Bharatan - A Journey Down Melody Lane

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Copyright Raju Bharatan 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

The views and opinions expressed in this book are the authors
own and the facts are as reported by him, which have been verified
to the extent possible, and the publishers are not in any way
liable for the same.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in
the form of a phonographic recording, nor may it be stored
in a retrieval system, transmitted, or otherwise be copied for
public or private use other than for fair use as brief quotations
embodied in articles and reviews, without prior written
permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978-81-89988-91-3

Printed and bound at
Saurabh Printers Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi

To
My wife, the late Girija Rajendran,
and also
to
Shilpa, Sriganesh,
Sucharita, Sachin

Contents

Lata Mangeshkar remains, in my euphonious esteem, the greatest singer ever to be heard in Hindustani cinema. But for Latas inspirational vocalizing, I would never have started writing on music.

W hen more than 15 years ago Lata Mangeshkar: A Biography (written by me) was published, there were very few books on music idols. But with the passage of time, a variety of publications in this genre made an appearance, crystallizing into a trend. What one misses, however, is a kaleidoscopic work that views vintage musically Hindustani cinema through the luminous prism of the galaxy of stars upon whom all those vintage numbers came to be audio-visually immortalized. In other words, a book cinematically highlighting the tuneful contribution, to our film lore, not only of music makers, lyric writers and singers but also of such exceptionally creative wavemakers as Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Vijay Anand, Guru Dutt and Yash Chopra.

A Journey Down Melody Lane is ideated as such a breakaway book epitomizing the Musey musicality of the motion picture in India. It examines, in sonorous detail, how the timeless music we (at least the aficionados) so cherish came to be crafted by a Naushad Ali via a Mohammed Rafi; a Madan Mohan via a Lata Mangeshkar; and an O. P. Nayyar via an Asha Bhosle. It expressively explores our treasure trove to spread out, before rasiks, gems so polished as to make our silver screen an eye-filling phantasmagoria. It comes up with fascinating nuggets of information that whet the appetite to know more about films in general and film music in particular.

I am grateful to Doordarshan (as Indian TVs torch-bearer) for conferring upon me the title of film historian. For all that, I am a listener first, a chronicler after. That is why I feel bewildered when I find a slew of writers and commentators (both in print and electronically) today presuming to hold forth on the nitty-gritty of Hindustani cinesangeet as if they were there when it all happened in the golden age of film music. If they were there, I never saw them. I regularly beheld, at such 1950s 1960s song recordings and music sittings, only Jitubhai Mehta (of the Gujarati Vandemataram and Bombay Samachar) alongside SCREEN photographer-reporter R. M. Kumtakar.

While a music recording happens with everything rehearsed and ready, a song sitting is where you get to witness the numbers writer, composer and singer indulging in the scale of nok-jhonk (give and take) bringing a certain rounding to the tuning. Like, for instance, lyricist Hasrat Jaipuri apostrophizing it as Chashm-e-bad door to complete Teree pyaaree pyaaree soorat ko kissee kee nazar na lage as the Jaikishan take on B. Saroja Devivia the 1961 come-over-to-Sasural overtures of a Rajendra Kumar vocally vindicated by Mohammed Rafi. You think the Teree pyaaree pyaaree tune was final and ready for recording after that? Perish the thought! A week passed in further refining the tune for it to acquire the razzledazzle it did on the screen.

As a fresher still, I watched entranced as, first, Jitubhai Mehta and then R. M. Kumtakar softly ventured to offer their mellifluent impressions to the tunes composer. If O. P. Nayyar genuinely valued Mehtas insights, Madan Mohan habitually turned to Kumtakar for final ghazal approval. To think that I joined the MehtaKumtakar twosome only because cinema coverage got to be contemptuously assigned to me after all those intellectual heavyweights (manning The Illustrated Weekly of India in The Times of India Building at Bombays Bori Bunder) considered it beneath their dignity to handle something so demeaning as films!

Thus did popular cinema and quality music mingle in my bloodstream over a period of 60 years. It therefore amuses me no end upon being authoritatively told, on TV, that ace composer C. Ramchandra created all nine songs of Azaad (1955) during a single nights sitting! Its but the mere outline of a tune you could get in a flash, C. Ramchandra enlightened me. Recording the song after that is a humdrum process consuming a minimum of two-to-three days even when rushed, as we were on Azaad. No composer on earth could conjure a tune and takeit in the same breath. Each Lata tune needs nursing in the heart and mind.

Let no one therefore dare tell you that any tune got done in two shakes of a ducks tail. It might sound great to hear that R. D. Burman songscaped Asha Bhosle (to go on Zeenat Aman) as Dum maaro dum with a snap of the fingers, but the ground reality is quite something else. The aim of this book, therefore, is to set the gramophone record straight for instance, by noting that Lata Mangeshkars entry of 30,000 songs in the Guinness Book of World Records was officially expunged in 1990 itself. In underpinning such fragments of fact, the integrated effort is to orchestrate our evergreen music in an idiom designed to offer a grandstand view of the 60 song-laden years spanning the 19472007 musical spectrum. Nor is the music made before 1947 and after 2007 by any means underplayed for I have updated my musings to embrace the period up to the arrival of A. R. Rahman.

It was in a Rahman-era newspaper supplement, HT Caf of the Hindustan Times, that I resumed writing on our song treasury via a column titled Mausam Hai Musicanaat the invitation of cineaste Khalid Mohamed. After doing a number of such columns, I obtusely lost, on the computer, each piece so written! This was when my perceptive musical admirer, Rupa Dore (sitting in the Hollywood heart of Los Angeles), magically materialized, on my computer, to retrieve each such piece for me. But for Rupa and her spot audio-visual feedback, this book could not have been undertaken. If only because those HT Caf contributions represent some of the source material in shaping this book something for which I sincerely thank the HT Group in the face of having proceeded to expand each such 450-word column! The stimulus for the books mood-setting opening chapter (The Talkie in Its Walkie Teens) came from a musical odyssey I undertook for the prestigious