When we moved house seven years ago, one of the casualties — along with a few pieces of expensive crockery — was my husband’s prized collection of about 50-odd 78 rpm gramophone records, collected by him in the Fifties when he was a college student in Allahabad.
Every month after receiving his precious monthly allowance of Rs 150, which covered board, lodging, fees and books, he would head straight to the record shop, listen to at least a dozen records over and over again and finally select one to buy. The collection spanned that golden era of Hindustani film music with legends like Noorjehan, Shamshad Begum, K.L. Saigal, Kanan Devi and K.C. Dey.
The common denominator among all the records in the collection was our favourite composer, Naushad (photo), whose felicity in wedding the folk idiom of Uttar Pradesh with hoary classical ragas is unparalleled in the annals of Hindustani film music.
When months of intensive searching proved futile and my husband was convinced that his collection had been lost in transit (or that I had not given away his treasures to the kabariwallah), we headed to a popular music shop to try and replace the loss. Alas, the shopkeeper had at best a vague idea of the singers of those times. “But they are all-time greats. How can you not stock them in such a big shop?” we exclaimed. “Sir, nobody listens to this kind of stuff these days. You will have to hunt in the archives of All India Radio for these,” he advised. Dejected, we returned home empty handed.
Naushad believed that listeners had to be groomed to appreciate good music, and when exposed to it, they would lap it up in preference to cheap, tawdry stuff. Proof of this was the thundering success of the technicolour resurrection of Mughal-e- Azam, about 35 years after the original black and white version.
{{/usCountry}}Naushad believed that listeners had to be groomed to appreciate good music, and when exposed to it, they would lap it up in preference to cheap, tawdry stuff. Proof of this was the thundering success of the technicolour resurrection of Mughal-e- Azam, about 35 years after the original black and white version.
{{/usCountry}}Our misfortune today is that we don’t have composers with the fervour and passion of a Naushad Ali any more — whose quest for perfection was an end in itself. We live in an ‘instant’ age where everything is ‘outsourced’, from the singer to the composer and the musicians. Compared to the gems of Naushad, the songs to be savoured gently, pretty much everything these days has become ‘fast food’. A pity.