For a brief while on April 29, the stage at Bandra’s St. Andrews Auditorium turned into an old-fashioned music studio. With the young singers Prashant Samadhar and Harpreet Hasrat singing two melodies from the 50s and the 60s, to the accompaniment of a live orchestra, it recreated the feel of real-time recording that music-making for films used to be; a far cry from the technological exercise it has become today.
‘Hindu ke Ram, Muslim ke Khuda; Haaye Ramji Pa Ma Ga Re Sa’, joyously sung by Samadhar, also brought to focus legendary tabla maestro Ustad Allarakha’s largely unheralded innings in Hindi cinema as a composer. This song, ‘Ni Sa Ga Ma Pa’, is one of the earliest with ‘sargam bol’ (musical notes) for lyrics; long before ‘Do Re Mi’ in The Sound of Music (1965).
Haunting melodies
Abbaji’s (as Ustad Allarakha was often referred to) unique tryst with Hindi cinema was one of many chapters in the larger celebration — called The Journey Continues — to mark his 99th birth anniversary.
A stringing together of musical pieces (conceptualised by his musician son Fazal Qureshi) with an engaging, anecdotal narration about his life by actor-director-raconteur Danish Husain, the show had Hasrat and Samadhar reprising another of Abbaji’s haunting film melodies ‘Je main jaandi Jagge ne mar jaana’ from the Punjabi film Jagga (1964), his last as a composer and the only one in which he is credited as Ustad Allarakha; all of his film work gets attributed as A.R. Qureshi, his actual name. Layered, rich, rooted, raw and earthy, the two compositions left one asking for more.
Husain refers to cinema as the start of Abbaji’s musical journey, which he had to eventually put on the back-burner. “Between 1943 and 1958 he composed music for more than 30 films,” says Husain. These include Yaadgar, Aandhiyaan, Humsafar, Hatimtai ki Beti, Laila, Khandaan, Bewafa. It was an interesting part of his life that not many are aware of.
From Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, Pandit Ravi Shankar and Ustad Vilayat Khan to Shiv-Hari, Zakir Husain and Kishori Amonkar, classical musicians have been consistently composing for films. However, unlike Pandit Ravi Shankar’s ‘Haaye re wo din kyun na aaye’ and ‘Jaane kaise sapno mein’ in Anuradha or Ustad Vilayat Khan’s ‘Ambar ki ik pak surahi’ in Kadambari, Abbaji’s work has not been so strongly imprinted in the mass consciousness.
While researching for the show, Husain found himself faced with reams of incomplete information and he could access very few of the original recordings; most of them have disappeared. “Artistes of his calibre come to the world once in decades and centuries. [Ideally] we should be preserving every bit of their work,” he says.
Where’s the record
Music direction apart, Abbaji is also said to have played the tabla for Ustad Ali Akbar Khan’s compositions in The Householder, Devi and Kshudito Pashan (Hungry Stones). He was also a guru to Jaidev and R.D. Burman.
Having trained in dhrupad and khayal, legend has it that he may have done playback singing in films, specifically for Prithviraj Kapoor. “But it’s one of those mythical things that can’t be proved or disproved because no record is available,” says Husain.
It’s in the context of this lack of archiving of film music history that the individual work of a few passionate music buffs needs to be acknowledged. In the 90s, when the Internet was still in its infancy, the late Amarjeet Anand was one of the first to start a website (indiascreen) for vintage music. U.S.-based Prof Surjit Singh collects and shares songs from the 30s and 40s on his website hindi-movies-songs.com.
K.L. Saigal fan Surinder Madani has been collecting and sharing his Saigal and Pankaj Mullick collection. V.K. Rangarao in Chennai, Indore’s Suman Chaurasiya, Jodhpur’s Girdhari Lal Vishwakarma, and the U.S.-based Narsingh D. Agnish and Dr. M.L. Kapoor are assiduous music and record collectors.
Last, but not the least, Harmandir Singh ‘Hamraaz’ of Kanpur has been tirelessly compiling songs (with complete credits) for the encyclopedia of Hindi film music, Geet Kosh , six volumes of which (1931-1985) have been published, even as he soldiers on to put the seventh and eighth together.
Namrata Joshi is Associate Editor-Cinema with The Hindu in Mumbai.
namrata.joshi@thehindu.co.in
