to corner Lata – fed up with the dictatorial ways of the first lady of our music.’
‘What first lady?’ asked Naushad tartly. ‘I tell you, it’s you writers who have invested Lata with these grandiose labels. Labels taking the credit away from us composers as her true preceptors. What was Lata when she came to me, some time in the middle of 1948, to render Tod diyaa dil meraa for Mehboob’s Andaz? She was but a carbon copy of Noorjehan. Oh, Lata swiftly grasped the nuances of the Bhilawal thhaat in which I wanted her to reproduce, for me, Tod diyaa dil meraa upon Nargis. But she merely re-created what I had created. A singer is purely interpretative, not creative.’
‘Yet what calibre of interpretation!’ I persisted. ‘Interpretation mellifluous enough for each one of you to turn to Lata. Each one of you except one Omkar Prasad Madan Gopal Nayyar. That surely suggested something extra special?’
‘You’re confusing two different entities – singer and composer,’ came back Naushad cannily. ‘You’re, in effect, mixing up Naushad the composer with Lata the singer. Remember, Lata the singer is only as good as Naushad the composer gets her to be or lets her be. Just now you mentioned Shanker. I remember congratulating Shanker upon the superb way in which that composer had [in April 1953] cast the Aankhon aankhon mein ghazal for Lata [upon Bina Rai playing Aurat]. Now here is a classic example of the composer at work upon the singer. Shanker has tried hard, very hard, to bring Lata to us in her own voice. Yet a vocal hangover of Noorjehan abides. Who brought Lata out of her Noorjehan fixation? We composers did, of course. Lata, if she is honest with herself, would be acknowledging the fact that one Naushad had a signal role to play in her shedding the Noorjehan mantle.
‘All of us have faced problems with Lata,’ went on Naushad. ‘If she’s grown bigger than the music director, the fault lies in the way in which some of our composers collaborated in putting her on a pedestal. Shanker might have a point in contending that, if we made Lata, we could also create another Lata. But it’s a job that you have to undertake with a certain subtlety. Obviously, you do not flaunt a non-talent and say that you have the spot answer to Lata. SJ must remember how lucky they were to get Lata, all there [by 1948-49], for Raj Kapoor to help them make a name for themselves straight away with Barsaat. We senior composers had helped turn Lata into the finished product by then. By the time Shanker-Jaikishan came, we had Lata taiyyar [fully prepared]. No composers’ path therefore was as easy as that of these two.’
Verily had SJ gone on to take over – from the Lata-lost C. Ramchandra – the notch placing them second only to Naushad by the turn of the 1960s. But the number one position Naushad surrendered to none – from among a host of wannabes – in that all-determinant decade of 1951–60. A decade popularly viewed as the golden era of Hindustani film music. It was the Jadoo of Naushad that was to light up this decade, beginning 1951, as the sloe-eyed Nalini Jaywant proceeded to hold us in a thrall. A thrall having Lata’s Lo pyaar ki ho gayi jeet balam hum tere ho gaye matching, at another level, Shamshad Begum’s Jab nain milen nainon se aur dil pe rahaa na kaaboo. Two numbers helping viewers – in that era of no uniform theatre airconditioning – to beat the May 1951 heat.
Naushad thus had set up Lata Mangeshkar against Shamshad Begum for the Best Singer contest mentally to begin – a full seven years before the Filmfare top playback performer award came into being by 1958.4 That no Naushad composition ever won for Lata, even for Rafi, the Filmfare Best Singer Award is the delicious irony of our film music. That Naushad’s first (1953) Filmfare Best Music Director Award for Baiju Bawra should have been his last only heightens that irony. Even the all-encompassing Padma Bhushan at last came to Naushad in January 1992, as the cherry on the icing following the authentic 1981 Dadasaheb Phalke Award for Lifetime Achievement. But the upmarket Filmfare Best Music Director Award – for the aural score of an entire movie rather than for one stray song from it – tantalizingly eluded Naushad throughout his composing life. A musical life stretching to 65 years from Prem Nagar to Taj Mahal, a 1940–2005 wingspan that embraced Shahjehan (1946), Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Love and God (1986). Yeh naadaanon ki duniyaa ha yeh diwanon ki mehfil hai – the Rafi–listener ‘get-together’ suggested by those 1986 Love and God lines vivifies the impressive hold that Naushad came to exercise upon an entire generation. A generation attuned and addicted to him as a musical marvel thematizing an era when melody was queen because composer was king.
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1 From Mehboob’s Anmol Ghadi (1946). Music by Naushad. Song-lyric by Tanvir Naqvi. Rendered by Noorjehan and Surendra.
2 A scale of seven notes from which any number of raags take birth.
3 It was Shanker-Jaikishan’s Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai that bagged the Filmfare Best Music Director Award for 1960 and not Naushad’s Mughal-e-Azam, a film marking, during the same year, a milestone in our cinema.
4 The Filmfare Best Playback Singer Award (like the Filmfare Best Lyricist Award) came into being only with the year 1958. Its maiden winner was Lata Mangeshkar for Aa jaa re pardesi, the theme song of Madhumati composed by Salil Chowdhury to go upon Vyjayanthimala in Bimal Roy’s 1958 Filmfare Best Picture of that name. Initially, there was just one singer award. Only starting 1967 was this award bifurcated into the Best Playback Singer (Male) and Best Playback Singer (Female) segments.