UPFRONT NO LONGER AS THE BACKLASH COMES
Ae mere mushkil-kushaa fariyaad hai fariyaad hai
Aap ke hote huue duniyaa meri barbaad hai
Bekas pe karam keejiye Sarkar-e-Madeena
Bekas pe karam keejiye
Gardish mein hai taqdeer bhanwar mein hai safeena
Gardish mein hai taqdeer bhanwar mein hai safeena
Bekas pe karam keejiye Sarkar-e-Madeena
Bekas pe karam keejiye …1
WHY DO WE FIND NAUSHAD TO BE REPEATEDLY RETURNING TO THE theme-song of his having failed to seal the Filmfare Best Music Director Award for Mughal-e-Azam? The 1960 career pinnacle that this K. Asif epic marked for Naushad had cried out (by mid-1961) for just such a pride prize as the status clincher in the eyes of this Mammon-driven industry. Being pronounced as the burnished winner of that black statuette – in the awards announcement getting to be made only by the end of May 1961 as Mughal-e-Azam headed for a golden jubilee – would have meant Naushad continuing his bid to remain number one. No such timely Filmfare recognition pushed our Sangeet Samrat into the category of a classicist fast turning into a status symbol. An after-14-years return to the fond fold of his mentor, Abdul Rashid Kardar, with Dil Diya Dard Liya (1966) signalled, ironically, the beginning of Naushad’s descent from the Wuthering Heights of Emily Brontë, so to speak. The ‘novel’ slide that Naushad’s career took with this Dilip Kumar non-show could be but momentarily halted by that thespian’s Ram Aur Shyam (1967). In fact, as the decisive decade of 1961–70 pressed on, our composing marvel made the distressing discovery that Dame Luck, his proverbial accompanist in orchestrating his career to such heights, had deserted him in the show hour that mattered.
How lucky was Naushad to start the new decade of 1961–70 – set to ring in dramatic changes – with such a Dilip Kumar golden jubilee hit as Gunga Jumna, going on to rank as a milestone movie? Was our maestro even luckier to find a fresh October 1963 talisman in Rajendra ‘Jubilee’ Kumar, the one looking so mesmerizing as he blended with the husn of ‘Husna’ Sadhana – as he blended with the beauty of a heroine nubile as nubile could be – in Mere Mehboob? Luckiest Naushad perhaps was in the Dilip Kumar illusion sedulously created that his March 1964 Leader biggie had been a genuine jubilee hit. This S. Mukerji multistarrer had been nothing of the kind. Even Naushad’s letterhead, listing his jubilee hits including Ram Aur Shyam (July 1967), downplays Leader (March 1964) as a non-performer alongside Saaz Aur Awaz (February 1966), Dil Diya Dard Liya (April 1966) and Palki (May 1967). If at all Leader was anointed as a jubilee hit at any centre, it had to be a naqli jubilee, a fake labelling.
Leader, in fact, had meant such a career downturn for Dilip Kumar, as the ‘star of stars’, that with it began the ulti ginti (reverse count) for Naushad, too, as that superhero’s virtual satellite by now. What Leader came to presage was a Dilip Kumar nosedive. A nosedive from which Vyjayanthimala, still lithesome, stood upflung for a Raj Kapoor waiting to welcome her with open bol-Radha-bol-sangam arms. Naushad’s market rating, as the Leader of music directors, thus stood diminished by the time the new accounting year of April 1964 got going. At least in terms of his tunes helping a film to overcome the final hurdle to a silver jubilee run. It amounted to little that his Leader tunes made endearingly enduring hearing still. Following Leader, the fact that Naushad continued to remain irretrievably invested in three Dilip Kumar films ultra-long in the making – Dil Diya Dard Liya (to come in April 1966), Aadmi (to release in January 1968) and Sunghursh (to follow in October 1968) – did not exactly help matters.
Let us take, first, A. R. Kardar’s Dil Diya Dard Liya. It never looked like coming. When it did finally come – just after the first quarter of 1966 – it was gone almost before it mounted the screen. Such a catastrophe overtook our composing monarch just 10 weeks after Naushad had sadly misjudged things in trying (during the February of 1966) something best described as the throw of Saaz Aur Awaz dice.
The dice, in the result, came to be so hugely loaded against him that it was left to that renowned Southern movie baron, B. Nagi Reddi, to bail out Naushad – by the July of 1967 – with his Ram Aur Shyam for a box-office surety. For all that, no one now doubted the fact that Naushad – once a clean striker of the ball in front of the sightscreen – was on the back foot, following the early-1966 career havoc wrought by Saaz Aur Awaz and Dil Diya Dard Liya folding up inside 80 days of each other. The heat of May 1967, on top of that, saw the sun going down on Waheeda Rehman and Rajendra Kumar’s Palki. This was the outlandish outcome of Naushad trying to foist a 1947 black-and-white story idea upon a 1967 colour-aware audience – à la Saaz Aur Awaz.
That left our sangeet sultan with but one 1967 glimmer of hope in Waheeda Rehman and Dilip Kumar’s Ram Aur Shyam. Our composing virtuoso, here, urgently needed a career correction. This, fortuitously, came to be provided by that Ram Aur Shyam grandslammer from the South materializing as a belated show of musical might by Naushad, restoring to him his lost jubilee lustre. B. Nagi Reddi’s Ram Aur Shyam (releasing in the July of 1967), in fact, came to delineate, by the beginning of 1968, Naushad’s first big silver jubilee hit after Mere Mehboob (acclaimed, as such, as far back as April 1964). Yet, even as Ram Aur Shyam arrived as a saviour, came a whimper in the shape of another Waheeda Rehman–Dilip Kumar starrer Aadmi, the much-delayed movie directed by A. Bhimsingh that limped its way to the screen by the January of 1968. This non-performer, unspooling almost on the heels of Ram Aur Shyam’s silver jubilee, all but nullified the sense of joy brought by that B. Nagi Reddi jubilee gift made to Naushad – as his solitary box-office triumph through three throttling years.
I find it nothing short of amazing that Aadmi should be hailed as a silver jubilee hit when it was the non-grosser of the year 1968 – after its opening week. Such was its producer P. S. Veerappa’s plight that the man did not have the resources to print the film’s song booklet! A payment of Rs 21 lakh as fees to Dilip Kumar – prestigiously one lakh more than what Rajendra Kumar was commanding by the end-1961 juncture – had left the hapless maker of Aadmi in a state of dismal disarray. Next, on the Naushad career chart, was Vyjayanthimala–Dilip Kumar’s Sunghursh, a damp squib if there ever was one during the 1968 Divali festivities. Vyjayanthimala–Dilip Kumar’s Sunghursh – getting to be stretched out in production – was followed by Vyjayanthimala–Rajendra Kumar’s Saathi (signifying the no Naushad respite November-end of a grim 1968). Thus Aadmi, Sunghursh and Saathi had Naushad performing what, for one of his stature, was an unprecedented and unenviable hat-trick. Three thrashings at the hustings inside 10 months represented an extent of setback that Naushad’s frail frame could not be expected to withstand. Two Dilip Kumar duds and one Rajendra Kumar thud, during that cataclysmic year, left Naushad with little to rejoice in the matter of entering the 50th year of his life and times, as his birthday fell on 25 December 1968.
‘Magic Naushad’ is how reverently I had found ‘the man in the Lucknow street’ describing our maestro, as I visited that ‘aristocrat’ city on the 15th of December 1951. It was a trip undertaken after my having been a sad eyewitness, as a 17-year-old cub, to Vijay Hazare’s India being whiplashed (inside three traumatizing days) by Nigel Howard’s England in the December 1951 Kanpur Green Park Test. Kanpur to Lucknow was but a joyride in 1951.
From that December of 1951, exactly 17 years on by the end-1968 litmus-test stage, Naushad had come full dress circle. Indeed Girija and I had gone visiting our staunch stalwart, on a cool evening of December 1968, in an effort to reassure him during what clearly was his term of trial. As we called upon him, we were asked to go in, straight away, and where do we espy Naushad if not on the piano, composing! What to compose to end that calamitous decade was the conundrum that found our sangeet savant caught between the Scylla of quality and the Charybdis of mediocrity.
Even amidst the dwindling returns from his films, look at the intrinsic merit of those tunes that Naushad created for Aadmi, Sunghursh and Saathi. After hearing them afresh, tell me, as a music buff pure and simple, is not Naushad Ali to sangeet what Mushtaq Ali is to cricket – the touch artist supreme? But the maestro’s Midas touch, it had gone suddenly missing. Ganwaar, in fact, underpinned what was to become a ‘standard deviation’ almost all through the 1970s. True, even the best of them had known no better after 30 chastening years in music making. In fact, is it not significant that Naushad’s decline begins from the 1970 Ganwaar year during which our top singers, arbitrarily, switched both the rehearsing and the recording of a song to the same eleventh-hour morning of a single testing day? Just the calibre of switch callously calibrated to put a habitually non-hurrying Naushad off his sure-strike stride. For an in-depth comprehension of the ritzy surrounds in which Naushad fell from box-office grace, it is crucial to study our film industry’s rapidly fluctuating climate from the year in which the new era got under way with the 1961–70 decade dawning.
As the pair set to emerge as the duo of the decade, Shanker-Jaikishan began running Naushad close in the Eastmancolor race to number one. This from the end-October 1961 hour in which Shammi Kapoor landed with a Kashmiri Junglee thump to the strains of Mohammed Rafi bellowing ‘Yahoo! Yahoo!’ as only he could on the Rebel Star. One whom I had labelled as ‘The Revolting Star’ in print at the time, unable to digest the image change that Shammi Kapoor came so vilely wildly to symbolize. The neo mantra of music in our cinema did ‘Yahoo! Yahoo!’ go on to become in Shammi Kapoor’s callisthenic company – for SJ to surge ahead and splurge in the new decade.
But SJ had competition building. Truly ‘colourfully’ to centrestage was O. P. Nayyar preparing to return. OP – considered by SJ to be their bogey boy – had set the stage for a tuneful comeback following the August 1962 black-and-white musical web that he wove around the personae of Sadhana and Joy Mukerji via the Raj Khosla-directed Ek Musafir Ek Haseena. But the big OP bang was to be in Eastmancolor, come November 1963, via Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon. So what if this offering of writer-director Nasir Husain could as well have been styled Phir Wohi ‘Dil Deke Dekho’2 Laya Hoon, as twitted by me then? If that wisecrack had Nasir Husain fuming, how, possibly, could we bypass the enrapturing Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon score that that entertainer had visualized, in breezy association with O. P. Nayyar, on Asha Parekh and Joy Mukerji? O. P. Nayyar’s tuning and Nasir Husain’s taking gave the Kashmir kaleidoscope a different musical dimension altogether. ‘I recognize only Shanker-Jaikishan as competition!’ O. P. Nayyar had bragged earlier, while commending that devil-may-care duo for all but lowering the Naushad mast. An oddball not batting for his son Ashish’s obsessive interest in cricket: O. P. Nayyar. On the one hand, OP missed no opportunity to run down Naushad; on the other, Nayyar brazenly admitted to lifting that composer’s tunes! (‘Maine Naushad ke bahut se gaane churaaye!’)
Alarm bells jangling in his ears – as OP began catching up with SJ – Naushad did a career review. A rewind long overdue, seeing that the 1961–70 era was set to herald a radical swing in musical insights. That not so decorous decade had got going with our Jubilee Kumar showing what ‘elegant romantic variation’ really meant by starring, for starters, opposite a well-seasoned Southern heroine and, next, opposite a Hindi wannabe leading lady from the garden city of Bangalore making her own beauteous waves in Tamil cinema. Rajendra Kumar – whose films were the scale of hits calculated to uplift the fees of our music directors – here first scored big time with Vyjayanthimala as his (February 1961) Aas Ka Panchhi heroine. Come the April of 1961 and we had Rajendra (‘Teri Pyaari Pyaari Soorat Ko’) Kumar going Sasural hunting – to be in tuneful sync with the lotus-eyed Byrappa Saroja Devi. Two hits of high attraction – an attraction matching the drawing power of B. Saroja Devi’s and Vyjayanthimala’s magnetizing eyes – were Sasural and Aas Ka Panchhi. Two early-1961 films going on to single out Rajendra Kumar to be holding near-untrammelled sway, as the Jubilee King, a good five months before Shammi Kapoor could get to exercise his unique Junglee hold on our Eastmancolor-salivating movie audience.
Happily, shikara shooting had rhythmically resumed in Kashmir side by side with Shammi Kapoor assuming a new avatar altogether as the Junglee unleashed to tame the queenly beauty of a Banu all ‘Sairazzmatazz’. Saira Banu’s rapt tuning with Shammi Kapoor via SJ’s ‘Junglee leap forward’ had the vibrant effect of all but metamorphosing the Hindustani cine scene. Yet such Shammi shenanigans, oddly, in no way acted as a damper in the progress of the jubilee jamboree on which Rajendra Kumar stood already launched by J. Om Prakash’s Aas Ka Panchhi, L. V. Prasad’s Sasural and ‘Gemini’ Vasan’s Gharana. Three Junglee-preceding movies hitting the screen inside an astounding frame of 200 days during the year 1961.
What then, for our film trade, was the cardinal difference between Rajendra Kumar and Shammi Kapoor? It was that not once, in the six years following 1960, did a Rajendra Kumar–SJ show turn out to be a fiasco. But Shammi Kapoor, he either succeeded big time or he failed big time in his from-1960-down films having SJ scoring the music going on him. Shammi Kapoor and SJ’s teaming coming unstuck in College Girl (1960), Boy Friend (1961), Dil Tera Deewana (1962) and Budtameez (1966) is proof of that. By contrast, ‘box-office boy’ Rajendra Kumar begins to let down SJ not until Aman (1967) and Jhuk Gaya Asmaan (1968). Begins letting down SJ, that is, only as Saira Banu and he reach a stage, in their torrid togetherness, where they have eyes and ears for only each other. So involved in each other do they become during such an off-screen takeoff that Saira Banu and Rajendra Kumar choose to fly ecstatically high. So high – as an audience-embracing twosome – as to crashland with Aman and Jhuk Gaya Asmaan.
Where Saira Banu and Rajendra Kumar began so electrically to vibe by the June of 1963, there, as a cheer leader, Jaikishan, joyously, simply had to be! Had to be there, simultaneously romancing Pallavi Mariwalla – to the chagrin of one Lata Mangeshkar! The instant in which Saira Banu and Rajendra Kumar’s gazes met, from that moment – in their Ayee Milan Ki Bela of tender tuning during shooting – had Jaikishan begun courting that peach Pallavi. Started courting his Pallu in the Gujarati language equivalent of Tum kamsin ho naadaan ho naazuk ho bholi ho, set off by Main kamsin hoon naadaan hoon naazuk hoon bholi hoon. Imagine, it was Lata singing for Saira thus – for Pallavi to Jai-empathize! Thus did we get to hear the ever lyrical, the ever gallant Hasrat Jaipuri spot-equating with the viewing public of the country. A Hasrat cozily SJ-communicating – to the vicariously participative desi movie viewer – the juicy fact of Saira Banu and Rajendra Kumar going in 1964 Rafi–Lata tandem. A delicate tandem tune so captively captured by Hasrat’s mood pen as to have the spooning pair of Ayee Milan Ki Bela bonding on the spot. A bonding finding Jakishan at his attuning best. It was Pallavi herself who told me all about how Jaikishan and she had rousingly related through his love letter that transliterated, in their Gujarati jargon, as: Tum kamsin ho naadaan ho naazuk ho bholi ho …
Not so bholi, not so naïve, did Pallavi go on to look as she made her name as a top-flight dress designer of India. Such a big name did she become here that, upon entering her Marine Drive Gobind Mahal building in the early 1990s, I spotted the nameplate there to be simply reading: Pallavi J.
‘Jai Jaikishan!’ said I to that as, reflecting upon it, I came away from Gobind Mahal to go past – on my Tulsi Vihar way home – the Seksaria Building. A fabulously wealthy Marine Drive Seaface building in which the dusky Sonali Sheth (later Sonali Rathod) was beginning to make comely watching in the glitzy ghazal era viewing Pankaj Udhas to be studiedly giving, to the listening public in India, what the audience was sorely missing in the cacophonous film music of the late 1980s.
But Sonali came after, Pallavi was there first, wasn’t she? Actually Jaikishan was still some way away from moving with his Pallavi into Gobind Mahal as Junglee happened by the end of October 1961. If anything, the jazzy Jaikishan, at that piquant point, was still sweet on Lata. A Lata going so coyly upon Saira as Jaa jaa jaa mere bachpan kahein jaa ke chhup naadaan – as she lip-synched that ditty upon the neo Beauty Queen falling ‘Saira head over Banu heels’ in love with the Junglee Shammi giving an Elvis Presley twist to lovemaking on the Hindustani screen.
Was Junglee, then, the October 1961 harbinger of a trend by which the accent in our music started shifting from the soft and the sweet to the banal and the boisterous? Messrs Shanker-Jaikishan, having been the ones to release the Junglee genie called Shammi from that VAT 69 bottle, became the ‘on-the-button’ baton wielders after 1961. But O. P. Nayyar, following the euphonius euphoria that he went on to foster via Ek Musafir Ek Haseena (August 1962) and Phir Wohi Dil Laya Hoon (November 1963), kept the SJ duo on their competitive toes. OP left the SJ duo in near jitters with the sustained excellence of the four Rafi solos and the three Rafi–Asha duets that he conjured to go upon Shammi Kapoor in the summer tourist season of May 1964 coinciding with the escapist release, from Satyajit Ray3 custody, of Sharmila Tagore as Kashmir Ki Kali. A Kashmir tourist season inexorably leading up to the ‘Royal Bengal Tigress’ Sharmila Tagore – as the Filmfare ‘uncover’ girl – identifying herself as the 1967 pedigree of pin-up to pin down, if An Evening in Paris it had to be. An evening beholding Shammi Kapoor to be readying himself for the Aasmaan se aaya farishta fray. That peppy song number was but one of the six SJ–Rafi hits that Shammi came to belt out during An Evening in Paris. If SJ we now felt to be revolutionizing the tempo and the tango of popular music through the 1960s, O. P. Nayyar – more innovative than ever before – never let that dextrous duo run away with the cash box. Omkar Prasad Nayyar snazzily chasing down Shanker-Jaikishan, even as Shanker-Jaikishan were to be heard roundly running down Laxmikant-Pyarelal, made the 1966 Sawan Ki Ghata–Love in Tokyo–Aaye Din Bahaar Ke vanity clash of the threesome all the more winsome.
Upon his noteworthy return to the top rungs of the Binaca Geetmala ladder, O. P. Nayyar, happily, appeared to have all but overcome his Naushad preoccupation manifest through the latter half of the 1950s. OP now candidly confessed that the exciting new tone that his music came to acquire had its genesis in the surfacing, all at once, of Shivkumar Sharma as a santoorist; Rais Khan as a sitarist; Hariprasad Chaurasia as a flautist; plus Zakir Husain as a tabla prodigy. OP doubted if, in the pantheon of instrumentalists, we had experienced four such aces in the same pack. Ramnarain on the sarangi had been there as king emperor all along. So much so that Shanker, ever arrogant, was once heard admonishing: ‘Hey you Ramnarain, play only as much as I ask you to do, understand? No more, no less. No embellishing, get it?’
So saying, Shanker would promptly sit at the sarangi and show Ramnarain how – so resilient was the elder member of the duo as a composer. Jaikishan was more persuasive in his demeanour. He respected Goody Seervai on the accordion too much to presume to tell such a senior musician what to do. Jai knew Goody would instinctively give him what he wanted in the right measure. For Naushad, as the original trump card among our composers, none of the four making up the wizard instrumentalist pack held any terrors. He had seen them all, heard them all, over the years. He had watched them as striplings, graduating into the virtuosos that they became. Naushad’s musical word was law for these young men, no matter what be their fresh-found playing status in the 1960s.
But our Trio of Duos cared little, now, for Naushad and his musical ethos. Here, even as the Shanker-Jaikishan duo was seeking to neutralize the growing influence of brother music directors Kalyanji-Anandji as unfailing hit-makers, there was a stunning development on the duo deck. This was small-timers Laxmikant-Pyarelal racing to the forefront from being nowhere in the running! Notably debuting (by end-September 1963) via a sheer C-grader in Babubhai Mistry’s Parasmani (starring Mahipal opposite Geetanjali), Laxmikant-Pyarelal, as arrangers turned composers, came as ‘The Lata Boys’ groomed to put SJ in their hit-parade place. Laxmikant-Pyarelal were also there to ensure that Kalyanji-Anandji soon found themselves to be caught ‘in the middle of nowhere’ – as between SJ and LP. The neo LP duo posed a cheeky challenge to O. P. Nayyar too – to an OP still Asha-smitten. But more of a hazard were LP, as a pair, to the overlordship of SJ, who had held KA well in check until then. But SJ, now, had reason to fear LP as the Lata cat set among the duo pigeons! What is more, SJ well knew the mandolin–violin pair of Laxmikant-Pyarelal to be two lads who had learnt everything ‘on the job’. Laxmikant had a tongue toned even finer than that of Jaikishan. Laxmikant won over hearts in no time. LP’s forward march, through the determinant 1963–67 era, was so steady that Laxmikant – four composing years into films by then – was to summon the gumption to tell me: ‘Ask your Naushad to come – we two, Pyarelal and I, are good enough to take him on now!’ Laxmikant was speaking with the brashness springing from the giant strides to A-rate composing eminence that the duo had made as the go-go boys out to topple SJ, come what may. LP had zoomed from a pulp movie like Parasmani (1963) to the high-class Milan – that Nutan–Sunil Dutt 1967 L. V. Prasad blockbuster due to ensure, for these SJ bugbears, not their maiden but their second Filmfare Best Music Director Award!
The daredevil LP duo so sensationally scored by lubricating their publicity machinery to see that their Dosti, even earlier, had gone on to commandeer the 1964 Filmfare Best Music Director statuette from inside the Sangam bag of tricks employed by SJ. Rajshri’s Dosti (October 1964) had been released simultaneously all over India – by its LP-backing producer-distributor Tarachand Barjatya – with a total of 64 prints (a record for its time). ‘The film came in 1964 and I took out 64 prints!’ explained Tarachand to me. Such a multiple release was possible only because Tarachand Barjatya was a chain theatre owner – distributing films Indiawide. Dosti, with two teenagers (Sushil Kumar and Sudhir Kumar) for its singing and mouth organ-playing heroes, astonishingly clicked in a very big way as directed by ‘child specialist’ Satyen Bose. Clicked purely on the strength of its music scored by Laxmikant-Pyarelal. There were as many as five male solos in Dosti, five solos so very committedly rendered, for these rank newcomer composers, by Mohammed Rafi (as against but one song number to LP’s Lata in the film). Majrooh Sultanpuri’s ‘lyricizing’, too, carried its own pull. Dosti, clearly, was a different denomination musical not to be taken lightly.
Yet SJ had been contemptuously dismissive of LP’s Dosti as a musical bestseller simply lacking the high-voltage, star-studded fire power to bid, in a straight contest with Raj Kapoor’s Sangam, for the Filmfare black beauty. How fickle a mistress that ebony trophy could be is something that the Sangam-mooning SJ, to their cost, RK-realized the hard way now. It was no idle boast, therefore, Laxmikant-Pyarelal daring Naushad by mid-1967, though the idea took a year more to fructify. Yes, 1968 was the benumbing year in which Naushad all but met his Waterloo, following the shock showing of his Aadmi, Sunghursh and Saathi in a highly demoralizing 41-week cycle.
LP’s Bharat Vyas-penned Jeevan dor tumhein sang baandhi grip on our classical modes gave them an edge among the up-and-comers. Lata naming the above 1964 Raag Yaman Sati Savitri lovely to be ranking among her 10 Silver Jubilee Bests, in April 1967, gave LP’s career, already flourishing, a rare stimulus. By this late-1967 stage LP were already in the bracket next only to SJ, though it had taken this market-driven duo a while to get there – past KA and OP.
KA, OP and LP the industry could still trade against one another to bring down the price range of each, using as a catalyst Ravi for the devaluing foil. But Shanker-Jaikishan, they continued to rate above them all in the estimate of our movie moneybags, as that durable duo’s ‘track’ record continued to do the successful speaking for them. In fact, LP were ultra-keenly to watch, as SJ stuck out for a major fee raise from Filmyug’s J. Om Prakash (Omji). This following Naushad’s Rs 225,000 end-1961 signing of Mere Mehboob as a demonstration of his new-found Rajendra Kumar clout. Stung to the quick by old stager Naushad’s totally unforeseen Mere Mehboob fee-doubling feat, Shanker-Jaikishan (charging Rs 175,000 after Junglee) had been no casual game-watchers. The duo’s adroit advantage lay in the films that SJ scored in such swift succession. On top of Aas Ka Panchhi and Sasural in the first half of 1961, SJ were to come up with such standout Rajendra Kumar grossers as Hamrahi and Dil Ek Mandir through 1963. Crucial point here: while finalizing the fees for Hamrahi and Dil Ek Mandir through the 1962 ambit, SJ had incredibly upped their ante to levy, in one shot of the arrow, Rs 300,000 per movie, shrewdly perceiving that both those (1963) films were to be Rajendra Kumar starrers! Thus had Shanker-Jaikishan left Naushad (at Rs 225,000) far behind long before Mere Mehboob came to be released in the October of 1963. Such a Shammi Kapoor brand-varnishing 1962 starrer as Professor had only added to the SJ musical glitter. Indeed SJ had taken due notice of the fact that Naushad had harnessed the telling point of his Gunga Jumna (November 1961) being in all-sweeping colour to price himself anew. Now SJ had Shammi Kapoor, as Professor in colour, to add flavour to any fresh fee rise that they sought. Who among our top producers was going to be Shanker-Jaikishan’s next target became, in such a face-off, the theme keenly deliberated upon in the ‘Max-Factory’ industry.
It is imperative, at this decisive juncture, to debate price differentials during the 1961–70 decade – to put Naushad in performing perspective. Believe it or not, Shanker-Jaikishan soon displayed the nerve and the verve to demand Rs 350,000 from Filmyug’s J. Om Prakash for his Saira Banu–Rajendra Kumar sizzler in colour: Ayee Milan Ki Bela (1964). A crestfallen Omji, until then looking upon SJ as ‘my boys’, was left with no go but to pay up and feel the difference. Small consolation it was to Omji as he watched SJ going, from there, to a fantabulous Rs 450,000. A sum that SJ collected, from the capacious hands of Gemini’s S. S. Vasan, for that Madras Mughal’s lavishly mounted Ramanand Sagar-directed Zindagi. That is, for the 1964 Gemini-banner presentation featuring the awesome trio of Rajendra Kumar, Vyjayanthimala and Raaj Kumar. ‘Gemini’ Vasan had always been known to pay handsomely for those turning up tops. Yet to shower Rs 450,000 upon SJ, just like that? How, after Gemini’s Zindagi, Jaikishan ventured to ask for, and get, Rs 500,000 in the case of Ramanand Sagar’s Sadhana–Rajendra Kumar box-office sparkler, Arzoo (1965), is by now part of our screen lore. Do pay attention to the fact of each one of the films, immediately cited above, having been a Rajendra Kumar starrer – whether it be Ayee Milan Ki Bela (1964); or Zindagi (1964); or Arzoo (1965). Only query then – were Shanker-Jaikishan beginning to overreach themselves? In a decade set to end with Rahul Dev Burman joining the two-fisted Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo for the film trade to begin to envision its first fling at cutting Messrs Shanker-Jaikishan to performing size – as ‘tones’ further changed by 1969-70?
But we were on LP-Omji. Anything more than the Rs 350,000 – accessed at near gunpoint by SJ for Saira Banu–Rajendra Kumar’s Ayee Milan Ki Bela (1964) – Omji, for one, was not ready to shell out. Paying SJ even a rupee more became, from this crunch juncture, a point of personal pride with Omji. SJ’s adventurous advance to Rs 350,000 in the colour decade – from the Rs 125,000 that Omji had handed to the duo for Vyjayanthimala–Rajendra Kumar’s black-and-white Aas Ka Panchhi (February 1961) – had left the man shaken to the core. So much so that Omji, now, did not even bother to broach the subject with SJ where it came to doing the music of his ‘song atmospheric’ Asha Parekh–Dharmendra starrer: Aaye Din Bahaar Ke (1966). Omji decided to hit SJ where it would hurt that duo the most – by booking their arch-rivals, Laxmikant-Pyarelal, for Aaye Din Bahaar Ke.
LP accepted the offer with alacrity to come up with an enchantingly landscaped score for the theme. Omji – while paying LP not even one-fifth of the Rs 350,000 that SJ had wheedled out of him for Ayee Milan Ki Bela – opted to promote his handpicked duo in a big-big way. At the Famous Labs Mahalaxmi press show of his sans-SJ Aaye Din Bahaar Ke, Omji made it a ‘show-SJ-how’ issue to present each one of 75-80 mediapersons there – on the dot in the June of 1966 – with a complete set of that Asha Parekh–Dharmendra colour starrer’s 78-rpm disc records. This was a mould-breaking ‘first’ by any filmmaker and it helped ram home the point that LP had begun the process of capturing ‘camps’ from SJ. All this while Naushad had been a rueful onlooker as his Saaz Aur Awaz and Dil Diya Dard Liya crashed inside the first four months of 1966.
From SJ to LP – from Aas Ka Panchhi (1961) and Ayee Milan Ki Bela (1964) to Aaye Din Bahaar Ke (1966) and Aaya Sawan Jhoom Ke (1969: yet again Asha Parekh opposite Dharmendra) – was a telltale makeover on the part of J. Om Prakash. With a tinge of sadness had Omji told me: ‘It was a huge fee-raise demand that led to my parting from SJ at a time when I still very much wanted them.’
LP taking over in the J. Om Prakash establishment underlined that the youthful twosome was beginning to close the ‘hyphenless’ SJ gap in an era of ‘new vamps for old’. Verily had we moved into voluptuous times where a composer was almost assessed by how catchily he tuned with the vamp rather than with the heroine! As even bolder floozies came on the scene, Helen, as the cabaret dancer par excellence, discerned that her date with ‘calendar girl’ destiny was near at hand. Music was becoming at once racier and raunchier, as underscored by an LP getting even their Lata to sound more in tune with the tempestuous milieu. This via Helen with Aa jaan-e-jaan aa meraa yeh husn jawaan. Next, getting the same Lata, in the same 1969 SJ-avenging Inteqam, to go naughtily tipsy, upon the by then living-it-up Sadhana, via Kaise rahun chup ki maine pi hi kyaa hai.
Two Laxmikant-Pyarelal Inteqam-wreaking song numbers sending the message to SJ, on the one side, and to Naushad, on the other, that the leading lady – as we were poised to enter the 1970s – was the heroine and the harlot rolled into one. In other words, the setting no longer belonged to the old-style courtesans – to the tawaifs and the begums of Naushad’s nawabi epoch. Leave aside Naushad’s positioning here, even SJ, no longer, were the omnipresent duo. Rahul Dev Burman – even in the face of big daddy Sachin Dev Burman refusing to age – had taken over, by early 1970, as the new pathsetter to reckon with in the new decade.
But we are racing ahead of the field. To go strictly in sequence, even as LP so balefully baited SJ, Kalyanji-Anandji (having started out, in April 1958, as Kalyanji Virji Shah with Samrat Chandragupta) remained no slowcoaches in the rat race. KA had splendid orchestral support in their team led by stage showboy Babla. Thus Kalyanji-Anandji, too, were always somewhere there in the postcard picture. KA were not only melodious in the recording studio but also extra-adjusting in the matter of payments to be made outside that room. They were ‘show business’ men from Gujarat’s Kutch first, Mumbai music directors after. They had defined their music room as a ‘department store’! Here the filmmaker could take his choice of whichever tone of tune he wanted, just about everything being on tap.
In such a locale, S. D. Burman – for all his tennis staying power in the matter of originating lasting hits during such a demanding decade – came through as a glorious commercial misfit. SD, in fact, sat tongue-tied, as SJ lifted the 1966 Filmfare Best Music Director Award, for Suraj, from under Dada Burman’s Guide nose. A greyhound nose clueless about how such a reversal in composing fortunes could have possibly occurred. About S. D. Burman, Roshan, Madan Mohan and Khayyam, therefore, SJ, KA, OP and LP could be uncaring – as no real fee threats to their top-notch slots. Naushad they recognized as a ‘vintageing’ force still but, from the more contemporary lot, the one that they dared not spurn was Ravi, the guy whom they addressed as ‘Panditji’ (given his Brahminic Ravi Shanker Sharma nomenclature). Ravi was the subdued, soft-spoken one, chipping away all the time at the firm Radio Ceylon foundation laid by SJ, KA and LP as the domineering Trio of Duos. As sweet of tongue as of tune, Ravi was the one performer that the Trio of Duos, and even OP, seriously underrated.
Naushad, on the other hand, always recognized that ‘Panditji’ Ravi posed a distant danger. It was Naushad’s long-time experience that those who were less trained in music were the ones able, readily, to reach out to the masses. Their very lack of musical schooling enforced upon them – as Naushad was at pains to emphasize – an instinctual concentration upon sheer simplicity of tune. The ever mild-mannered Ravi was thus to remain a major coin spinner almost through the 1960s. Luck was but another name for Ravi. He was full of pluck too, never resting on his oars. Ravi worked at his music so unobtrusively that no one knew how he contrived to lift the 1961 Filmfare Best Music Director Award for Gemini’s S. S. Vasan-directed Gharana (Asha Parekh starring opposite Rajendra Kumar – with Raaj Kumar and the South’s Devika, too, prominent in the cast). Yet again, in 1965, no one guessed how self-effacingly Ravi repeated the 1961 Filmfare Best Music Director Award-winning feat, this time via that A. Bhimsingh-directed hit all over India, Khandan (starring Nutan opposite Sunil Dutt).
Here, merrily out of tune with the times, was our Naushad – as the Lost Mughal – still bemoaning his 1960 Filmfare Award loss, on the K. Asif opus, to SJ. There was Ravi, creating his own Gharana of music to upstage, not just the Trio of Duos, but all others, in the ‘Come Wednesday’ game of musical chairs that was the Binaca Geetmala of Ameen Sayani. The fact that Ravi also knew how to look after Radio Ceylon made him a live peril. Ravi, shall we say, had all but mastered the art of ‘getting at from under’; understanding, with becoming modesty, that all the flamboyance going belonged to Naushad, SJ, OP and LP. Low key was Ravi and content to stay low key. Never locking horns, openly, with the Trio of Duos, always according Naushad pride of placement at any Cine Music Directors Association meet. Ravi made Madras his Gemini-AVM firing base, leaving our Kilkenny-catty ‘fight composers’ to slug it out, among themselves, in the feisty tinpan alley of Bombay City. Ravi knew better than most how to ‘manage’.
Naushad, for his old-world part, knew how to manage neither the Filmfare Award nor Radio Ceylon. He had to be grateful that his reputation – as one whose musical integrity derived from the gift of being able to compose only hits – continued to work for him at Radio Ceylon. They could not ignore ‘Music by Naushad’ there even if they had wanted to do so. Radio Ceylon had to contend with Naushad’s all-pervading aura that gave his music a listeners’ request momentum – a momentum that there was no damming, given his abiding ability to create lasting hits. Thus Naushad spent nothing. ‘A spent bullet’ was the charge, in fact, that Naushad had to face in this savage decade. That he came to bite the Mere Mehboob bullet – by way of startlingly seeking a humongous hike in fees – therefore came as a bolt from the blue to the industry. True, they had sworn by Naushad’s name at one time. But where now could they slot Naushad – by end-1961? Against such a background, let us take a valid look at the concatenation of circumstances that saw Naushad reaching a minus situation. A situation that he never should have found himself in, keeping in view the fact that he was continuing to generate hits, all the way, in each film that he did.
The industry’s objection to Naushad raising the price bar – as it turned out – had nothing to do with this practised campaigner’s capacity to come up with song-hits. It had everything to do with his continuous Dilip Kumar nexus. A Dilip Kumar show had grown into a gigantic gamble, following the true box-office feedback on Leader by the end of the first quarter of 1964. In such a Leader-down environment, Naushad they had come to look upon as an attendant risk that they had to run – as excess Dilip Kumar baggage. A Dilip Kumar film now cost a prince’s ransom, as the gestation period, here, grew longer and longer. If, after all that, an April 1966 Dilip Kumar show like Dil Diya Dard Liya exploded in the financier’s face, it meant, in sum, that Naushad’s music was no longer helping to extend a movie’s box-office longevity. Short point – Naushadian music was now viewed to be commercially failing the Dilip Kumar film. That the Dil Diya Dard Liya songs went on to be upheld as composing classics least interested a trade assessing music makers purely by its glam-sham maxim of this being an industry living for the moment, not the morrow.
The fact that the name of Naushad vis-à-vis Dilip Kumar had not been queried, in any way, right up to Gunga Jumna (November 1961) is the trick of the film trade. Here in films, it is all about winning; no one has any time for losers. It was the harsh fact of Leader (March 1964), Dil Diya Dard Liya (April 1966), Aadmi (January 1968) and Sunghursh (October 1968), each one of those four films seeing Dilip Kumar, all too suddenly, shedding his sheen, that put Naushad’s career on the line. The reason for Naushad failing to score in films that would be as solid hits as his tunes in them – argued the trade now – was his steadfast refusal to break with Dilip Kumar. If, in between, a Naushad show starring Dilip Kumar, like B. Nagi Reddi’s Ram Aur Shyam (mid-1967), performed most impressively at the counter, that was but a Madras flash in the Bombay pan! A success average of ‘one out of five’ was not good enough in the case of a till-1964 seldom failing performer like Naushad – now no longer in the kind of jubilee form that they had known him to be at his composing zenith.
Put that way, the film trade had a view for us cinegoers seriously to weigh. Even if the charge came to be conveniently made only as the Naushad–Dilip Kumar combine started failing with Leader at a time (March 1964) when, significantly, Raj Kapoor was to due to deliver with Sangam. There remained, here, a glaring fact for Naushad to ponder. This was that no fewer than 15 of his 30 films had been with Dilip Kumar in an extended 20-year span (from Mela, October 1948, down to Sunghursh, October 1968). The other Naushad heroes figuring in this composer’s 15 films remaining (out of those 30) – during the same 20-year spread – could be counted upon your fingers with a few to spare! They are: 1. Shyam (Chandni Raat and Dillagi); 2. Suresh (Dulari, Jadoo and Diwana); 3. Raj Kapoor (Dastan); 4. Bharat Bhooshan (Baiju Bawra, Shabab and Sohni Mahiwal); 5. Rajendra Kumar (Mere Mehboob, Palki and Saathi); and 6. Joy Mukerji (Saaz Aur Awaz). That made it a total lack of top-class manly variety through 20 years – a tally of just six heroes in 28 films (discounting Mother India, 1957, and Son of India, 1962, as movies that had no real leading men). To the plea that the hero is the maker’s and not the music maker’s choice, the rejoinder is that Naushad always looked at the names of the hero and the heroine before signing on the momentous line! Thus, even when Naushad (after five films with the Tragedy King in the 1948–51 period) did finally sway away from Dilip Kumar to do Baiju Bawra in 1952, he tended to get rooted upon another hero in Bharat Bhooshan. It came to be Bharat Bhooshan, not only in Baiju Bawra (end-1952), but also in Shabab (mid-1954) and then in Sohni Mahiwal (end-1958). Likewise, in the 1963–68 orbit, Naushad was observed, almost, to work with Rajendra Kumar in three films running – if you ignored the February 1966 Saaz Aur Awaz Joy Mukerji aberration. Following Mere Mehboob (end-1963), Naushad had stayed with Rajendra Kumar through Palki (mid-1967) and Saathi (end-1968). Indeed, even after 1968, Naushad had continued to look upon Rajendra Kumar as his after-Dilip Kumar lifeline – in three such nondescript movies as Ganwaar (mid-1970); Tangewala (mid-1972); and Sunehra Sansar (early 1975). Naushad did try to make a point of how, out of those three latter-day movies of his, Ganwaar and Tangewala had been adjudged by the trade itself to be ‘very good hits’.
Yet not jubilee hits any more! Ganwaar and Tangewala at best touched, in keeping with the neo-Madras innovated gimmick, ‘100 days’. Also, if we were to get serious about scrutinizing the true worth of Naushad’s music in Ganwaar and Tangewala, you might ask me to get my head examined. Ganwaar might pass muster at a musical pinch, but Tangewala? As for My Friend (showing up in February 1974) and Sunehra Sansar (disappearing in February 1975), I would not dare mention either of them musically – such embarrassing non-scores were they to prove to be in the composing care of Naushad. Let us face it, even Naiyaa meri chalti jaaye from My Friend (early 1974) – for all the Rafi comeback sentiment associated with it – is Raag Bhairavi below Naushad par. Shanker summed it up succinctly as he said: ‘Man does weary with the years, doesn’t he?’ (‘Raju Saab, aadmi thak bhi jaata hai na?’) What Shanker meant by this was that even a Naushad finds that his creative impulses are not responding with the sheer spontaneity that they once did. Fair enough. Let us be grateful that we got the music that we did from Naushad in his jubilee years extending from Station Master (early 1942) to Ram Aur Shyam (July 1967). Even a Sir Donald Bradman goes for a duck in the end. Therefore, after Saathi (1968), you no more presume to discuss Naushad’s music seriously than you make bold to raise the question of Lata Mangeshkar’s singing – in her later performing life. It was in the August of 1970 that Lata Mangeshkar had personally met up with Dilip Kumar at his Pali Hill Bandra home to tie that sisterly Raakhi on his hand. Watching Dilip Kumar from up close then – elevating Lata Mangeshkar to the level of the greatest voice ever – you would just not have guessed that our five-star hero was at the most critical cross in his career.
Consecutively, had he lost box-office primacy with Aadmi and Sunghursh – inside nine months of 1968 – and had, in attempting such a valorous vault, dragged down Naushad with him. It was this deep dip in Naushad’s reserves that had our composing ace turning to Rajendra Kumar, afresh, as his superstar benefactor. How had the Naushad Ali–Rajendra Kumar hook-up begun in the first place? Rajendra Kumar, already beginning to peak by end-1961, had veered towards our composing virtuoso purely in the hope that some of the Naushad–Dilip Kumar Tuu kahe agar piano nostalgia would rub on to him. Yes, Dilip Kumar and his Andaz remained a pet piano obsession with Rajendra Kumar to the end even after all that distinction that he attained on the jubilee marquee. It was as if Rajendra Kumar, still, had to ‘do an Andaz’. If only to prove to himself, if not to others, that Rajendra Kumar was no less a piano-playing legend than Dilip Kumar.
Any other star would have stayed steady with an utterly vocal natural like Mohammed Rafi – after the Rajendra Kumar spell that Naushad had cast via that divine voice with Mere Mehboob. Not so Rajendra Kumar as a performer getting the phenom feeling of being ‘the superhero of superheroes’ by 1966-67. Mohammed Rafi, after all, was already, tonally, Rajendra Kumar’s vocal alter ego in films not falling within the Naushad trajectory. So what about something out of the vocal Naushad way now? If Mukesh could do the Saawan ka mahina trick for a hero lesser known like Sunil Dutt via Laxmikant-Pyarelal with Milan (1967), why not a similar focus for a Rajendra Kumar in a neo-Naushadian Andaz light? What is superstardom if not ‘matinee idolatry’ approximating to narcissistic self-worship culminating in delusions of grandeur? Delusions from which Rajendra Kumar was no more free, now, than Rajesh Khanna was fated to be in his super-superstar years to come …
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1 From K. Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam (1960). Music by Naushad. Song-lyric by Shakeel Badayuni. Rendered by Lata Mangeshkar.
2 Dil Deke Dekho, a November 1959 film starring Asha Parekh as its debutante heroine opposite Shammi Kapoor, is a movie written and directed by Nasir Husain. It came to the screen as S. Mukerji’s maiden movie under the Filmalaya banner that he set up as he left Filmistan. Music is by his debuting find: Usha Khanna. Song-lyrics are by Majrooh Sultanpuri. Singers rendering the 10 numbers in the film are Mohammed Rafi, Asha Bhosle and Usha Khanna (if heard only in one chorus-accompanied number with Rafi). The movie’s background music is scored by Vanraj Bhatia. Usha Khanna’s chief music assistant on Dil Deke Dekho – Master Sonik (of the later Sonik-Omi team).
3 Sharmila Tagore (given her coveted Rabindranath Tagore connection) had started out under the world-renowned direction of Satyajit Ray (opposite the highly adulated Soumitra Chatterjee) in Apur Sansar, the 1959 classic that completed the famous Apu Trilogy. Next (again opposite Soumitra Chatterjee), Sharmila Tagore had distinguished herself in Satyajit Ray’s Devi (1960). From such an artistic start in cinema-conscious Bengal to something sounding so blatantly Bombay commercial as Shakti Samanta’s Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) denoted an extent of comedown that led to Sharmila Tagore being berated by the Bengali cognoscenti. Sharmila Tagore responded by returning to her alma mater under Satyajit Ray – this time opposite the celebrated Uttam Kumar – with Nayak (1966). Not to forget Sharmila Tagore going on to be a part of Satyajit Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (1970) – in renewed association with Soumitra Chatterjee – and Seemabadha (1971), this time with Barun Chanda and Paramita Chowdhury.