In Hindi film music, there is too much artifice to arouse pathos: techniques of dramatisation and sentimentality are used to cajole the listener’s sensibility. Jagjit simply touches upon the bare notes of pathos in Ghalib, bringing it closer to our experiencing the language of the poems. So, though Abida Parveen sings ‘Bekhudi Besabab Nahi Ghalib’ brilliantly, her singing rather than Ghalib’s poetry becomes the point of appeal. As Vikram Singh Khangura put it, his rendition of Ghalib, as “poetry recitation”, something that is suitably “less ornamented”, brings us closer to the poetry than classical and other forms of singing Ghalib. Jagjit Singh’s rendering of Ghalib may be an exception.
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The men in comparison, including the maestro, Mehdi Hasan, charm with the richness of their singing but can’t get really close to the piercing vulnerability one experiences listening to the women singers. What prevents Farida Khanum from scaling the same heights of sorrow as Akhtar or Reshma is perhaps the velvety texture of her voice, which tempers the effect of ‘Mohabbat Karne Wale Kam Na Honge’ and other songs. The song, interestingly, is an Urdu translation of Irish poet Thomas Moore’s poem which begins, ‘Oft in the stilly night’, by Nadir Kakorvi. But it is in the ghazal, ‘Aksar Shab-e-Tanhai Mein’, in which Reshma, with faltering strokes of emotion, finds her soul. The gypsy singer from Rajasthan, Reshma, came to be famous for her song in Hero, where Laxmikant-Pyarelal made her render the Hindi version of the Punjabi folk song, ‘Char Dinan Da Pyar O Rabba Bari Lambi Judai’. She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white, / corners the sky into disbelief. ‘Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow, / sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you. In her memory, the late Kashmiri-American poet, Agha Shahid Ali, wrote,
#SADDEST GHAZALS FULL#
From Shakeel Badayuni’s ‘Mere Humnafas Mere Humnawa’, to Ghalib’s ‘Ibn-e-Mariyam Hua Kare Koi’, Akhtar scales songs of bereavement full of longing.
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All of Begum Akhtar is a veritable plunge into the river of sadness. In the world of the ghazal, a genre ripe with sadness, there are quite a few exemplars.