The one tune

Twenty-two years ago,it tried to capture a nations endless variety in about seven minutes. How the original Mile Sur became a TV anthem

Twenty-two years ago,it tried to capture a nations endless variety in about seven minutes. How the original Mile Sur became a TV anthem
Sometimes a song can capture a nation in seven and a half minutes. On the morning of August 15,1988,a TV-viewing India watched the first visuals of a saffron sun,sea and the splatter of a waterfall segueing into a sombre Bhimsen Joshi,his eyes turned away,singing Mile8230; sur mera tumhara. The raga was the majestic Bhairavi not many knew the name but its infectious rhythm swirled out of television sets as Joshi sang,for about a minute,to the beat of a single tabla. The music picked up pace and the scene changed to the Dal Lake,a tractor in the fields of Punjab,a top shot of the Taj,a desert,backwaters8230;. It was India in the gentle shades of patriotism. And they Hema Malini and an unnamed mahout,Amitabh Bachchan and M Balamuralikrishna,Sharmila Tagore and the cast of Tamas,among others sang in Punjabi and Oriya,Kannada and Marathi,Tamil and Malayalam,Assamese and Telugu. Soon Kashmiris learnt to hum the Malayalam line Ente swaravum ningalude swaravum; Marathis managed the Bangla Tomaar shoor moder shoor. And Mile Sur became an eminently hummable television anthem and a tableau of nationalism.

On that Independence Day,one man nervously waited before his boxy BPL television set for prime minister Rajiv Gandhis speech to end and for the inaugural broadcast of Mile Sur: ad man Suresh Mullick. The video was his brainchild, recalls Kailash Surendranath,who was assistant director of the programme. We never thought it would become a cult anthem.

The late Mullick he passed away in March 2003 was the national director of Ogilvy amp; Mather. In early 1988,he had conceptualised the Freedom Torch video that featured sportspersons. Rajivji,who had watched Freedom Torch,gave us the brief for the Mile Sur video, says Surendranath. It went something like this: bring together Hindustani,Carnatic,popular,folk and contemporary music,the countrys many regions and at least 14 languages in one piece that was visually and musically appealing.

We wrote to artists to be part of the programme and they readily obliged, says Surendranath. Mullick got jazz musician Louiz Banks,composer P Vaidyanathan and cinematographer RK Rao on board. Lyrics were the problem. Mullick did not like any of the songs handed over to him by seasoned lyricists and even senior copywriters at his firm. He then asked a young man in his team to take a shot at it. He got it right in his eighteenth attempt. That was Piyush Pandey. Mullick sahib was my boss and he told me not to use cliches like jhanda,desh,etc. He wanted me to use simple words to bring people together, says Pandey,now CEO of Ogilvy amp; Mather.

Another essential element of Mullicks patriotic project was Raga Bhairavi,the sampoorna raga that uses all 12 sur which include the slightly higher and lower versions of the basic seven swaras and is common to both Hindustani and Carnatic music. Little,however,is known about the composer of the tune that captivated the country. Most people attribute the tune to Banks and Vaidyanathan,but their work began much later, says Pandey. The composer was Pandit Bhimsen Joshi. We gave him the first six lines of the song and told him that we preferred Raga Bhairavi. One day,Panditji came to the studio and sang the song for half an hour. We loved it immediately, says Surendranath. Vaidyanathan and Banks arranged the music for various languages,took care of the transitions from one language to another with the help of musicians in different states and wrote the final crescendo by incorporating the national anthem.

Doordarshan did not like our inclusion of the last bit of the national anthem. They thought an incomplete anthem was inappropriate. But Rajivji saw it and loved it. He did not want anything changed, says Banks.

Cinematographer Rao travelled across the country to shoot the film. It was the simplicity of the video,the presence of ordinary people and a catchy tune that worked for us, he says. There are no vigorous camera movements. Most of them were one-take shots and I shot all of them myself. This added to the uniformity of the film. It was shot at 20 locations in just 31 days.

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The shoot was not without problems. Since Mangeshkar was performing at a concert in Russia,Kavita Krishnamurthy sang the last bit. Mangeshkar had to dub it while listening to Krishnamurthy and she was not amused. She was not very happy but she finally did it, laughs Rao.
In January 2010,the same team,minus Mullick and Vaidyanathan,created Phir Mile Sur,but the redux was disastrous. Phir Mile Sur was dominated by Bollywood and its nakhras. It could not capture the innocence of the original, says Rao.

That innocence belonged to 1988,when DD in colour was just six years old and good enough to blow us away,when Kamal Hassan and the Calcutta Metro were brought together probably for the first time on our television sets,when a singing Mangeshkar,with saffron,white and green draped on her right shoulder,was all the nakhra that nationalism needed.