(bdnews24.com, October 8, 2011)
In 1941, a few years before India became an independent nation, a son was born to devout Sigh parents in Sriganganagar, Rajasthan. He was called Jagmohan, but his father changed his name as per the suggestion of the family’s guru of the Namdhari sect. The child became Jagjit Singh – a name that is now spoken of with reverence and admiration by anyone with any musical interest. He was trained by a blind teacher, Pandit Chhaganlal Sharma, and by Ustad Jamal Khan of the Senia gharaana and learned to sing shabad kirtans (Sikh hymns) in gurdwaras and holy processions. The interest became a passion very soon and Jagjit’s first paid public performance was when he was in the 9th grade, when people paid hin small sums of money and cheered and applauded as he sang. His favourite songs were always coloured with soft sadness, a gentle melancholy that spoke of love lost but hope still in bloom.
My taste is not for this kind of music. I like happy sounds, dramatic sounds, vibrant sounds, colourful sounds, not tunes that are tinged with blue and touched with the edge of tears. So when I was asked to go with friend to a Jagjit Singh concert in Mumbai some years ago, I protested, objected, cavilled. Not me, I grumbled, it’s just not my thing at al. To me, ghazals, the singer’s forte, were for airplanes and elevators, music that soothed and softened, that could easily – and often did – put me into a soporific state that was akin to intense boredom. I was not especially interested in that kind of mood at the time and had to be pushed into being part of the group, bribed with the promise of dessert that was all about chocolate. And I was right; the music was soft, gentle, sleepy almost, lulling my self-frazzled synapses into a kind of torpor that was extremely pleasant, on the verge of being addictive. What grabbed my attention was not the man on the stage playing the harmonium and singing, but the way people around me reacted to him and his music. They were spellbound; they knew every word of the lyrics; they sang along, teary-eyed, smiling, unabashed by the emotion that beamed off their faces.
Jagjit Singh often told the story of what happened during a concert in college – the electricity suddenly went off and he had an audience of 4,000 people watching and listening to him. Mercifully, the sound system was battery operated and he could be heard. He remembered, "I went on singing, nobody moved, nothing stirred ... such incidents and the response from audiences convinced me that I should concentrate on music."
And thereon, he did. He was a huge fan of classical musicians of the time, from Talat Mehmood and Abdul Karim Khan to Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Amir Khan. He developed a taste for Urdu poetry, and thus a preference for bol-pradaan music, which focuses more on the words and expression rather than the tune itself. Geets and ghazals made magic for him, and he soon built up not just a repertoire of songs, but a roster of loyal fans who asked for certain compositions whenever he sang. But Bombay, as it was then, was where he wanted to be and in 1961 Jagjit Singh moved to the big city to try and make it big in film circles. People liked his music, but had no work for him at the time and he left for Jalandhar. Four years later, he tried again. This time, he found a degree of success. He made two albums for a recording company and shed his turban and cut off his long hair to be more photogenic for the cover photographs. From small gatherings to – very, very slowly – bigger projects, it was not an easy journey for the music-man. But the struggle added depth and emotion to his songs and his voice, adding real-life anguish of experience to words that anyway sang of sorrow and loss. And he made the ghazal an accepted, anticipated and applauded form of vocal expression.
Along the way, there was great joy, too. He met and married his love, Chitra, and the two sang together in a collaboration that was sheer poetry. It was still not easy, even though he was getting increasingly popular, both as a solo singer and with his wife as a couple. The birth of his son Vivek in 1971 brought him not just happiness, but luck too. In 1975 he composed his first LP for HMV and sold unbelievably well. But grief came in 1990 when Vivek was killed in a car accident. Chitra lost her voice and refused to even try and sing again, certainly never in public. Jagjit Singh decided to use his loss to colour his music and focussed on it as a kind of meditation, concentrating entirely on his work. He became more spiritual, less ebullient, increasingly philosophical. And the audiences poured in. Bollywood too had become a fan – his songs were used in blockbusters like the arthouse Arth and the more populist Sarfarosh.
Along the way, his health suffered. Jagjit Singh had a heart attach in January 1998, after which he stopped smoking. Nine years later, he suffered blood circulation problems and had to spend time in hospital. A few weeks ago, he had a stroke and was rushed into surgery, where clots in the brain were removed. He was on life support and died on October 10 at the age of 70 in a Mumbai hospital. I may not have been a huge fan of his music, but I will always admire the man who could give so many so much pleasure.
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