Mass mushaira

If ghazal is Urdu dreaming and desiring and despairing in metre,then Jagjit Singh made it the soundtrack of our loves,losses and hazaaron khwaishen. He brought ghazal out of the elitist,cloistered mushairas,to the masses outside and ensured they loved it. He became their go-to singer for a draft of Ghalib and Zafar and Faiz.

Jagjit Singh,a Punjabi who came to Bombay in the mid-1960s with an exquisite grasp of Urdu and a deep understanding of ghazal greats like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and Talat Mahmood,soon did an extraordinary turnabout. He went against the reigning mode of rendering ghazals and played with arrangements. He dropped the weeping sarangi from his concerts and brought in the lively beats of the guitar. He shortened the rendition of a shair while the elaborate murkis were best understood by the cognoscenti,he made poetry speak to the public without daunting them with its formidable detours in music. It was one-of-a-kind contemporising of the ghazal that put audience before tradition. Jagjit Singh wouldnt tamper with the poetry shayari was sacred,solemn,the soul but in that essential Punjabi lift which he gave to Urdu poetry,ghazal became demotic like it had never been in India.

The eagerness to popularise the ghazal was evident in his first LP for HMV: The Unforgettables,in 1975. It was resonant as much in his later rendition of Sudarshan Faakirs Wo kaagaz ki kashti and Gulzars Shaam se aankh me nami si hai as in the ghazals he sang for films in the 1980s when their popularity peaked Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho in Arth and Tumko dekha in Saath Saath. In his bass voice that quavered and faded to denote pain,and which rose almost imperturbably to signal passion,a nation learnt to delight in the nuances and notations of ghazal. And Jagjit Singh led the way for all the others that followed.