Nightscapes

When I was growing up in Bombay evenings were the time of day I looked forward to the most, if only for the lights that gradually began to come up on the buildings on distant Altamount Road on the hill, directly to the west of where I stood on my neighbour's balcony.

Needless to say and to borrow a line from Mr. Rowse's 'A Cornish Childhood', "those lights have held my eyes ever since", as has the dusk that filtered down before it turned into night. The moon had a great way of shining over Bombay in those days, as it captured that period of transition, whether it streamed down upon the Hanging Gardens, or shimmered upon the undulating waves off Marine Drive or the Gateway, and the other sea faces of Bombay. The resulting ambience was the stuff that film poetry was made of. It would not be inaccurate to say that after the mandatory rain song in our films it was the 'moonlit' solo, duet or chorus that stole our hearts.

Oddly enough, before the telescopic lens started zooming skyward and gave us the real thing, it was the black and white photography that created an out-of-this-world euphoria, aided by the quaintness of  studio sets  and art decor and the often 'spotless' (if you know what I mean!) watching full moon, hanging above it all, that gave us musical memories that will stay with us forever! Not all of them can be profiled in one blog despite ample room on cyberspace, but here are some...

The moon was witness, as it were, to joy and sorrow as also to the arrival and departure of star careers. For instance.....

By 1955, Bina Rai's career was hovering between a stumble and closure. The star who had earlier done such memorable work in Anarkali and Kali Ghata was beginning to lose her command at the box office. In 1956 we would see her doing one more fine role in Filmistan's Durgesh Nandini, and another in Nadiadwala's historical romance, Taj Mahal (1963), before finally going her way.

But back to 1955 and G P Sippy's crime thriller, Marine Drive, in which she starred opposite hero-soon-to-turn-villain, Ajit. The film is eminently forgettable but at least two tracks have remained memorable and are still with us, including this lilting solo by Lata. The song patches in a romantic mood right from the beginning, as you see that big orb in the heavens peering down into the bedroom, with the track getting off to a hesitant start as though unable to decide where to go and then picking up melody: it's not a flaw either in the composition or the recording, just the music seeking to reflect itself in the hesitant eyes of the heroine.



That was the much under-rated N. Dutta for you, doing his magic in only his third independent outing as composer (Chandrakanta and Milap being the first two that same year) after a long period of assisting mentor SD Burman. And Sahir Ludhianvi's fine lyric is erotic without being vulgar. One does not see such subtlety anymore...A good friend helped me recall this song after all these years, during a memorable train ride in India in 2008.

Cinema in the South  had a funny way of juxtaposing one ludicrous family situation against another until everyone got together in the last five minutes of a movie for the climactic family photograph, lauding domesticity and exuding happiness. We sat through film after film from AVM and Gemini lapping it all up in the 60s, along with the occasional sly touch of humour that directors from Madras often infused their films with, as comic relief from the bathos.

AVM's Miss Mary (1957) was one such film: a full length attempt at humour bordering often on slapstick thanks to Kishore Kumar and Om Prakash, with Gemini Ganesan (Rekha's dad) and Meena Kumari playing second fiddle via the romantic roles. At least two of the tracks have a pretty setup with the moon and stars in the night and almost genuine-looking garden props.That immortal Lata-Rafi duet O Raatke Musafir was picturised on Meena and Gemini in a pretty detailed set, with mock-drama being the catalyst for the song. For once the pathos on Meena Kumari's face is tongue-in-cheek and not tragic, even as Gemini launches his mock-complaint before the moon. That funny moment as Lata comes in after Rafi-saab's first antara is unforgettable.





There is another track in Miss Mary, a solo in Lata's voice that creates a truly romantic mood as Gemini and Meena act out their charade of being newly-weds before the unsuspecting Om Prakash, at the same time drifting emotionally closer, in time for the denouement. This is one of Lata's best for Hemant-da. Both lyrics were penned by Rajendra Krishan and set to music by Hemant Kumar Mukherjee.






I have always loved the moon above the minaret of a mosque: something very eastern about the image, a picture you will probably never see elsewhere in the world with the same feeling of romance. Add to that a lonesome belle with almond eyes about to give vent to her sorrow, and you have a poem written by Majrooh Sultanpuri, tuned by the great Sachin Dev Burman with the clarionet leading the crooning, with one of Nutan's most effective lip synching: the medium closeups say it all! Lata's voice weaves through the dusk her ethereal magic in a timeless classic....Once again, studio props in silhouette transported us beyond the realms of reality. The film was Filmistan's Paying Guest (1957).



Hrishikesh Mukherjee was one film director who improved with every film he made. Coming as he did from the Bimal Roy camp (he was first assistant to Bimal-da), he retained that master's poetic hold on cinema right to the very end. In Asli Naqli (1962) he was fresh from his success with Anari and Anuradha and was given a trite tale to handle by LB Lachman, with Dev Anand playing the disgusted scion of a rich home casting his lot with the not-so-rich of Bombay. Sadhana was his lady love, a school teacher from the wrong side of the tracks, except that she looked like anything but a poor school teacher from the wrong side of the tracks.

The film was a hit thanks to Shankar Jaikishan's superb musical score and lensman Jaywant Pathare, who captured (for posterity as it were) scenes from the wayside Bombay of the time. The best lensing, however, was reserved for the song sequence towards the end, a Lata solo filmed on Sadhana. Something subliminal about that terrace drenched in the moonlight with the strings, the harp and the accordion in complete harmony, spreading a musical aura all around. All this climaxes as Sadhana turns around and catches the moon fully on the face and the accordion brings the song to its end, and us back to reality....a brilliant Shankar-Jaikishan-Lata-Shailendra symbiosis, if ever there was one. (I'm sure we can all live with the slight off-synch on this fine Shemaroo DVD).



But perhaps the most erotic nightscape in our films was shot by Radhu Karmakar (assisted by a very young Jaywant Pathare who was to later carve a niche for himself  via Hrishikesh Mukherjee's films) in Raj Kapoor's immortal, Awara (1951). Sixty years after we first heard it, the Lata-Mukesh duet Dum Bhar Jo Udhar Munh Phere, remains one of film music's most enduring legacies. Both Lata and Mukesh knew what was expected of them by the director in Raj Kapoor and both rose to the occasion: Lata with the proper abandon reflecting the passion in Nargis' face and the very gentle Mukesh, with the controlled, pensive, hesitation Raj's character demanded at that crucial point in the film. Yes, it was a difficult, unlikely chiaroscuro of sound and expression. And yes, like so much of our other great music it would have fallen by the wayside, just hummed, listened to and not remembered as a visual treat, but for the evocative camerawork. There is not enough subtlety in the English language to capture the nuances of this song sequence in translation.

K. A. Abbas, who penned so many of Raj Kapoor's films, has dwelt at length upon this particular song sequence in an article he once wrote in Filmfare and while his actual words need not be included here they are worth a trip to that magazine's archives if they do exist. Suffice it to say that the English poet Alfred Noyes' "ghostly galleon" of the "cloudy seas" saw it all. That last exchange between the two lovers is amazingly captured with cloud and moon, and a mere lilt from SJ's bass in the background bringing Shailendra's great lyric and its followup to a close.



While Raj Kapoor's long affair with romance reached its peak in Awara, it had its roots in his very first venture as producer-director in 1948's Aag. Whatever the other drawbacks of Aag as a film might be, it remains unsurpassed for its experimentation with light and shade. His photographer at the time was V.N.Reddy and we have a film with exquisite closeups in black and white....especially in the song sequences....with the moon playing hide and seek in the clouds...



Saraswati Kumar 'Deepak' wrote this metaphorical lyric for composer Ram Ganguly (Shankar-Jaikishan were still a year away, with Barsaat) who created and recorded the duet in the voices of Meena Kapoor and Sailesh Mukherjee for the movie. However, as good as Meena Kapoor was, Shamshad Begum proved to be better when the discs were ultimately cut and she with Sailesh Mukherjee have stood the test of time on the 78s.

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And there were other attempts at fine evocative mood photography but the industry was beginning to experiment in colour. Guru Dutt tried it with mediocre results in filming Waheeda Rehman in colour for the title song of his own Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1959): the only oddity in an otherwise great black and white film. Even Mohammad Rafi's rendering of Shakeel Badayuni's fine lyric and Ravi's subtle 'tarz' do not salvage the sequence. Guru Dutt never had the time to attempt colour again before death tragically claimed him.


And then there was V. Shantaram's Navrang (1960), with the fabulous C. Ramchandra giving us his immortal 'aadha hai chandrama raat aadhi' penned by Pt. Bharat Vyas. But the splashes of colour in that sequence reduced the moon to a dot in the sky: besides, audiences were too busy watching Sandhya balancing all those 'matkas' on her head with neither she nor costar, Mahipal, casting a second glance towards the celestial orb above.

The 60s had dawned.

Mukesh With Salil Chaudhary

Even as I sent out my earlier post on Mukesh the other day, an inner voice was telling me that I had not done justice to maestro Salil Chaudhary, by summarily dismissing him with only his opinion of this gentle singer, at the top of  my write up ~ that something was missing.

It remained to friend Pradeep Asrani (and I invite you all to read his lengthy response to me) to nudge and help unravel the coils of memory, by saying how "perplexed" he was at this cursory mention I had made of Salil-da. There was no stopping his pen.....And as I read his response through, I remembered long-forgotten names of films and tucked away in these films was a gem of a solo here and a melodious, well-written duet there. This gifted composer, I recalled, was even able to carve out songs in films like Annadata (1972) and Rajnigandha (1974) for Mukesh, at a time when all else had given up on him.

While the solos in both films (one each) 'nain hamare sanjh sakare' in Annadata and 'kaee baar yun bhi dekha hai' in Rajnigandha, heralded a comeback of sorts for Mukesh at this late stage the ties had been fostered long years ago, as far back as RK's Jagte Raho (1956), in fact, in which he sang the sybaritic 'zindagi khwaab hai' (filmed tellingly on Motilal with the yokel in Raj standing by, aghast at the former's drunken antics on the dark, lonely Bombay street) and Bimal Roy's Madhumati (1958), in which was featured the deeply articulated 'suhana safar aur yeh mausam haseen'. I still marvel at the reverence in his voice as he sings '....woh aasman jhuk raha hai zameen par....', enunciating the final antara, helping the spellbound Dilip Kumar on that mountainside.....Both lyrics were penned by Shailendra.

Two more years would pass before Salil Chaudhary beckoned to Mukesh once again, in 'Honeymoon' (1960), this time with a duet of sorts. This was probably the first time that Mukesh sang for the young and upcoming Manoj Kumar (he was teamed with the very pretty Sayeeda Khan, in this film), an association that would yield sweet music through the sixties and well into the seventies. During his career Mukesh would sing more songs for this non-actor, than he would for any other performer. As so many of his compositions did, this one shows Salil's adeptness at merging western music movements with Indian classical themes. And in the background is the very gentle Lata in melodious support....another lyric written by Shailendra.




And that most prolific of our filmi-poets, Rajendra Krishan, wrote lyrics that Mukesh sang under Salil-da in two fine films of the early 60s viz AVM's Chhaya (1961) and Bimal Roy's Prem Patra (1962).

The first starred Asha Parekh (that lass from Kapadvanj) in only the third film of her long career, paired with Sunil Dutt. The roles were symbolic : she is the muse, who is running after the poet (for a change) and the songs are replete with images of nature with fine camera work adding to the poetry. Among them, notwithstanding 'itna na mujhse tu pyaar badha....' the Lata-Talat beauty in which Salil blended Mozart's 40th with Indian folk, is this duet between Mukesh and Lata, with the lead pair cavorting in the open fields, under the clouds, by the seas......etc. etc. etc. I have not the fine black and white video, just the 78 sound with the third antara missing.








And then we have in 1962, Bimal Roy's Prem Patra~a film which featured Shashi Kapoor (at this point firmly established as an actor after he had 'graduated' with Krishan Chopra's 1961 domestic drama 'Char Diwari') and Sadhana, delineating the pangs and misunderstandings of first love. "A fine, fresh film", said the Times of India in its review, I remember, to which I will add , "though a departure from the serious subjects that we have come to expect from Bimal Roy." Both, Shashi Kapoor and Sadhana gave a good account of themselves as they went about the film singing their way through its meanderings, and neither looked back after that.




And the 60s stretched into the 70s. There were other songs that Mukesh sang for Salil among them the gentle, wistful ditties in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anand (1971)  and their careers were intertwined all the way....but that fateful August of '76 was looming.....


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It would be difficult to define Mukeshji's voice. Lata defined Hemant Kumar's voice as that of a pujari praying to his god in a temple atop a hill, at day's end, thus recognizing the ascetic in Hemant-da's singing personality. Rafi and Manna Dey were recognised by their range and virtuosity, Kishore Kumar for his ebulience and Talat Mehmood for his gentle crooning.

But Mukesh was recognized by the way the common man identified himself with him. He was one with the masses. It was deceptively easy to sing his songs, until we started singing them, and then we felt his moods envelop us. He was good at what he sang for the films (mainly in Hindi and in Gujarati) and he was good, if not better, when he sang the 'private' songs which at one time were so well known and which are still being played in private circles.

He sang a lot of them and let me end this tribute with one that is a universal favourite ...a quintessential Mukesh number, quietly disturbing. It was penned by Qaif Irfani (a name long since forgotten) and composed by this gentle singer himself.

Mukesh~Poetic Gravitas

Even as the age of classicism in our film music began to wane in the mid-40s, a new breed of music directors, lyricists and singers began to make its presence felt. We know them all, the whole romantic slew of them, and we have sung their praises even as we hummed and sang their songs.

Among them was the very gentle Mukesh, he of that special feel for the lyric and whose articulation of the songs he sang made up for the range or the बुलंदी  of voice that he did not have. No less a composer than Salil Chaudhary, who did not much use Mukesh, has gone on record saying he was the most "nuanced" of all our singers. And down the years this has remained the most pertinent of all qualities attributed to this charismatic singer. That and the deep, moving, sonorous pathos in his voice. It was easy for one to identify with his singing: a vicarious expression of one's innermost feelings, which often made you want to walk away when his songs came on during a screening. He was singing for us.

True, we feel traces of the legendary K L Saigal (an influence he could never completely shed) from his earliest songs viz. 'dil hi bujha hua ho', his first-ever song as playback that he recorded for Ashok Roy in Nirdosh (1941), and in the fabulous 'dil jalta hai to jalne de' that he recorded a few years later for Anil Biswas in Paheli Nazar (1945). Another composer of note at this point was Ram Ganguli who made Mukesh sing Behzaad Lucknowi's 'zinda hoon is tarah ke gham-e-zindagi nahin', for Raj Kapoor's maiden  production, 'Aag'. It was here that the 'atman-jism' team of Raj and Mukesh was born. Sadly, that was all he would sing for Ram Ganguly.

Simultaneously with Anil Biswas it was Naushad Ali who mainly gave the singer's career the boost it needed in the late 40s, before each of these composers went his way, the one with Talat Mehmood as his main singer and the other with Mohammad Rafi, as his. Indeed, after 'ai jaan-e-jigar' for Anil Biswas in Aaram (1951), it would be a long while before we heard Mukesh sing for him: 'zindagi khwab hai' in the final film of his illustrious career 'Chhoti-Chhoti Batein' (1965). And for Naushad Ali, after Andaz (1949), Mukesh sang a couple of bad solos and worse duets with Suman Kalyanpur in 'Saathi' (1968), a film in which that eloquent composer futilely tried to prove his mettle one last time before putting away his baton, a spent force after more than 30 years of brilliance.

So, it was the period between 1948 and 1950 that set the stage for the Mukesh we came to love over the years. After Paheli Nazar it was films like 'Anokha Pyar' (1948), the Dilip-Nargis-Nalini Jaywant triangle and 'Lajawab' (1950) that had fine singing by Mukesh under Anil-da, but it was janab Naushad Ali who gave him his metier and under whom he shone in at least three films viz Mela & Anokhi Ada (both in 1948) and Andaz. While it would be a cliche to include here a track from Andaz in which Mukesh sang all his songs for Dilip Kumar, thus giving the latter a persona that  remained with him throughout his career, it is important for us to recall tracks from the other two films.

The soulful duet, 'dharti ko aakash pukare', with Shamshad Begum ushered in the age of the lovelorn: tragic yet uplifting, and Naushad-saab's great tuning of Shakeel Badayuni's four-liner remains as fascinating today as it did when it first came out, right from the lonely beat of the drum at the top, to the crescendo at the end, metaphorically sealing the fate of the doomed lovers (Dilip Kumar & Nargis). The songs in this film further cemented the Naushad-Shakeel partnership that had had its roots in Kardar's Dard, a year before in 1947. Here is that storm-tossed duet:

He sang another beautiful, if more subdued, duet with Shamshad Begum for Naushad Ali in Mehboob Khan's rather silly 'Anokhi Ada' in which, apart from the glorious tracks, we saw the actor Surendra essay probably the only light role of his career with considerable success.This love triangle also starred the beautiful Naseem Bano who was Saira's mother and herself a fine singer (Pukar, Sheesh Mahal etc.) and Prem Adeeb. The duet was picturised on Naseem Bano and Prem Adeeb.

Along came that 'musical powerhouse' of a team of music directors as Raju Bharatan rightly calls Shankar-Jaikishan, who gave Mukesh his first duets with Lata in RK's Barsaat (1949). This versatile duo was actually able to bring out the lighter, more flippant side of Mukesh's singing personality as no one else could. How can we forget 'awara hoon' from Raj's Aawara (1951) and  'mera joota hai japani' from Shri 420 (1955), both penned by Shailendra! It was his rendering of these two light, happy-go-lucky, yet profound songs that helped perpetuate Raj Kapoor's 'hobo' image.

Too bad Raj could not carry off the very chirpy 'ruq ja o janewali' in Kanhaiya (1959-also written by Shailendra), as well as he did the other two but then, he was not directing himself in this film! Here is the 78r.p.m. arrangement of this fine composition, a charmer if ever there was one. The on-screen version does not even come close, with its plethora of instruments, complex arrangement and longish preamble.



And a bit earlier, in 1957, there was a song picturised on a drunken Jaikishan, in a 'guest' role with the main pair Kishore Kumar and Shakila: a fine solo in a film that was banned for copyright reasons, soon after it was released: Begunah, a little remembered movie. The music, however, caught on and Mukesh's 'ai pyase dil bezubaan', became a hit. Even today, it creates a nostalgic mood. Once again, a Shailendra lyric tuned by SJ.



With Roshanlal the singer probably had his best professional relationship. Mukesh sang three fine solos and three great duets with Lata in Roshan's very first film 'Malhar' (1951).....

....and sporadically remained with that composer to the very end of the latter's career, when he sang the deeply philosophical 'taal mile nadi ke jalmein', for Anokhi Raat (1968). Film lore has it that the poet Indivar, who did a lot of work with this music composer right from Malhar and who was present at the recording (they always were in those days, to make sure of the correctness of the articulation by the singer), was so moved by Mukesh's rendering of this immortal composition that he embraced him and said: मुकेशजी ,मैंने इतना अच्छा तो नहीं लिखा, जितना की आपने इस गानेको दोहराया~Mukeshji, your rendering of this song has been far more profound than my writing of it!. The film was Roshan's swan song--he passed away soon after. The background score was completed by Salil-da and the film was released posthumously. Fine bit of filming by lensman Kamal Bose.

And he sang for Sachin Dev Burman who, like Salil, did not use Mukesh's voice as much as he should have. But can we ever forget this song from Bandini (1963)? If that did not deserve a FilmFare award, what did! He sang it like his heart would burst and the pathos in his voice was matched only by the grief reflected on Nutan's face. A great lyric from Shailendra and a fine bit of filming by director Bimal Roy, the cameraman once again, Kamal Bose. This was the last film Bimal-da made: he died two years later and a pioneer in film making moved to history.

Poets and composers took extra pains to create their compositions when Mukesh was to sing them. They kept his limitations in mind, but also the softness of his singing. Composer Khaiyam came up with an extra gentle score to counter Sahir Ludhianvi's hard hitting, scathing 'chin-o-arab hamara' which reflected that poet's frustration with Nehruvian policies, in Ramesh Saigal's Phir Subah Hogi (1958). The end result, as Raj puts it over as only he could, is almost unbearable.Truly, the lyrics and music and the rendering of the songs were the only bright spots in a mediocre film based on Dostoevsky's Crime And Punishment. It starred Raj Kapoor and Mala Sinha with the great Rehman in a pivotal role, but even these three fine performers could not salvage the film. Every song in it is a comment on the social condition of the time and both Mukesh and Asha Bhonsle rose to the occasion, eloquently understating Sahir's expression as they sang some of the best tracks ever.



I do not know which would be the other two but if I were asked to name my three favourite solos by Mukesh, this fine theme lyric penned by Qamar Jalalabadi and tuned by Kalyanji-Anandji for Sri Prakash Pictures & Vijay Bhatt's Pyase Panchhi, would surely be one them. Something about the depth of this song evoking a myriad emotions, some recognisable, others not. Poetic images cloud the mind: pigeons taking flight at Chowpatty as they can only in Bombay skies, a strange, wistful longing as you get lost in the nuances as Mukesh takes control of you and your emotions. You wonder at the lyric in the first antara of this song as he croons "....jaise saagar ki do lehrein chupkese mil jayen..." and then once again in the second as he sings: "....chhupi hain aahein kis premiki badalki aahonmein, bikhri hui hai khushbu kaisi albeli raahonmein....'"  happy, but painful in a mysterious sort of way. What does it all mean, you ask yourself? You're only 16.



Kalyanji-Anandji's scoring is gay abandon all the way and this was one of the most melodious tunes ever. Mukesh sang the maximum number of his songs for this duo and most of them were well done, quite a lot of them happy and some not so....we know them all.

But, I would like to think, the saddest song that he sang was the one he composed for himself for Anuraag, a film he produced, acted in and also composed the music for. It was one of those mistakes that film personalities often make. He also acted in it with Usha Kiran as his lead, but the film ended up a disaster in more ways than one, and it took him a while to come out of its backlash. The song, penned by Qaif Irfani, is still with us: one can feel Roshan's influence on Mukesh the composer.



In 1965 Mukesh sang for the last time for Anil Biswas in the film 'Chhoti-Chhoti Batein'. This was Motilal's final movie. He produced it and acted in it. But what is remarkable is that the three, Mukesh, Anil-da and Motilal teamed together 20 years after Paheli Nazar and created a swan song for at least two of them. Motilal died soon after the film was released (I think) and failed and Anil Biswas, like Naushad would a few years later, finally put away his baton for good. Mukesh sang Shailendra's signature lyric for the period that had passed.



By now the era was changing. Mukesh went on to sing a track here, a track there most of them mediocre, with the exception of  the songs in Teesri Qasam which Shailendra produced but died before the film was released. The music was pure Shankar-Jaikishan 50s vintage as was his title rendering of the track from the film Raat Aur Din, by the same team, which one never saw on the screen except in Lata's voice. Finally, of course, there was Raj Kapoor's  moody, nostalgic, self-conscious opus 'Mera Naam Joker', in which the RK camp (sans Shailendra), made us think of the times that were and yet will always remain with us. No, I am not going to play the cliched 'jane kahan gaye voh din', great and unsurpassed though it is. Let's just retain and remember them all on this the 35th anniversary of Mukesh-ji's death (August 26).

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The irony of  Mukesh's career to me, at least as an observer and admirer, was that of the four FilmFare awards bestowed on him. Two of these were for fine, nay great songs (Anadi-1959 & Kabhi-Kabhie-1976) while the remaining two songs (Pehchan-1970 & Beimaan-1972) do not even merit mention anywhere except in Manoj Kumar's autobiography. Mukesh sang far better songs than all the four for which he earned the FF statuette, in fact, for other composers most of whom I have not been able to give space here. All were eminent, all were great, all have moved on. Most could have written about singers they had met and most of them would have been kind to Mukesh....as has been that teenager who refused to wash his hand after a handshake with the singer.....

Good Bye, Shammi.

Shammi Kapoor lost to Rajendra Kumar by a thumping majority of one that sunny morning in 1963, when a bunch of us decided upon the first-run Hamrahi rather than the umpteenth rerun of Ujala! (1959). I gloated my best I-told-you-so at my classmates as we all came out of the Lotus (or was it the Swastik?~time's taking its toll!), cursing that milksop of a movie and vowing never again to waste hard-earned pocket-money over a Rajendra Kumar feature! We caught up with Ujala a few weeks later and emerged from the theatre praising Shankar-Jaikishan, Raj Kumar and Shammi Kapoor (with Mala Sinha and Kum Kum supplying the oomph!)~in that order. The film was a rehash of any number of Hollywood crime films of that era, with Raj Kumar hamming the crime boss to the hilt! Immensely laughable at that or any age, but thrilling: and great black and white photography, as I recall, especially during the climactic sequence with Raj Kumar on the rooftops. They had a lot of fun doing that film with the fun loving Naresh Saigal (who had another hit that same year in Main Nashemein Hoon) as director. The Lata-Manna Dey duet 'jhoomta mausam mast mahina', set new records in popularity. Impossible to sing and difficult to emulate, it could only be mimicked. The song was written by Hasrat Jaipuri and literally reverberated elsewhere in the world because, from what YouTube tells me, even the Greeks were ecstatic over it.

He was not younger brother Shashi and certainly not older brother Raj Kapoor, but Shammi-saab was finally turning the corner away from the silly dramatic-role cloaks that he had heretofore donned. It took him a few years to find his niche from the undramatic entry he made into films with dramatic vehicles like Rail Ka Dibba (1953-opposite Madhubala), Laila Majnu (once again 1953 with the emerging Nutan), Shama Parwana (1954-opposite the then-fading but still beautiful Suraiya), Miss Cocacola (1955-opposite future wife Geeta Bali). And there were other films like Thokar (1953) and Chor Darwaza (1954)all of which, I am aware, were eminently forgettable. While I have only billboard memories of all these films, I do recall viewing at least a badly-mutilated print of Laila Majnu and an intact copy of Shama-Parwana. Bad films both but colossal music by the great Ghulam Mohammad in the first and the equally great Husnlal-Bhagatram in the second.

A startling clip has surfaced on YouTube of a Talat song that we have loved down the years. The solo was originally intended for the moody-brooding Laila Majnu but for one of those inexplicable reasons that often put a song out of context, was removed from that film and appended to Chor Darwaza. And I say startling because what is essentially a reflective musing on tormented love (what else!) has been picturised upon a smiling Shammi Kapoor flirting with a stoic, stony-faced Sumitra Devi! Either a different mood or a different song was definitely called for here, unless I'm missing director Prakash Arora's intent. It should have remained, more logically, with Laila Majnu. Shammi is close to a laugh-burst and the only reason I have included the track here is because the penning of it by Shakeel Badayuni is so intense and memorable.



But that period was coming to an end, as I have stated, with Nasir Hussain's Tumsa Nahin Dekha (1957) roaring in and sowing the seeds of the 'Yahoo!' image that we came to associate with Shammi Kapoor. It was the turning point in his career and Shammi Kapoor never looked back for at least a decade and a half after that. His costar in the film was the very coy Ameeta who also, with this vehicle, came out into the mainstream of Hindi films. The songs in the film composed by the legendary OP Nayyar placed Shammi Kapoor on the map with the young crowd, although the older generation still shunned OP's compositions as being too 'unIndian'. But Shammi was ready to go and go he did....and there was no restraining him...watch him mouth Sahir Ludhianvi's exuberant....Yun to humne lakh haseen dekhe hain...



The next big hit was Dil Deke Dekho (1959)again directed by Nasir Hussain but the film did more for Asha Parekh and Usha Khanna than it did for Shammi Kapoor. The first debuted as leading lady while the second debuted as a music composer of note although where she went over the years is a different story. One must note, though, that she was only the second female music director in films, after Saraswati Devi of the 1930s/40s. There are great vocals by Mohammad Rafi and Asha Bhonsle on the tracks of this film, with one especially standing out as a blend of rural folksy in the first half and beat in the tandem. Here it is, penned by Majrooh Sultanpuri.



There came a slump in his career with nondescript films like Mujrim and Boyfriend and China Town (a double role, here), which despite fine music by OP Nayyar in the first and Shankar-Jaikishan in the other, and Ravi in the third did nothing much to boost Shammi's career until.....

.....producer-director Subodh Mukerji came in with 'Junglee' (1961), to place the final, finishing brush stroke to the 'Yahoo' image begun in Tumsa Nahin Dekha, four years earlier. The film was a maddening success and I say maddening because Shammi was falling all over Saira Banu (in her debut) when he was not all over himself as he played the spoiled, eccentric millionaire who finds love in the arms of a simple mountain belle. Colour was still spell bindingly new to the industry in 1961 and the only aspect of the song better than the Kashmir visuals, was the unbridled Mohammad Rafi, singing a much-derided Shankar-Jaikishan number penned by Shailendra. It is probably one of filmdom's best kept secrets that a lot of us still do not know who yelled the reverberating 'Yahoo' into the mountains!



Once when I was in Bombay I read an article written by Shammi Kapoor and something he said in it made me pen an email to him and I told him that the only better films than Junglee were 'Professor' (1962) and Manoranjan a fine adaptation of Irma La Douce which was released in 1971 (I think) after a 10-year wait in the cans. I was surpised when he actually wrote back to me explaining the delay in the release of Manoranjan.

To sit through a viewing of Professor is to understand one's helplessness in controlling an outburst of laughter in the movie house, long after a particular sequence has passed. It was a fine, hilarious role as Shammi Kapoor juggled the joint characters of the young lover (with Kalpana, another new find) and that of the old professor in his scenes with Lalita Pawar. His scenes with that old thespian are part of classic film lore~and so is the musical score, once again by Shankar-Jaikishan.

The movie went on to bag the FilmFare award for the best music of the year, with Rafi-saab, also walking away with the statuette for 'Ai Gulbadan'. Every song in the film is a classic from the joint batons of S-J setting to music the penmanship of Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri. 'Main Chali, main chali.....' the Shailendra-penned Lata-Rafi duet will, however, always remain my personal favourite, because the kind of day we see as the scene unfolds was exactly the kind of day I saw the film on with my buddies: bright blue with fleecy white clouds (sorry to bring myself in, like this). We don't see that kind of days anymore in Bombay.... And then there was Kashmir Ki Kali (1964) with composer OP Nayyar's creations the standout feature in a mediocre movie, whose only other significance was the introduction into Hindi films of the very young and talented Sharmila Tagore. The songs, especially the two Asha-Rafi inspired duets penned by the immortal SH Bihari 'Isharon, isharonemein dil lenewale' and 'diwana hua badal....' , were lyrically picturised by Shakti Samanta. It was the music that saved the day and made the film a runaway hit.....



...until 1965 came along and death claimed Geeta Bali his wife of 10 years. And we know he was never the same again, despite a remarriage. Teesri Manzil was released in this same year during which we saw Asha Bhonsle taking her first tentative steps away from OP Nayyar and moving towards RD Burman whom she later was to marry. This film, again, was more a comeback vehicle for Premnath from yester years (who donned the mantle of the 'bad' guy and went on to do some fine roles in the process) but more importantly it set RD Burman firmly in the saddle as a brilliant and innovative composer very much like his father, the immortal SD Burman.

The movie paired Shammi Kapoor with Asha Parekh and will always be remembered for Premnath's evil-as-evil-can be character but moreso, as I have stated, for RDB's unique music sounds, the likes of which had never been heard until then. He was the last of the three acknowledged mavericks in Hindi film music after Shankar-Jaikishan and Chitalkar Ramchandra during their heyday in the late 1940s. Once one gets past the first 40 seconds of verbalizing on this fine composition, the magic becomes inescapable.



Well, the times were a-changing: we still had a couple of more years of the film industry as we knew it: but slowly and surely it was moving towards becoming 'Bollywood' a term concocted by Nasir Hussain in 1971, symbolising the change in generation and the setting-in of a deplorable trend in film-making that does not seem to let up.


This was not the end of Shammi Kapoor's career, though. He had a few more films left among them the eminently forgettable Brahmachari and Latt Saheb and Prince and Janwar and Tumse Acchha Kaun Hai which do not deserve space here or anywhere else, although Pagla Kahin Ka and the long delayed Manoranjan did reveal his flair for genuine humour. In fact, Manoranjan marked a new phase in his career~that of a character artist and he did some good ones all through the 80s.

So, where does he stand? Right at the top? No, not as long as one has evergreen memories of his brother, the eloquent Raj Kapoor. But he will always be remembered as a performer who brought joy to the middleclass with his shenanigan's and gyrations and fisticuffs, although the better (sic!) class of filmgoers did not care much for him or his movies. He had a charm all his own: and he could be funny, without being vulgar like others I could name. Like Dev Anand it was difficult to watch him do serious roles. But, also like Dev Anand, he 'sang' any number of good, nay great, songs for us and that's what we went to the movies for in those days and at that age, anyway....

R.I.P.

Kamal Das Gupta~A Composer Forgotten

I need to write about Kamal Das Gupta whose memorable career carved the segue between the more intellectual, and erudite era in film music, and the dawn of the romantic era ushered in by the likes of Shankar-Jaikishan and Chitalkar Ramchandra and their contemporaries, circa the late 40s. July marks both, the birth and death anniversaries (1912 & 1974) of this fine music composer whose geet and film music are still listened to today, even if his name is all but forgotten.

At a time when composers like Pankaj Mallik (Doctor, Mukti, Nartaki), Gyan Dutt (Bhakta Surdas), Khemchand Prakash (Raja Bhartruhari, Tansen) and Rai Chand Boral (Street Singer) were weaving intricate compositions and enchanting listeners with their erudition, along came Kamal Das Gupta with his favourite poet Faiyaz Hashmi. The one wove simple tunes and melodies around eloquent geets of the other, the kind that gave ample scope to the singer to project voice and emotion. A brief acknowledgement about Faiyaz-saab, here. Many a song lyric until this point was written in chaste Hindi or very classical Urdu, with a smattering of Farsi (or Persian) thrown in. Faiyaz brought in a welcome change with his simple blend of Hindi and Urdu, a blend that made it easier for the common man to grasp the import of the song. I admit that to this day I myself do not understand the lyrics of several of the songs of that era (especially those sung by Pankaj Mallik and Kundan Lal Saigal). It is only their singing and the powerful compositions that hold me. But Kamal-babu and Faiyaz Hashmi were a great tandem!

While he is vastly remembered for setting to music the songs of Kazi Nazr-ul Islam (the rebel Bengali poet-philosopher whose works spoke of the plight of the downtrodden, and called for an end to British dominance of India), it is his considerable output of film music and 'private' songs that are Kamal Das Gupta's greater claim to fame. Playback singing, as we have known it, had its roots in these 'private' recordings which were either simply-written verses (geets), or classic and newer ghazals or traditional bhajans that were set to simple tunes and were not included in any film. There was no fanfare involved in these creations: no complex arrangement in orchestration (the S-J team was still a few years away) and yet both, composer and vocalist, gave of their best to each three-minute 78r.p.m. recording, with an eye on the fast-emerging playback phenomenon of the late thirties and the early forties.

Perhaps what I have said above would bear weight were I to mention that Kamal Das Gupta was responsible for propelling (if not launching) the careers of some of our very famous singers of that era....

Hemant Kumar Mukherjee (or Hemant Kumar, as he was affectionately known to us), was one of them. As a  young man in the late 30s (he was born in 1920) he went around listening to the already-established Pankaj Mallik singing Rabindra-geeti and wondering if he would ever sing like that senior icon. Like we all know, he did, although his take-off vehicles 'Jai Jagdish Hare'  (dovetailing with Geeta Dutt) from Anandmath and 'Yeh Raat Yeh Chandni' from Jaal, were more than a decade away (1952).

In the meantime he recorded the odd Bengali song steadily gaining popularity in intimate circles. There is nothing on cyberspace that records his first meeting with Kamal Das Gupta but meet they did and Kamal-babu introduced him to the public with the very gentle 'Kitna Dukh Bhulaya Tumne Pyare', penned by Faiyaz Hashmi. The year, I believe, was 1947 and the Columbia disc played in swiftly widening circles and on radio stations, its flip side bearing the very emotional 'O preet nibahne wali...meri aashaon ki basti ko mita degi tu' which was again, set to music by Kamal-babu and penned by Faiyaz Hashmi. My own awareness of music was just beginning and the best was yet to come, but let it be said that without my being aware of it Kamal Das Gupta was the first music composer whose songs I listened to. He was my introduction to popular music. The year, like I have said, was 1947, I was two hears old and dad was already drumming the Bengali singers and composers into my ears!  Both these songs have stood the test of time, the first one especially so. Here it is... 




And then there is the legendary Juthika Roy a devotee of Lord Krishna whose ardour in her rendering of the traditional bhajan, it is said, matched that of Meera (the 16th century bhakt of Krishna) herself. She recorded her first song, a bhajan, when she was seven and after that never looked back. In later years as the struggle for independence became more intense, leaders like Gandhi and Nehru invited her to sing at their 'prarthana sabhas'. Kazi Nazr-ul Islam became her mentor and through him, Kamal-babu. It is said that a naat she recorded jointly with the latter in the 30s led the music director to embrace Islam in his later years.

But somewhere in between a legendary partnership was born and Juthika Ray became a household name thanks to her bhajans (of Meerabai and Kabir) and geets recorded by Kamal-babu. The temptation was strong for me to insert here the Kabir bhajan 'ghunghat ka pat khol re', the rendering of which she is most known for but there is another one that I have loved all my years and which I would like to share with all. It is a fine melody, simple and untainted by too much instrumentation, a melody the strains of which, coupled with the voice of this divine songstress, invoke Lord Krishna beseeching him to make an appearance.



Jaganmoy Mitra became 'Jagmohan' Mitra after an error made by a compere at a singing competition in 1939 and he has gone down in musical history simply as Jagmohan, a name that we have come to associate with sweetness in singing. Like his contemporaries Pankaj Mallik and Hemant Kumar, he dabbled in Rabindra-geeti but was probably unaware of his own worth until Rabindranath Tagore himself dubbed him 'sursagar', a title that was never questioned to the end of his life.

However, although he had plenty of admirers all over the country it was largely due to his 'private' recordings, both Hindi and Bengali, that we remember him. That, and his asscociation with Kamal-babu. We think  back nostalgically to the times when his signature songs Dil Ko Hai Tumse Pyar Kyun and Meri Aankhen Baneen Diwani were commonly heard over Radio Ceylon and AIR. He did not have the same good fortune that Hemant Kumar had on the Hindi film scene and I cannot recall any film song that he may have sung during the 50s, for a Bombay-based film. Today, we cherish the legacy he has left behind via that old faithful, the 78r.p.m. disc. 

But sing for the films he did, almost to the end of the 40s and Kamal Das Gupta gave him the boost that should have helped him along but did not, in films like 'Meghdoot' (The Cloud Messenger)  based on the epic poem of the same name from Kalidasa. It is hard to describe this beautiful symbiosis of composition, poetry and rendering, the coming together of song and and raaga and singing that starts with a gentle longing and ends with the tumult in the rainstorm. The effect of the storm as the song winds down is evocative of cloud and rain and remains unmatched, considering the era in which it was created (1946), when studio doors had to be padded at the bottom to keep away external disturbance and recording was done during the dark hours! This one is a treat for the soul.....once again a fine lyric by Faiyaz Hashmi.... 



To say that Kanan Devi's singing career "ended" would be a misnomer: it faded away with an occasional echo still floating in the atmosphere, even as the Lata generation gradually began to take over. Quantum wise, very much like her Bangla contemporaries, she sang more in her mother tongue than she did in Hindi. Her film career spanned a couple of decades and her association with Rai Chand Boral (Street Singer, Jawani Ki Reet, Vidyapati), Pankaj Mallik (Mukti) and later with Kamal Das Gupta (Jawab, Hospital, Meghdoot) yielded fame and for us her admirers, a number of beautifully sung tracks of which the best I believe were heard in the three films that she did for Kamal Das Gupta from the early to the mid 40s.

Jawab~The Response (1942) was P.C. Barua's adaptation of  the Ronald Colman-Greer Garson starrer Random Harvest, based on the James Hilton novel. A lot of us still do not know what to make of this film but I think it was a fairly acceptable attempt on the part of this otherwise distinguished film maker, with him also doing the male lead opposite Kanan Devi. But here all questions and skepticism end because the film had some of the best songs (written by Pandit Madhur) recorded in the history of Hindi films. The melody stepped in right at the top of each track and did not let up until the final hush at the end of each song. The one attached below, ai  chand chhup na jana, is especially telling towards the end, even as the emotion becomes too much for the character on the screen and by extension the singer, as Kamal-babu merely allows the song to end on a subdued note. The pause in the singing towards the end where the music takes over is very poignant. There are other excellent songs in the film sung by Kanan Devi (including a duet with the composer) but this one bears testimony to her eloquent understating of a lyric. The track sounds better off screen than on because the crucial third antara is missing from the movie, thus removing the cue for what follows next in the plotting.



It is common knowledge that it was the great Anil Biswas who gave Talat Mehmood his first break as a playback singer and launched him with the brilliant "Ai dil mujhe aisi jagah le chal" in the 1950 film 'Arzoo'. This gentle singer had already been singing over the radio for almost a decade before this film ushered him  in as a new playback singer. He left behind a trail of quality singing in Calcutta where he sang on the radio under the Bengali name 'Tapan Kumar'. But no matter where he sang or in what language and under what name, to us all he was 'the never-never Talat Mehmood.'

It was in Calcutta, then the hub of the film and music industry, that he probably met Kamal Das Gupta and Faiyaz Hashmi who created the immortal 'tasveer teri dil mera behla na sakegi'. That 1944 HMV disc, as we know, broke all sales records and is remembered even today. It would be very easy for me to insert this geet here, but the other side of the disc bore an equally charming track and I do believe that all three, poet, composer and crooner, have done superior work on it. While both lyrics deal with gentle imagery, it is this second one that has a beguiling quality about it, that deserved equal exposure but has always been overshadowed by the first. Here it is....."chand mere chand se sharma gaya...." . Both, Kamal Das Gupta and Faiyaz Hashmi in a fiesty mood...



Finally, a post script: This has been a long and drawn out write-up. For a while now, I have wanted to do a blog on this gentle composer from yesteryear. As always I was awaiting a cue that would start me off and it was a chance peek at the YouTube that told me of the dates of his birth and death, both of which fall in the month of July.
Such was his hold over the music lovers of the time that I remember how the Eros cinema in Bombay held a recital on stage every Sunday morning for almost all through 1965, to packed audiences. Needless to say dad and I attended every show and barring Kanan Devi, all the singers featured here appeared. Memories were still fresh at the time....

Revisiting 'Embers'

People, it's a good thing I tend to revisit my life occasionally and now by extension, my blogstream.
I need to correct an error in the second line of the first paragraph of  'Embers' posted 01/21/11.

The import of the sentence was, "When KLSaigal moved on in January 1947, freedom for India was seven months away but his passing would still remain a major event for the music loving generation of the time".

Not one of you pointed this out which keeps me in good company (if you know what I mean!), but I will richly deserve the guffaw I will hear from Tejas, on this one.

~Kersi
PS: here's a bonus. And for the uninitiated: if you see the screen lighting up at the end it is because KLS has just finished rendering the 'raaga' deepak (the lamp, or the glow of it), in a film called Tansen from 1943.

The Echoes Outside

In the weeks immediately following my recent protracted visit to India, and with my time being my own until the boss returned, I was able to do what I had not done in a long, long while: simply watch the rain clouds gather and unburden their load. The spring has been unusually verdant this year, here in the northeast, and I often found myself walking long distances, sometimes as much as five miles at a time, wearing out my sneakers and my poor aching soles, returning home only to start again after a few hours this time by car, watching the rain sprinkles scampering up and down the windshield as the air currents led them a merry dance...

And there was a documentary way back, whose name I do not now remember, in which the camera catches the main protagonist standing at a window watching the rain outside, and tracing the course of the raindrops as they splattered on the pane. His attention seems to focus on one drop which in his mind's eye gradually evolves into a ballerina and the sequence explodes into a colourful ballet performance. I did not focus on any particular raindrop on the windshield as I drove along one day (that would have been hazardous) and the ballerina disappeared from the imagination after a while and was replaced by sounds of the lashing wind and raindrops from films past seen and songs listened to many times over with an increasing fondness as the years slip by.

I have often wondered how our music directors were able to project a song sung and recorded within the confines of a small studio, into the great outdoors (indeed, recording studios were tiny during the time which haunts my blogstream!), and almost convince us that what one saw lighting up the screen and our emotions was not indeed seeded in the claustrophobia of four walls! True, the sound engineer and his team played their role but ultimately it remained to the singers and the composers to give a song the ultimate nuance that would retain it in the mind of the listener. 

Happily there has been a plethora of rain oriented songs that has lingered in our collective subconscious. They lie just under the surface and all it needs is a prod for remembrance to do the rest. For, the Indian breast is overwhelmed by the advent of the raincloud of the monsoon. There is a poet in everyone of us struggling to shake off the sluggish heat of May and dance to the rhythm of June, be it in the gullies of Bombay or Calcutta, or the rurals anywhere in India. And our film makers have been quick to seize upon this vulnerability. From Raj Kapoor to Bimal Roy to Vijay Anand to Guru Dutt, a film those days was considered incomplete by the masses without at least one rain sequence projecting the moods of the protagonists. Not all these stalwarts are represented here.

The rain meant various things in various films. In Bimal Roy's Do Bigha Zameen (1953), based on Gurudev Tagore's ultra short story (2 1/2 pages) and which ushered in the new wave  in our films, the sudden onset of the monsoons brings joy to the poor peasant-farmer whose patch of land lies parched and whose cattle are dying. And yet, this joy is not without its tinge of apprehension for he knows that the rains might not be so plentiful the next time around! It's all in the black and white camerawork, people, and the warm lyric penned by Shailendra set to music by Salil Chaudhary, in his first-ever foray into film musicdom. Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey lead a fine chorus.... the sound is a bit frayed attesting to the passage of time.

Fast forward a decade to 1962 and Salilda and Bimal Roy weave a different kind of magic with rain and cloud in Prem Patra. Here, a blind Shashi Kapoor is lamenting his lost love, unaware that it is indeed she standing right by him in the role of a nurse, as he muses upon what the rains do to him. Once again it is Lata Mangeshkar crooning, this time with the never-never Talat Mehmood one of the sweetest duets ever, written by Gulzar early in his illustrious career. To watch the entire sequence from before the song actually comes on (missing in this clip) and listening to Shashi Kapoor's soliloquy is to be transported into a different poetic realm altogether.

A short burst of rain and song accompanied by the crashing of the waves and the wind at Bombay's Marine Drive helped us muse upon the quandary that Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman found themselves in, in Nav Ketan's Kala Bazar (1960). Each was voicing the other's thoughts, going back and forth in time, penned by Shailendra and set to music by Sachin Dev Burman. Director Vijay Anand  lent his own poetic touch by having the sound engineer give a fadeout to the song, after the second antara. The full duet rendered beautifully by Geeta Dutt and Mohammad Rafi however, was released on 78rpm and is still heard today. This clip, however, suffers from overexposure on the DVD.



And here is Waheeda Rehman in a sequence from Kohraa (1964), a bad adaptation of  Daphne Du Maurrier's Rebecca, sporting that pet cliche of Hindi films: a happy face masking a broken heart. As directed by Biren Nag she might as well have been Thomas Hardy's Tess in the bosom of nature but as the film unfolds she is neither, except her own beautiful self. Perhaps the producers, Gitanjali Pictures, had sought to cash in on the success of that absurd adaptation of The Hound of The Baskervilles, Bees Saal Baad (1962), a runaway success thanks to the great tracks (Hemant Kumar) and lyrics (Shakeel Badayuni) and last but not least Waheeda Rehman herself. In this song sequence from Kohraa, lots of rolling, fleecy clouds shroud Kaifi Azmi's great lyric set to music once again by the immortal Hemant Kumar Mukherjee and Waheeda mirrors each changing, varied mood of the song in that mobile face that made her a rage for so many years.



I know, I know my predilection for the Bengali composers comes through in what I have written above. There were other immortals: Naushad Ali and Shankar-Jaikishan and Anil Biswas (here I go again!) and C. Ramchandra and others too numerous to mention whose compositions will always haunt us, but the Bengali composers knew best how to incorporate the Hardian concept of man-against-nature in their artistry and I could go on and on with what they did but these are the songs that came to mind while I was coasting that afternoon along the back roads and by lanes of Edison and Metuchen.

I would like my readers to write to me, via the Comments box above if only to speak to me of their favourite baadal-o-baarish songs. I am aware that each age brings along with it its own brand of film and music themes but I do believe that the industry is now at the nadir of its creativity in film music. Perhaps it's the fault of the movies themselves, which despite branching off into new territories have left precious little scope for melody to retrieve its place in our hearts!

What else can one say of a generation which, as Raju Bharatan has rightly lamented in his latest, is snug within its parameters set by Rahul Dev Burman and A.R. Rehman?  

YSZ.....

People, profanity sounds more repulsive in one's mother tongue, I firmly believe, especially if said mother tongue is Hindi or any of the regional languages of India, in which case I will probably never buy an exorbitantly priced ticket to a movie house in Bombay, to watch a run-of-the-mill Hindi film.

Let me tell you why we went to see the much touted Yeh Saali Zindagi. I chanced upon a slickly written critique of this film in the TOI. Film reviews have come a long way since when I was growing up, I will grant you that. Barring a few big names like Firoze Rangoonwala (Screen), Bikram Singh (Filmfare) and the formidable Baburao Patel (Motherindia) most reviewers in those days, in Bombay at least, were content to issue brief, staid notices of new releases. But while reviews today are more breezily written they lack depth and hint only at a verisimilitude in perception. It's probably because they have to deal with characters crudely drawn, representing the brute in man and the devil in penmanship! It's okay to be choosy in one's roles and Irfan Khan, a fine performer otherwise (The Warrior, Mumbai Meri Jaan), certainly needs to do so. We have precious few good actors working today and as cine goers we do deserve an occasional well drawn, mature characterization. I was squirming in my seat watching him mouth this defilement of language. I do not remember the other names that throng the credits of YSZ....honestly, I do not care.

I have been in and out of movie houses for most of my life and have lost count of the number of movies I have simply walked out of--never though, for the filth and violence that this screenplay of YSZ portrays. The language in its crudeness leaves nothing to the imagination: it goes beyond the usual allusions. These were the most disgusting 40 minutes I have spent in a movie house in Bombay, or anywhere else for that matter! This film was not going anywhere even if we had stayed to its end.

From back in the early 60s I remember a review of Ajanta Arts' Mujhe Jeene Do, a tale of banditry, ransom and mayhem, that Sunil Dutt had the courage to shoot in the robber-infested ravines of the state of Bihar. One line from that review has stayed with me over the years: "....this is not a film that we want our women and children to see...."  I wonder what that reviewer would have had to say about the writing in YSZ!

The times, they have changed and in their eagerness to keep up with contemporary world cinema our producers and screenplay and dialogue writers have lost track of perspective. Call me dated but brazenness is not everything that one looks for in a movie, especially when one recalls the great writing that emanated from the likes of Rajinder Singh Bedi, Inder Raj Anand, Wajahat Mirza and Ramanand Sagar to name a few~writers who made us think and encouraged us to change the way we interpreted life, to muse upon it! True, a lot of the films were mediocre but they were not ever repulsive. It is since the late 70s that films have donned a crude mantle. Permissiveness has reached its nadir in recent years and needs to be muzzled.

....And Hum Dono

I have finally watched this fine Nav Ketan production on the big screen: not a patch on the black and white which I followed up with at home, despite the colour and the cinemascope. This is one of the few Dev Anand starrers from which, thankfully, his gangly silliness is missing. It was good to see the young faces of Sadhana and Nanda and Dev himself, from fifty years ago this year, not to speak of the mature performances of the then already-aged character artistes Lalita Pawar and Gajanand Jagirdar and Leela Chitnis. The latter is especially forceful as Dev's mother: mesmerizing in her initial confrontation with Sadhana, simply brilliant in her metamorphosis in the scene that immediately follows. Sadhana's controlled turbulence is the perfect foil, to that senior thespian's outburst. To cap it all, the perfect chiaroscuro helps to carry the symbolic situation: all this, however, is lost on colour. 

And like the colour, so the sound. Jaidev's fine soundtrack has been 'improved' upon, Dev-saab would have us believe. Where the mere plucking of a string was enough to indicate a nuance, we are now subjected to drawn out computer-backed wails. Even the strains of the famous Nav Ketan logo have been altered! Our films, unfortunately, have trained us to seek depth where none exists, and often our songs reek of bathos more than emotion. This is one film where the songs are well placed. Sahir Ludhianvi's fine lyrics have depth and meaning actually adding to the story's anti-war message, and thankfully, where digitization does not intrude Jaidev-ji's fine background music still makes its presence felt.   

I am convinced that the classics need to be left alone. Once the DVD of the current coloured version of Hum Dono is released, the black and white will fade from memory and with it, the significance and charm of the pre-colour 60s era (B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur and K. Asif's Mughal-e-Azam have met the same fate). Those of us who still have the original DVD of this fine film need to hang on to it at least until our generation has run its course. The film is a happy experience of the black and the white of life. We need not have sullied it with the colours of the rainbow.

In The Concert Hall

A long time ago someone close asked me why I have always loved to listen to a song more in an auditorium during a movie re-run, than on the radio. While not quite accurate, listening to Radio Ceylon in the dead of night had its own charm (the silence of the night helped hold the song deep inside you forever!), but playing hookie from school to enjoy the glory that was the classic Shankar-Jaikishan soundtrack in the Maratha Mandir or Naaz or Liberty with a thousand other voices of a packed audience was an experience which, I thought, was gone with my high school years...

....until this last Saturday, at the Shanmukhananda Hall in Bombay at a revival of the legendary Manna Dey's songs under the auspices of Keep Alive and its very eloquent founder, Manohar Iyer.

People, I have been away for the better part of forty years and what I have missed in the interim was driven home to me forcefully, time and time again, during the just-under-four-hour programme that a very able troupe belted out to the delight of an appreciative crowd. For long I have lived in muted despair bemoaning the current state of our film music, missing the singers, composers and poets (if not most of the movies) of our time but this quintet of wonderful voices convinced me that all is not yet lost and that nostalgia will remain alive and well for a few years more.

That era of the 30s thru the 60s (yes, I am convinced there was a lot of good even in the declining 60s) will always remain with us as the era of definitive music and eloquent poetry and great, great singing. True, there was change and evolving every step of the way but the Muse was never lost sight of and each new genius added to our experience of the art.

While Manna Dey's forte was raga-based compositions, he excelled in folk renderings as also the occasional risque trivial compositions, as later film situations demanded.

All this came to the fore thanks to Rana and Gaurav and Sagar and Radhika and Shruti as they led us down memory lane and brought to life the years that we will always remember. Think of the poets whose songs Manna Dey rendered and the music directors who Manna Dey sang for, and we had a very colourful and composite musical tribute to a legend that is probably in the final years of his life.

Fittingly, the evening opened with the Kavi Pradeep-SD Burman tandem and Manna Dey's takeoff number from 1950s Mashal,'Upar Gagan Vishaal'. Whatever skepticism my ignorant mind had harboured until then about these kids taking on the songs of the ages, was dispelled by the time the solo stepped aside after the 'mukhda' and the full-throated chorus stepped in and took over. Let me mention here that the film version of this classic does not sound half as good to my heart as does the re-recorded 78r.p.m. track which was, thankfully, adhered to by Sagar.

After that it was a roller-coaster ride of emotion and memories surging and goose-pimples and musical portraits of departed music directors and poets and fellow singers of Manna Da's era. And as we coasted down the three-odd hours and more, we remembered poets and wordcrafters ranging from Kavi Pradeep and Bharat Vyas, to Sahir Ludhianvi to Kaifi Azmi to Shailendra-Hasrat to Majrooh and Gulzar and music directors from Sachin Dev Burman, all the way down to his scion, Rahul Dev Burman and beyond. In this context, one does not understand why Naushad-saab never found use for Manna Dey's vocals, barring two of his tracks in Shabab and Mother India: the two could have done a lot together!

In between, thanks to Manohar Iyer's effusive commentary we learned how Manna Dey was often short-changed (barring Lata, which singer was not?!)over the years and finally relegated to sing for a horror comic like Mehmood, so much like Mukesh-ji. And we learned why the very gentle Mukesh himself lost so much of his value and market as a singer in the mid-50s thanks to a bungled film compromise.

There is no audience like an audience at a concert of vintage Indian film music. I have noticed and shared the deep love and veneration we have for our film music, at movie halls right from my school days in Bombay. Not for us the deep sigh and then silence as the conductor waves his baton at concerts, elsewhere (not that there is anything wrong with that)but we never hesitate to punctuate a song at the right moment, with a disciplined, subdued applause that passes as soon as the singer moves on. I loved this feeling once again on Saturday. True, most of us gathered there were a fraternity and each of us knew what we were looking for in the songs that we heard. But the joy shared, thus, was multiple and varied. I will never forget, though, the moment of rapt silence as Rana brought Anil Biswas-ji's resounding 'Buddham Saranam Gacchhami' to an end, before the applause broke. Gaurav excelled at and moved us with his renderings of the Prem Dhawan-Salil Chaudhury creation 'Ai Mere Pyare Watan' from Kabuliwala and the Makhdoom Mohiuddin-Salil Chaudhury classic 'Janewale Sipahise Pucchho' from Bimal Roy's Usne Kaha Tha.

What I did miss was listening live to that folk song of all folk song compositions 'Dharti Kahe Pukarke' from Do Bigha Zamin. These voices would have done more than justice to Salil-da's great chorus.

I could go on and on about this fine programme, but let me point out an incorrect factoid that has been rankling me for many years ever since I first came across it. It is a common misconception that the film Begunah (fine rendering of the Manna Dey-Lata duet on stage, by the way) was based on the Hollywood
film Knock On Wood, starring Danny Kaye. This actor's name itself would be a dead giveaway, for the film was a comedy of the mid-50s and had no crime in it. What we need to remember as the base for 'Begunah' was Highway 301, a noir crime caper made in 1950, which was released at the Eros theatre in Bombay and which subsequently spawned 'Begunah', which was later withdrawn due to copyright reasons. An interesting aside to this mess was the assault on the Bombay branch of a prominent British bank, patterned exactly as the bank holdup was in the Hollywood film. This is just by the way and in no way has taken away from the glory that was last weekend's programme. These kids actually made me perceive melody in eminently forgettable songs like Chitragupta-ji's Jodi Hamari Jamega Kaise from Aulad and in the Laxmi-Pyare duet from Pyar Kiye Ja. Kudos! The female vocals were delirious!

Many thanks, Mr. Iyer: to you and your gallant singers one and all and the rest of the troupe. The song embedded here is for all of you.

A Page

  Here I am walking the streets of Bombay once again, after a lapse of two years. This will be my longest trip home in the 33 years and more that I have lived abroad. I am looking forward to the seven weeks I still have ahead of me.  My earlier visits were hectic and rather unfulfilled: two-week sojourns to my city of  birth that left no time for surging memories to run their course: the long flight home was often moody and disgruntled.

This time, I have promised myself, I will relive a part of my growing days visiting old haunts and meeting faces I had known.

I almost wish I hadn't: I go up to casual associates of the past who struggle in vain to remember but are polite enough to say "hello" (some of them do pause, think back and remember. Like Jimmy Vajifdar, just yesterday, eyes lighting up at a memory) and the old haunts are bustling with newer energies and face lifts. In short, the Bombay I knew is fast disappearing.

The essence, however, remains and if anything, the city is more vibrant.....A newer generation of young 'mumbaikars'  (please, can we go back to being Bombayites? 'Mumbaikars' sounds so parochial!) shows no qualm in walking hand-in-hand and is more eloquent than we were in exhibiting mutual affection, "gay pride" is much in evidence and the upstarts in the city's film industry (I refuse to use the 'B' word!) make showbiz brazen like it has never been before.

Today, my eyes fall upon a paanshop at the corner where Bora Bazar meets Gunbow Street, in South Bombay, now bearing a newer, longer name. I pause for a moment taking in the new look of this small landmark-of-the-mind, missing the old-world quaintness of the earlier shop. I stare at it from a short distance away and remember that late-evening hour in 1971 when I became friends with the paunched paanwallah without uttering a word: a fated moment in time, mine and his.....

My way home from the newspaper in what was then known as Ballard Estate lay along Gunbow Street and it being a bustling area with traditional old Parsee and Gujarati homes that spoke of where they came from (and still holding change at bay, as only they can) and mithaiwallahs and speakeasies and the fire brigade just off, there was always music afoot in the area: in Bombay, there is always music in the air. I paused as the strains of a Madan Mohan composition fell upon my ears: I had not heard this one in a long while. I sidled closer to the shop after a quick glance at my wristwatch: sure, I would miss the 10:40 local but there was always the 10:55!

It is not difficult to get lost in a Madan Mohan composition and the next three minutes or so were spent in eloquent silence. The paaanwallah himself was rapt, going about his business, as we listened to Lata  croon Rajendra Krishan's fine lyric, चैन नहीं आये, from 'Samunder'. In between, we exchanged looks appreciative of the song and as it neared its end he was still building a 'paan'. As the last groove worked itself out I paused long enough to thank him for allowing me to stand by, before heading to Churchgate and my train. But it was he who thanked me....by holding out that last 'paan' he had built. I could not deny him that and walked to the station and my local savouring my first ever 'paan'.






                                                                            * * *

I am in two minds whether or not to visit the local Metro for a showing of the coloured,  cinemascope re-release of Nav Ketan's 'Hum Dono'. I have never seen it on the big screen: not that I care much for the colourisation of the classics, even those initiated by their own producers (in this case Dev Anand). However, watching Sahir Ludhianvi's great lyrics unfold on the big screen to Jaidev-ji's "cerebral eloquence" in music, should make for interesting cinema viewing. Lata and Rafi and Asha are superb in their rendering of the songs in this film (1962). I have wondered why Jaidev-ji, lost Filmfare's Best Music Director Award to Ravi for Gharana in that year. Tell me people, should I?

Signing off....

Embers

In the 64th year of his passing, memories of Kundan Lal Saigal (or Sehgal, if you'll have it that way) remain just below the surface of  one's consciousness. He died when I was barely two years old but his songs and his singing were already being drummed into me repeatedly by dad (God bless his musical soul!) and his records. Saigal's death on January 17, 1947 was the first cultural trauma that music lovers experienced in post-independence India and all through time his memory has been kept alive, albeit in decreasing decibels of intensity, by various cultural associations formed by a generation that is clearly on its way out.

True, Radio Ceylon spearheaded the movement of keeping him alive not only daily when it played a Saigal chant at about 7:55a.m., marking the end of its 'पुरानी फिल्मों के संगीत का कार्यक्रम', but also by devoting an entire commercial-free hour on the singer's death anniversary: that was a lot in those days, for a shortwave radio station that ran for only three hours each a.m. and p.m. For those of you who remember, the great Gopal Sharma at first and later the more eloquent Manohar Mahajan after Sharmaji retired, fueled our growing love for KLS with their ad libs, as they played the songs! In later years, however, it has remained the lot of private musical bodies to keep memories alive. The halcyon days of Radio Ceylon have long since ended.

Although by now everyone from my generation is familiar with the man and his legends, I have always wanted to write something about KLS: never got a chance to do so during my days at the newspaper at home and much less after having settled abroad: except, during a short stint at a local radio station trying my best to jump-start a flagging interest in the vintage film music of India.

 And one fine summer's afternoon the spark caught fire, or so I thought. In an amusing manner the experience drove home to me the point that the generation had changed once more and that I was flogging a dead horse! The radio station was beamed, and is still being beamed although I am not a part of it, from the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, N.J. and most of my listeners were of my own age whose eyes moistened  at the mere mention of a song. What I played gave them a chance to call me up off-the-mike and give vent to nostalgia.

My yen to impart a bit of history with each track that I spun kindled a bit of curiosity among the students who tuned in to WRSU and sometimes I was pleasantly surprised by a young voice asking me the meaning of a word or complimenting my style. On this particular afternoon....
"Kersi Mistry.....?" asks the voice trailing off....decidedly Indian
"Yes, who's this....?"
"I'm calling from the dorm...."
"Okay, what can I do for you...."
"Could you play a song by Sehgal....?"
I hold my breath~this is a personal compliment!
"Sure thing, what do you want to listen to...."
"Anything, I just love his singing". This, clearly, was a kid whose dad was probably like mine!
"OK, next week: I am not carrying anything by him today."
"Thanks" says he, as he signs off.

The following Sunday I play the immortal and ever-reverberating "जब दिल ही टूट गया, हम जीके क्या करेंगे"from 'Shahjahan' (the last-but-one film in which Saigal-saab starred) in honour of the previous week's conversation, and wait in vain for a call acknowledging it! Another Sunday comes around and I pick up the phone....
"Kersi....."
"Yes"
"When are you going to play my song....?
"What do you mean.....I played a Saigal track just for you....last week"
"I know, I heard it....but that was not the Sehgal I had in mind...."
"Then, who...."
"I wanted to listen to something by Baba Sehgal......but you know what, this fellow wasn't too bad!"


I wanted to kick myself for not keeping up with the times....almost did.


I guess I would like to commemorate that encounter and my decades of listening to KL Saigal by playing the same song....one more time. Please tell me this is the one you were waiting for....

Ek Aur Yaad....

Some thoughts on the passing of Nalini Jaywant who moved on last week. I do not know how old she was but I am sure the newspapers in India carried the usual cliched headlines: "The End of an Era" or "Another Great Luminary is Doused".

Truth to tell, the era has continued to end a little down the years with the passing of each cine-personality who has left, but has remained alive and well in the songs that we listen to and in the memories that we still share. I, for one, am convinced that as long our generation lasts we will remember those who created nostalgia in us! Even now during a visit to the city of one's birth one automatically looks for (and sees in the mind's eye) some billboard that used to hang at some spot in Opera House or Lamington Road. For that was, what I would like to call, the age of 'persona', when a face peering down from the billboard drew the throngs to the movie house.

Nalini Jaywant was one such face that conjures up that beautifully emotive era. It is, however, unfortunate that her name does not always come up in discussions of the actresses we have known. Not her fault: look at the films she acted in: apart from Meena Kumari I know of no other actress of that period who was given such short shrift, as was Nalini Jaywant.

The biggest banners that she acted for were Kardar Films and Filmistan Ltd. The first was a prolific banner that churned out one bad remake of western films after another. Think of 'Jadoo' and you think of 'The Loves of Carmen': thereby hangs a tale! What lifted Jadoo, however, was the Naushad Ali-Shakeel Badayuni tandem, and Nalini Jaywant's lipsynch of that master's impossibly difficult compositions for that film, vocalized by the great Shamshad Begum and Lata. And then there was Kardar's Naujawan, also in 1951 of which I know nothing but the great compositions of SD Burman.

Filmistan Ltd., that unabashedly lachrymose banner, gave her roles in films like Samadhi (1950) and a fine role in Nastik (1954) and Bombay Talkies cast her in its Sangram (1950). All three of these films also had fabulous music by the late C. Ramchandra. She came back to Filmistan in the mid-50s with two lighter but silly films like Munimji (1955) and Hum Sub Chor Hain (1956), both of which are remembered today for their frothy music: the one with SD Burman and the other with OP Nayyar.

Towards the late-50s she starred in a film called Miss Bombay, as a wife who could not forget her lover (Ajit) and would rather see him waste away before her eyes than betray her husband (Rehman). That was a good solid role in a movie that suffered from bad, nay, poor direction. There was also Ramesh Saigal's Railway Platform in 1955 (Sunil Dutt's debut) which is largely remembered for a couple of Sahir Ludhianvi's great lyrics set to music by Madan Mohan.

So, what am I going to remember her for? Well (and call me biased) for the roles that I have seen her in but most of all for what she did for director Raj Khosla as the nautch-girl in Nav Ketan's Kalapani (a fine foil there for Madhubala), and for Ramesh Saigal in Shikast in which she matched Dilip Kumar's virtuosity, breath for painful breath. An underrated classic, this film did not go much beyond the critical acclaim it received upon its release in 1953 and is remembered today mainly for its brilliant soundtrack by Shankar-Jaikishan. But then, isn't that what this blog is all about?

R.I.P.

Continuum

People, you never know who you will bump into on cyberspace. Just when I thought that the age of Kundanlal Saigal and Pankaj Mallik was done with (in the media, anyway), along comes Dr. Sangita Nerurkar to completely bowl me over. Making the YouTube your alter-बसेरा  throws you in league with a wealth of individuals who share your passion for vintage film music.

I plead guilty to stifling an occasional snigger when I listen to valiant attempts made by amateurs uploading their singing of the classics on the tube, but always immediately kick myself for not having the courage to do so myself. This is one way that admirers of an unique musical tradition show their passion and their love for it, and short of listening to the great Radio Ceylon in the days of yore, or singing along as a song unfolded during one of the numerous re-releases of a film in those days, I have known of no other greater public display of feeling for a five-minute track. But I digress......

....if only to drive home the point that a song recorded more than half a century ago and still loved, can be re-recorded today with exactly the same enunciation, the same feeling and, more importantly, have its beauty realized once again by someone from a newer generation.  Dr. Nerurkar's soprano might jar those who will not have anything but K L Saigal's deep baritone (Lata's much under-rated Shraddhanjali suffered in that way, all those years ago), and yet she reins in her resonance even as she plunges to the lower notes. It is here that she matches the timbre in her voice beautifully with that of the great Bengali female singers of the New Theaters era. The magic in her voice is undeniable: so is her fascination for an age in popular music that is long past her own. Thank you, Doctor: you just did me a random act of kindness.

When Lata Had The Last Laugh!

Anything can happen on a Thursday. All through my school days it was Thursday that I looked forward to because of the solitude that the day off from school gave me: pretty much on my own, reading my books and more importantly listening to the music that would eventually coalesce into a major part of the subconscious. Years later, Thursday would become a day of revival: like today. Memories surfacing.

I was out walking earlier this evening when a discussion I had with friend Sharad Saklecha months ago emerged. It involved Lata Mangeshkar and a chance remark she had made during an interview not too long go. The interviewer had asked her what, at this stage in her life, she missed the most. The subdued but stunning response was: "I wish I had learned to sing!"

I remember Sharad and myself laughing at the remark and dismissing it as sheer sanctimony.  After all, लताबाई has been and will always remain to millions of us the epitome of great singing. But something that I came across just the other day has left me musing upon her remark, assessing her own singing. It was her rendering of Narendra Sharma's Jyoti Kalash Chhalke from Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan (1961), composed by the late Sudhir Phadke. 

Sudhir Phadke seemed to have disappeared from the Hindi film scene no sooner than he had entered upon it. True, he had made Lata sing for him in films like Malti Madhav and a couple of others whose names now evade me, in the 50s, and Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan might as well have been his swan song (I, personally, never heard of him again). But what a swan song it was. He was denied the fame and glory reached by other contemporary Marathi music directors like Chitalkar Ramchandra and Vasant Desai. However, he did give Lata at least one of the 10 best of her career i.e. Jyoti Kalash Chhalke....a song that defies definition and as at least one admirer puts it, is divinity itself.

As it so often happened in those days, before music directors made the playback singers record their creations, they themselves sang the songs to show them the way. Quite a few of those tracks have survived: among them, Jyoti Kalash and to name another, C. Ramchandra singing Radha Na Bole, his own dainty from Azad (1954). To listen to Sudhirji singing Jyoti kalash chhalke before a live audience and to watch the expressions on his face as he invites his audience to share his feeling at the coming of a new morn, is ecstasy itself.

Perhaps I have read too much into this video: I leave you to judge for yourself. Perhaps, again, it was this rendering that Lataji used as a touchstone to make the kind of comment she made about herself: this, and other recordings she has made along with classical singers like DV Paluskar.

I have appended two video clips of this famed composition. This first one is the actual clip from the movie Bhabhi Ki Chudiyan beautifully emoted by the late Meena Kumari supported by fine chiaroscuro from the cameraman......

and the other, appearing below, is the same song sung by Sudhir Phadke for a live audience. 

While both leave their own impact, unfortunately, the ravages of time are undeniably visible.
The idea is simple.....they are ushering in a new day.

Salaams! 

Why Groove78?

Why, indeed. When time began for me, circa the mid-40s, film music had firmly established itself not as much via the radio, as by the gramophone disc turning around a spindle at the rate of 78 revolutions per minute. Recording companies like Columbia and New Theatres kept bakelite in business, churning out track after track of musical delight from studios in Bombay and Calcutta. The mighty HMV, though already established elsewhere in the western world, was yet to begin its forays into film music in India.

So what's all this leading to? Well, that's where we first heard our music and that's where our memories took root. In its day the '78' was no less a marvel of recording than the CD is today. There is one that still hangs framed on the wall of my living room, each groove a testimony to the hundreds of songs listened to, down the decades. Listening to the '78' recording of a song is not the same as listening to its fuller version on the CD~or even the '78' rpm version. The one was the original, the other a reproduction. Most of us from that generation, while listening to the CD hark back to the original scratch of stylus on bakelite.

Hence the name of this blog. It may not feature in future posts here, but will be the guiding force behind them all......Nor does this blog purport to reconstruct the history of music recording in cinema. The aim is to have people contribute their memories and relive their experiences of the music that has gone before today.....Once again, welcome.