Talat Mahmood, the messenger of love

Brijeshwar Singh

Every singer in Bombay films has thousands of fans, but Talat was a class apart. Crowds would flock to his house in Bandra, young girls wrote him letters in blood and when his songs came on the radio, women would rush to hear them, pushing aside other listeners. In cinema halls, audiences heard his songs in a silent trance, broken only by the sobbing of many fans. That was Talat mania. Talat Mahmood was not just a singer or a singer-actor, he a musical icon.

He was in many ways an unlikely candidate for adulation by the masses. Handsome and always immaculately dressed in western attire, he looked like an upper-class gentleman. The perfectly polished shoes only added to the persona.

Talat was born on February 24, 1924, in a prosperous Muslim household in Lucknow. The family was fond of singing but sang only in private and in robust voices. Talat showed musical talent at an early age with his delicate but smooth voice. He fancied his luck in the world of music and with the backing of his paternal aunt, in particular, he joined the famous Marris College of Hindustani Music at Lucknow. At 16, he began singing ghazals on All India Radio, Lucknow, and became a teen sensation. When he recorded his first HMV disc a year later, he became more widely known. And at 20, he recorded his first big hit ghazal, ‘Tasveer teri dil mera behla nahin sakegi’. He became a national figure.

Calcutta beckoned this young man and he acted in three films. He sang a variety of Bengali film songs but the discerning Bengali audience expected serious singers to establish themselves in semi-classical music as well. Talat was groomed for this by the great music director Kunal Das Gupta, who made his pronunciation perfect. After much hard work, Talat entered this market under the pseudonym ‘Tapan Kumar’. So successful was he that many assumed that he was actually a Bengali who used the pseudonym ‘Talat Mahmood’ for his ghazals. When Radio Pakistan opened a new station in Dhaka in 1949, Tapan Kumar alias Talat Mahmood was invited to inaugurate it.

The same year, he decided to leave the declining Calcutta film industry for Bombay. There he found he was already a known figure. He did not have to struggle like his contemporaries, and began straightaway at the top as a solo singer. In 1950, he did his first hit song for Dilip Kumar and then sang for all the top stars — Raj Kapoor, Dev Anand, Shammi Kapoor and Sunil Dutt. Anil Biswas was his first great supporter but soon other top music directors like Naushad, C Ramchandra and Shankar-Jaikishan were flocking to him. He also sang for SD Burman, Roshan, Sajjad, Dhaniram, Salil Chowdhury, Bulo C Rani, Jamal Sen and his friend and supporter from the Lucknow radio days, the great Madan Mohan.

Bombay saw him as a ghazal singer, and used him in ghazal-like songs. Though the ghazal had been defined as ‘speaking softly about love’, by the 1940s, ghazals had become sadder, echoing Faiz’s famous quote, “The only fit subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.” The Bombay lyricists generally preferred this sad type of ghazal. Talat continued to sing of love in all its aspects and was a sensation singing Ghalib in the film, ‘Mirza Ghalib’. But he couldn’t escape the identification with tragedy and sad music.

In terms of musical style, Talat in the 1940s had sung a simpler version of the ghazal with the backing of a small orchestra. Earlier, ghazals were sung by classically trained singers and were often elaborated with numerous repetitions of the lines. Talat shrank the ghazal into a three-minute presentation, and dropped much of the elaboration. This influenced not only his contemporaries like Malika Pukhraj and Begum Akhtar, but also subsequent generations of ghazal singers who acknowledged him as the ‘king of ghazals’.

Meanwhile, in Bombay, music directors became more experimental and started using Latin American rhythms like the Samba and the Mambo, particularly C Ramchandra and OP Nayyar. Shankar-Jaikishan had pioneered the use of the 60-piece orchestra with sweeping violins and this became a keystone of what was called the golden age of film music. Talat continued giving numerous film hits but these remained more or less in the same groove of a singer backed by a small orchestra. Music composers gradually began phasing him out as being too delicate in his approach to sing with a large orchestra.

At the same time, the ‘king of tragedy’, Dilip Kumar, began doing lighter roles. Film producers switched to what was called family dramas, centred around the breakup and conflicts of joint families. The young stars now sang rather westernised flirtatious songs. The big change for Talat can perhaps be dated to the Shankar-Jaikishan score for ‘Yahudi’, when they successfully insisted on Mukesh’s voice, even though Dilip Kumar wanted Talat. Talat could sing the songs of happy love but he was not often used for these. S-J gave him a pop song for Dev Anand in ‘Roop Ki Rani Choran Ka Raja’ — ‘Tum to dil ke taar chhed kar’. But the impression remained that Talat was not versatile.

As his career declined, Talat turned to live concerts. He was the first singer to tour East Africa and the Caribbean. His concerts were sellouts. A few decades later, when I visited these areas, it was remarkable to find elderly Indian immigrants who shook with emotion recalling Talat’s voice. As multi-star concerts grew in India, Talat was given the honour of being the senior singer who would always sing last and get the maximum applause. I remember Kishore Kumar at one such concert admiring Talat’s impeccable Urdu diction, and saying that he could never be in the same league.

Did Talat’s voice tremble? Yes, he used what is technically called a vibrato, that is a rapid oscillation between two neighbouring notes while keeping the volume of the voice unchanged. This is a technique much used in loud singing such as opera, rock music or even folk music. But it requires relaxing the singing muscles in a controlled manner and cannot be done by every singer. Talat, in fact, used a small vibrato, rather like Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. He could very easily sing without this tremble in his voice, so why did he use it so often?

In Calcutta and Lucknow, Talat had sung with a steady and gentle voice as his early recordings show. In Bombay, his mentor, Anil Biswas, advised him to use the vibrato to distinguish himself from other singers. Talat then began to use it incessantly as a trademark. To get a sense of his voice without a vibrato, one might listen to his duet with Mubarak Begum from ‘Dak Ghar’: ‘Ghir ghir aaye badrawa kare’.

The most admired feature of his singing was what is called ‘swar lagaav’ or the skill with which he placed his notes. He sang notes so steadily and gently that even hard passages produced no strain and looked rather easy to sing. A good example is a famous song in Raag Mishra Bageshwari called ‘Hamse aaya na gaya’. What sounded simple in Talat’s voice actually tripped up many amateur singers with its difficult note combinations.

In his prime, Talat sang for all the top stars. The best match was actually for Raj Kapoor. If you listen to ‘Mere dil ki dhadkan kya bole’, Raj’s speech flows seamlessly into a flirtatious song. Shammi Kapoor, too, had Talat singing his songs for four years and always addressed him as Talat sahib. Shammi’s first hit film was ‘Thokar’ and it was Talat’s rendition of Majaz’s ghazal, ‘Ae gham-e-dil kya karun’, which created magic at the box office. For Talat, too, this was a special song. Majaz, unfortunately, died early and had been his colleague at AIR, Lucknow.

For Dev Anand, with his breezy screen persona, Talat was not an ideal fit. Even so, ‘Jaayen to jaayen kahan’ in ‘Taxi Driver’ was unforgettable. Chetan Anand wisely did not let Dev appear to be singing much or moving much, and this song seems to come not from Dev’s mouth, but from somewhere deep inside him. Dilip Kumar, in particular, followed much of the same pattern of letting Talat’s voice do the acting. In their first hit together in ‘Aarzoo’ (1950) — ‘Ae dil mujhe aisi jagah le chal’ — Dilip also kept fairly still. Their last great film together was Bimal Roy’s ‘Devdas’ in 1955 where ‘Mitwa lagi yeh kaisi anbhujh aag’ expressed Devdas’ agony at losing Paro. The song opens with Devdas with his back to the camera and Dilip’s lip-syncing is limited. Once again, the song seems to arise from the character’s soul.

But Talat could sing happier songs for Dilip Kumar too. The breezy duet with Lata Mangeshkar in ‘Sangdil’ (1953), ‘Dil mein sama gaye sajan’, has been revived many times by contemporary singers and it shows an exuberant Dilip and Madhubala completely in love. The most memorable song for Dilip was probably ‘Yeh hawa yeh raat yeh chandni’ in the same film. The song expresses both flirtation and a sense of doom.

While music directors continued to want Talat to sing, but by about the late ’50s, actors and producers began to feel he was too old-fashioned. Salil Chowdhury could not persuade Bimal Roy to get Talat to sing in ‘Madhumati’ and in ‘Palki’. Naushad, too, failed in getting Talat to sing a song expressly written for him.

Madan Mohan had worked with Talat in AIR, Lucknow, and had sworn he would use his voice if he ever became a composer. Madan Mohan was able to get the producer to give Talat all the songs in ‘Jahanara’, but the film was a commercial disaster. And that sealed Talat’s fate.

There was also a small but ever increasing deterioration of Talat’s voice in the 1960s. By the 1970s, it was surmised he was ill. It appears he was suffering from a neurological disease, which was progressive.

His reputation really rests on his 170 or so ghazals and not his film songs. Here he was free to explore all the facets of love without being pinned down to a film’s narrative. Those unfamiliar with these songs might try listening to Faiz’s ghazal, ‘Dono jahan teri mohabbat mein haar ke’. There are many different versions of this ghazal as Begum Akhtar, Mehdi Hassan, Farida Khanum, Ghulam Ali and several younger singers have sung it. Talat still stands out and you can see why Jagjit Singh studied his ghazals so carefully. He was not just the ‘king of ghazals’, but a real messenger of love.

It were his Bengali songs though which led to his own love story when he married a young fan, actress Rita Mallik, later known as Nasreen. The non-film song ‘Duti pakhi duti teere’ apparently captured her heart. But on his centenary, I recall his haunting number in ‘Saat Number Bari’ — ‘Ke daake amaye’. The words translate as: Who has called me, is it you, oh is it you? Who calls me again and again? The lines are almost like an epitaph.

A literary tribute

FROM being a pre-Independence radio celebrity to becoming one of Independent India’s singing stars, Talat Mahmood played a pioneering role. It was the golden era of film music in the country. Apart from helping establish the non-film music industry in modern Bangla, he can be considered the original king of ghazals. As his grand-niece, I wrote his biography (‘Talat Mahmood: The Definitive Biography’ ) to help music lovers understand the man behind the legend. The book also uncovers facets, such as his being the first Indian singer to start world tours, his acting career, spearheading playback singers’ royalty rights battle, performances for Army jawans, etc. His music calendar continued to be in demand right till the mid-1990s (Talat Mahmood passed away in 1998). — Sahar Zaman, grand-niece and biographer

— The writer is former Director-General, All India Radio