Odes to love, ghazals and pastoral melody saturated the evening of music presented by actor-turned-singer Namit Das at Adishakti during the recently-concluded 10the edition of the ‘Remembering Veenapani Festival’.
The show ‘Namit and Khwaab’, which had Nishant Nagar in accompaniment, carried the free spirited vibe of a mehfil, with the artist jokingly referring to some of the material as “rejected compositions”, which for one reason or the other failed to see the light of day. Some of the songs had never progressed beyond the entertainment fare at random family gatherings, but remain a non-monetised anthology, a language of kinship.
The lightness of touch with which he reworked most of the material, especially ghazals, exuded a free-spirited side to the stage and screen artiste, known for films such as Wake Up Sid and Ankhon Dekhi.
There was no hint of being burdened by the family legacy—his father Chandan Dass, an illustrious ghazal exponent; his maternal grandfather K. Pannalal, a musician par excellence, and uncle Jaidev Kumar, a reputed Punjabi music director.
It was a tightrope act between keeping the essence intact but shifting the melodic approach, that not only risked outraging the purist, or also off-putting the casual music lover if the experiment goes awry. The duo was translocating the ghazal instrumentation to an altogether alien soundscape, where guitar, electronic synth sounds and pre-set percussion rhythms substituted the tabla-harmonium sonic habitat. At one point, Mr. Das wondered how a ghazal singer in the traditionalist mould like his father, who was not yet privy to the set, would react!
At the same time, the pay-off is high when everything falls in place; a breakthrough best exemplified by a tango-style reformatting of a ghazal about fragrance by the precocious Pakistani poet Parveen Shakir. In this case, the poetic vision of the original verse were infused a new musical aesthetic in the rendition of Ak-se khushbu bikharne.., and turned out to one of the standout pieces of the evening.
After the immortal Mirza Ghalib, Na tha kuch tho that is replete with metaphysical querying was featured, the Faiz Ahmed Faiz fans made their presence felt in the hall, when Mr. Das introduced the rubaiyat (four-line stanzas) “Raat yun dil mein teri khoyi hui yaad aayi...” (Vikram Seth adding to the body of translations of the famous lines).
“Ghazal essentially is the stringing together of couplets which are part of one poem”, he would explain to the audience before introducing them to a work of Bashir Badr, a family friend of the Dass household. “The rhyme scheme and the meter is what holds the verse together... so one couplet could be very different from the other...every couplet is a world unto itself as opposed to a nazm”.
Naam, composed by Chandan Dass, exhibited this characteristic of disparate couplets swimming along the lyrical tide, simultaneously reflecting pain and loss that the poet himself experienced in communal violence and then transitioning a note of love, hope and optimism.
The duo’s reinterpreting worked best in some renditions, especially Muneer Niazi’s singular nazm, which would be commenced from Dekho... part of the verse, with the score syncing with the ‘deeper and darker side of the set’. If the Hindustani aalaap that set the tone for another Muneer Niazi nazm Kaise.. perked up the audience, the rendition of an upbeat Qateel Shifai ghazal brought the crowd to its feet.
An adaptation of “Haan tira intizar..” by contemporary poet Ameeta Prasuram Meeta divested the “intezaar” (waiting/longing) motif of its heavy-heartedness and infused it with a playful tone. Perhaps, the duo’s debut release, “Pehli baar dekha..” a ditty co-written by his mother and wife, and a sufi song to cap the night, best represented the constrasting ends of the spectrum of the show.
Over the course of the evening, when Namit presented some of his favourite poets “on the other side”, the hat tips would be directed both to the literary figures and exalted art’s ability to effortlessly pierce through man-made walls of division and notions of differences; as manifested in the syncretic ethos of the “Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb”.
