Ayaz Amir:

When all else is forgotten, the medley of music and song sweeping sub-continental cinema during the 1940s, 50s and 60s will be remembered.

First was Saigal, who sang like no one did, his voice touched by heavenly fire. Scan all the songs you want, of things lost, of hopeless love, no one sang more touchingly. He was a trailblazer, the father of modern Indian song.

But his singing was rooted in its own time and place. You can’t replicate Saigal now. His style would sound out of place.

Then came the equally-great Muhammad Rafi, who broke out of the Saigal mould and pioneered a new kind of singing which holds the stage until today. Rafi followed no bent but his own from the beginning. I suppose the difference lay in the quality of their voices. Saigal’s was the heavier voice, a baritone, and therefore more at home among the lower and middle scales. Rafi was a tenor, his voice capable of touching the highest scales. But merely being able to sing at a high pitch is not everything in singing. If your voice is not beautiful, if there is no touch of magic, you can reach the upper-most registers and yet leave your audience unaffected. Rafi’s voice was distilled from the purest nectar and rapped in beaten gold. That is why his best songs will live forever.

As for female singers, what a bevy of bewitching stars the 1940s produced: peerless Khurshid, Kaanan Devi, Amir Bai Karnataki, Uma Devi, Surraya, Shamshad Begum. Listen to them at their best and you are transported into another world. There is Zohra Bai in the qawwali and Nur Jehan, the undisputed queen of Indian singing at the time. When she came to Pakistan, she left the Indian stage to Surraya and Shamshad. This was a world in transition, the old still around but making way for the new. Just as Rafi had heralded a new era in male singing, female singing was also on the verge of being transformed by a

new phenomenon trying out her talent in the wings: the nightingale of India, Lata Mangeshkar. The age of the heavier voices was over. She has ruled unchallenged for close to 40 years, singing thousands of songs in the process.

What accounts for the trance-inducing quality of the film music of that period? A combination of three factors unique to the sub-continent: classical music, lyrical poetry and some of the finest voices ever created. The equivalent in western music would have to be Shakespeare poetry, Goethe or Shelley set to the tune of a Mozart or Beethoven composition and sung by Caruso or Callas — clearly an absurdity.

But things are never static, they change. The golden age of sub-continental film music lasted from the 1940s to about the middle of the 1960s before other influences crept in to change it. The age of Saigal and Khurshid gave way to the era of Rafi and Lata. That in turn giving way to ‘modern’ music. All is not lost, however. The songs and music of that period have already attained classical status. Even a thousand years from now people will still listen to the songs of that golden period, awe-struck at the divine grace which made them possible in the first place.

Ayaz, a columnist for Dawn, writes for THT from Islamabad