Singh No More

The purity of sur and the exploration and graces of the raags were amalgamated in Jagjit Singh’s ghazal though he could not travel the high virtuosity path of Mehdi Hasan

Jagjit Singh who died last week was a very popular vocalist. Though he was seventy, he presented a youthful look that went along well with his music which carried a saccharine sentimental strain.

It is a little difficult to pinpoint the reasons of his popularity over the four decades that he sang with the leading vocalists in more than one genre of music across the subcontinent. He made a name for himself in singing the ghazal and in his later years he also sang the bhajans and gurbanis which also endeared him to a sizeable segment of the music-listening public more comfortable with religious music.

Actually it was his ghazals that made him one of the most popular singers in the subcontinent. India did not have a ghazal singer as Akhtari Bai Faizabadi (Begum Akhtar), the last great exponent of the ghazal, had ceased to sing with regularity in the decade of the 1960s. Talat Mahmood two-timed between film songs and ghazals, fizzling out sooner than he should have had.

Meanwhile, musical influences travelled across the political boundary freely as musicians dealt with similar creative issues on both sides of the border. The major exponents of ghazal were all Pakistanis and the reason could have been that the kheyal and thumri had a thinning audience in the country which made these exponents of the kheyal and thumri switch to singing the ghazal which was less abstract and more acceptable to the emerging cultural contours of the new state of Pakistan. Ustad Barkat Ali Khan, Iqbal Bano, Fareeda Khanum, Mehdi Hasan and later Ghulam Ali all switched to singing the ghazal and enriched it considerably. Similarly, in folk music, too, the musical virtuosity went up markedly in Pakistan for the same reason.

In India, the lines were more formally drawn as most of the classical vocalists stuck to their genres while film music too was dominated by a few great exponents of the lighter forms like geet. There was hardly any scope for breaking through the confines of the already established parameters of the forms.

Mehdi Hasan, a truly great exponent of the ghazal, started to sing in a constricted voice in the lower and middle registers and allied the Rajasthani ang into the prevalent ghazal gaiki of the times. As his style caught on, others started to emulate him across the music divide in both India and Pakistan. Jagjit Singh was one such follower but he did not travel all along the high virtuosity path of Mehdi Hasan. The purity of sur, the exploration of the raag and the graces of the kheyal and thumri were amalgamated in his new style of singing the ghazal. Jagjit Singh took the path that was being followed by the more popular vocalists; he scaled down the high virtuosity and merged it with the geet-like suppressed ebullience and created a form that had been perfected by Ghulam Ali in Pakistan.

The popularity of the geet ang and then the ultra sweetness of the cultivated tone within a very limited range were what the people wanted to listen. This music was soothing and did not question the comfort zone of the listeners; the music evoked a romantic strain and did not have the quality to disturb or address the chaos within.

In the last fifty odd years, both in India and Pakistan the effort had been to scale down on the virtuosity and create music which has a more popular appeal. The markers have been ‘greater reliance on lyrics of the popular kind and compositions, which are not complicated and easy to hum. This consistent drive at appealing to the largest number in a democratic age may have been politically correct and commercially rewarding but it came at the cost of virtuosity. Jagjit Singh rode this wave of sentimentalism and became hugely popular.

There may have other reasons for his popularity. The manner of a man and a woman singing in a concert outside the film duet too was considered a novelty and his earlier successes were the numbers that he sang with his wife Chitra .It was pleasant on the eye as the duo performed in public or on television. He also sang for the films, though not very many but in the subcontinent to sing for the film is one sure way of reaching out to a great many people who are overly fond of associating music with lyrics, a situation, a character, thus avoiding the perils of the wanderings of the imagination.

He also lent his voice to the very popular television serial based on the life of Ghalib, enhancing the aura of the leading poet of Urdu in the most realistic attempt at the portrayal of the man and his times. This was seen on both sides of the border with great avidity.