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Three cheers for ghazal...
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The Devdas at heart or the self-styled Casanova, the shy college girl or the much-married matron, there are not many among us who can resist the allure of the ghazal. Pankaj Udhas, credited with having revived the ghazal as a popular medium, was in Delhi recently to launch his latest album, "Muskaan". ANJANA RAJAN catches up with the maestro who is not only armed with a smile but also hopes to lighten the common man's load... .
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Pankaj Udhas... . looking for `sukoon' - peace - through `Muskaan'. Photo: V.V. Krishnan.
THAT ALL the world loves a lover is exemplified not only by the pan-Indian theme of romance to be found in the commercial films churned out by the various regions of the country but also by the ubiquitous popularity of the ghazal, a kind of song that - in spite of being couched in Urdu, with liberal doses of Persian and Arabic, and bound by intricate rules of poesy - is on the lips of every youngster and golden oldie with pretensions to even the smallest dose of emotion. These two worlds - of exalted language and high thought on the one hand, and of the ordinary citizen toiling for a livelihood while living out burning human passions on the other - may be far removed, but the credit for bridging the two is plainly laid by many admirers at the door of Pankaj Udhas, whose hallmark it would seem is the ability to choose ghazals comprehensible to lay listeners not familiar with abstruse words.
Though some may criticise his selection of simple lyrics as even bordering on the pedestrian, this king of the popular ghazal retorts, "Ghazal mein zyaada Pharsi shabd daalne se accha nahin ban jaata." - Merely introducing Persian words does not raise the poetic value of a ghazal.
Singing since his childhood, Pankaj Udhas made his first ghazal album "Aahat" in 1980. As a young boy growing up in Gujarat, he received many musical inputs from his father who played the dilruba and brothers who also liked singing. Winning several prizes at the school level, he later learnt from Master Navrang - who incidentally also taught Asha Bhonsle and the eminent classical vocalist the late Jitendra Abhisheki. Pankaj Udhas is profuse in his praise of this guru, who was from the Paluskar tradition but was in possession of many shers of the Gwalior gharana.
Diehard advocates of the ghazal as immortalised by "Mallika - e - ghazal" Begum Akhtar have been heard to lament that with the emphasis on embroidered musicality introduced by vocalists like Pankaj Udhas, there has been an intrinsic dilution of the value and uniqueness of this form of poetry that has covered a historic literary journey from Iran to modern India.
"I grew up listening to Begum Akhtar and Mehdi Hasan," concedes Pankaj Udhas. But between the `70s when he entered the field and this past week when his latest album of ghazals and geets "Muskaan" was released, the world of music has seen a number of technological changes that affected the genres of classical, popular, film, devotional or ghazal. The availability of the latest in sound technology has resulted in a great rise in the quality of reproduction - both in terms of live amplification at stage shows and in terms of facilities available in recording studios.
"Over a period of time as this technology reached India we felt that in the 21st Century we should also produce equivalent sound quality. It becomes imperative for us to use these (electronic instruments) to create the ambience and compete with the quality of recordings available today. If I use only say, harmonium and tabla as accompaniment, the sound quality in the recording won't be the same. In the days of K.L. Sehgal, for example, no one would have expected this quality of sound. Therefore, the use of acoustic instruments alone is acceptable. In "Muskaan" I have made minimum use of electronic instruments."
The fallout of these changes has been both positive and negative. On the one hand we have the peculiar phenomenon of remixes, on which Pankaj Udhas feels strongly that the copyright law's loophole allowing for `versions' has led to a scenario where the original music director, singers and actors who may have performed in the film are forgotten. Till now the joke in educational circles has been students learning from guides and thinking that "Lal" and not Shakespeare is the playwright of "Hamlet". But soon, says the ghazal maestro, we will have a situation where children of the future may never have heard of stars like Rajesh Khanna, or renowned music composers, or singers like Lata Mangeshkar, but only their remixed counterparts!
We have also developed a tradition of loud electronic music that makes indiscriminate use of effects and pre-set rhythms and tones. The amazing advent of the sequencer into which tones of all kinds of instruments can be sampled and then played as easily as a keyboard also brings up questions of musical integrity and ethics. There are also inherent contradictions - for example, in playing wind instruments or traditional Indian strings with their meend technique on a keyboard that is staccato by nature - that need to be handled with extreme care and skill.
Indian popular music is still firmly under the sway of computerisation, though many musicians and rasikas - specially in the West - turn away from electronic music, calling the keyboard a "dead" instrument. The upside however is found in musicians like Pankaj Udhas, at ease with reconciling the pitfalls and advantages of the new technology. In fact, he likes to refer to the over-reliance on technological juggling as "manufactured music - one sample of sound, one groove of rhythm... !"
Therefore Pankaj Udhas - who performs a range of genres including film playback and devotional songs - finds that acoustic instruments like sarangi, sitar, tabla, flute and others are still preferable, and "Yes, at the end of the day I think people are reverting back to their roots. My experience is that your body reacts to certain notes. If someone presents notes in a good way, then it has an effect."
About "Muskaan" he points out that he has used ghazals and geets by a range of poets and each of the numbers is soothing. All over the world, he contends, it is hard to find "sukoon" - peace - in music. And what would an ordinary listener look for in a song? Simply, good lyrics and good music. "Something that touches your heart, jisse aapka bojh halka ho."
And so he promises that there will be no sameness in the lilting tracks in the new album, which has some haunting flute and sarangi, as well as a judicious mixture of Western and Indian influences, making use of both melody and harmony.
If Pankaj Udhas is known for his easy-to-understand ghazals, he has an academic side too. Remarking that he has been pleading with Urdu scholars to pull the language out of the museums - "not even the libraries!" - and make it accessible in Devnagari script for wider propagation, he mentions his work on poets of old, specially Mir, whose contribution to Urdu poetry is all the more significant in view of the fact that the language was not even highly developed in his time. Apart from planning a series - "Classics" - based on works of Mir and other "Ustads", Pankaj Udhas hopes he may soon be on the air with a programme similar to the popular "Adab Arz Hai" in which he used to appear on Sony TV.
And while we wait, we can smile, because "Muskaan" is both on the air and in the air.
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