RMIM Archive Article "237".


From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian

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# RMIM Archives..
# Subject: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara   4
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# Posted by: ADhareshwar@WorldBank.Org (Ashok)
# Source: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara   
# 		Clarion Books, New Delhi, 1978
# Author: Ragava R. Menon
#

----------------------------------------------------------------- 4 madhyama To those of us, for whom music is a matter of rich and helpless response, there exists in it a fathomless mystery. There are many who, while feeling this mystery, this hint of boundlessness and infinitude in it, mistrust and fear it. Most of us are moved by music, sometime torn by it, but somehow we are anxious to find means by which this boundlessness and mystery can be contained, subdued, and measured. The West discovered this quite early in its musical history and took steps to guard against its implications. It devised a fixed scale, calling it C, D, E, and so on, based on predetermined vibrations per second, began encouraging instrumentalisation of music and readjusted the value of voice to the status of a musical instrument. As a result, music became more and more an extension of the bewildering development of technology, whether mechanical or electronic. A still further precaution to contain the sovereignty of the individual, creative spirit was to emphasise orchestral arrangements and choral performances where groups of instruments, sometimes hundred or more, or groups of voices, interpreted a composition. The solo sung with subsidiary accompaniment became only an incidental part of music. Not until popular music in the Afro-American medium arrived on the scene did the solo singer or player find his true place in creative performance. This situation arose largely by the compulsions of the total industrialization of the Western milieu. For despite the fixing of the musical scale and the writing down of music, the older, original objectives of European music were very different from more contemporary concepts in Western classical music. The carefully graduated sharing of privilege and responsibility between composer and performer, and between conductor and soloist, is a case in point. Western music fought improvisation tooth and nail and won the battle in favour of the composer who retained the right to choose the notes and even interpret them. The performer as a result was maimed, creatively speaking by the mystique of the composer and the authority of the conductor. Not until popular form entered Western music, through men and women like Al Jolson, Bessie Smith, Frank Sinatra, Mildred Bailey, Mahalia Jackson, Judy Garland, Nat King Cole, right down to Barbara Streissand and Elvis Presley, and Ray Charles did Western music return to personal creation and to the magic of immediacy. Indian music never needed to go through these crises. It stuck to the measure of voice from the first day and kept its music to the _raga_ mould, and so the music remained evolutionary and organic in form and content, and not a matter of finished creation like a painting or a piece of sculpture. On top of this the classical music of India had developed light and popular forms without violating the _raga_ or the rhythmic integrity of the system so that it remained possible at all times to touch the musically illiterate as much as enchant the highbrow without losing any part of the music's essential wholeness. So that even today, despite great changes, some of them irreversible, taking place within the country, Indian music is ill at ease with mere innovation and novelty of form and cautious of the invidious seduction of technology and mass production. Indian classical music concerts rarely employ more than four or five persons and the sound of the concert is always small even with electronic amplification. Even if there is an orchestral accompaniment in some kinds of light music, notably in the movies, the orchestra is invariably derivative and survives on the virtue of the voice. So that if a performance of Indian music is able to hold the attention of a large audience and enrapture it, it has to use resources that are largely invisible, but not any less real because of it. Saigal during his lifetime used to be the idol of the millions. He was known and loved across the land even places and among people who did not understand the language in which he sang. His attraction arose out of the subservience of his singing technique to meaning, whether the meaning was the pure music of the _raga_ or whether it was the poetry of the words. In any case he rarely ever used his voice as a means whereby he could extol its range and timbre or show off his ability as a singer. Discussing Saigal in a moving TV documentary entitled 'Bhulaye Na Baney', Pankaj Mullick relates how seriously Saigal took the meaning of the song he was learning to sing, insisting each time Pankaj Mullick taught him a Bengali song for a film that the exact nuance of the meaning of the text be explained to him so that he might be able to sing it true. Two levels of meaning flow effortlessly out of Saigal's singing style without a trace of affectation, and he took great care not to neglect any one of these levels of meaning to extol the other. The first was the _raga_ or the melody mould in which the song was composed. This was always meticulously and significantly treated not in any great detail to be sure, as the records in those days were shellac and only a little more than three minutes long. But the _raga_'s sheer call to feeling was never omitted, the text of the song was locked into the _raga_ in a skilful way. It was this quality of his technique that distracted his listener's attention from the splendid skill and valour of his musical accomplishment. Saigal's art was the art that disguises art. He had made his musical accomplishment so inevitable that it seemed almost easy. It was as a last resort and because no one was able to specify the nature of his attraction and power that people put it down to his voice--the golden voice as it used to be called. But if you examined the voice independently of the song, and this is not as easy as it sounds, you will soon notice that there was nothing spectacular about the voice at least on a superficial examination. You may be led to believe and conclude that it was not even quite a singing voice. It was more a speaking voice and that of course was why the voice spoke so uncommonly well. Pankaj Mullick's voice was far more rounded and singing than the famous golden voice, and K. C. Dey's was certainly more powerful. It was Saigal who for the first time in Indian music welded the music to speech so smoothly, so inevitably, and without a trace of self-consciousness. Consider how little singing there was in the song "sukh ke dukh ke ab din bitat nahi," in 'Devdas' and how like speech the recorded version of the nursery rhyme in the film 'President' sounds which begins: "hullo, aao bachon." How the voice bubbles with suppressed merriment as it tightly traverses the notes in which it is composed. How easily he could halt the musical march of the song, fade into speech, and make his voice seem to smile and make it all seem an integral part of the song's structure. This was one of the reasons why during Saigal's lifetime while people raved about him, very few people woke up to the fact of his virtuosity. This was insufficiently understood. People puzzled over him but never could grasp him. He simply sang too knowingly for a film star. But when he sang, it seemed so natural and so easy that listeners never became aware of any physical accomplishment i him apart from the fact of an appealing voice. He sang uncommonly well long before he came to the films and right through his public career as an actor he sang much below his true capabilities in all the films in which he acted. If you ask about Saigal's beginnings, each one claims to have been responsible for bringing Saigal into prominence. For example, B. N. Sircar, Pankaj Mullick, R. C. Boral, Devaki Bose, Phani Majumdar, were all men who have been closely linked with Saigal's destiny as a singing star almost at the dawn of India's film history, certainly of talking pictures. B. N. Sircar owned the New Theatres. He was a kind of Jack Warner of the Indian film industry. He employed Saigal on a salary and a contract with the New Theatres. Pankaj Mullick was already a legend in Bengal as a singer, a composer, and an innovator in Indian music. And this was well before Saigal's entry into films. It was Pankaj Mullick who for instance employed western musical instruments in the structure of Indian light music with great beauty and wit. Then there was R. C. Boral. A scion of an illustrious tradition of composers and musicians in whose home anyone who was anybody in Indian music and theatre met, sang, or performed. In his home in P. C. Boral Street in Calcutta, marbled, spacious, dotted with palm fronds and whose walls were lined with the portraits of the legendary faces of Bengali theatre and cinema, there is even today a compelling atmosphere, a kind of noumena, a host of unseen presences from theatrical and musical history. R. C. Boral remembers Saigal vividly, the first glimpse of Bhola of 'Street Singer.' The late Harish Chandra Bali used to be a frequent visitor at P. C. Boral Street. Often, he remembers, Bali used to speak of a young man whom he thought was a singularly gifted singer with the hope that he could be brought to Calcutta and put to work in the films. Bali thought that the young man would make a mark in the cinema. The Bengal of the 1920s was like the Italy at the time of Verones and Leopardi. Writers and poets of the eminence of Sarat Chandra, Madhusudan, Tagore, and Bankim had already made Bengal real for the Bengalis. The language was being reborn into a new delight, her scenery was being transformed into landscape, and her people making new values and new perceptions and discriminations. The transforming presence of Tagore straddled this new world. The voices, too, the mouth-watering tenors and the game baritones of _baul_ and _bhatiali_ and _kirtans_, Rabidndra Sangeet_ and _adhunik_ were budding and proliferating and budding again in every direction. In this world where every other voice was a singing voice of disquieting beauty, purity and range, where skill and commitment of a notable kind was not exactly rare, it was difficult to visualize a penurious Punjabi from distant Jullundur, with no training in classical music on Bali's own admission, as a likely candidate for the distinguished roster of New Theatres. Consider the names. There was Pankaj Mullick, who was already a household name in Bengal with his keen perception into classical Indian music and also Western orchestration and harmony, a singer with a velvet voice whose round, rich tone and clear vibrato had transformed the sound of both _Rabindra Sangeet_ and _adhunik_ into a world of singular musical possiblities. This man had set fashions and standards in music that were not easy to match, or indeed surpass. Then there was Krishna Chandra Dey, blind, with a voice whose strength and power shivered the wireless sets and issued out of the gramophones of the 1930s like the call of a conch-shell at vespers. Then there was Pahari Sanyal, an accomplished musician with a degree in classical music from the Marris College of Music in Lucknow, who was already a concert performer with a durable reputation when he joined the New Theatres. The women were the voices of Kanan Devi, Kamala Jharia, Juthika Ray, Akhtari Bai Faizabadi; the young Siddheswari Devi was already getting to be known in Bengal and the princely states of northern India. Yes, there was competition, lots of competition. So when Harish Chandra Bali mentioned this unknown man, Boral was vague and non-committal, pointing out that to find the merest niche in films even as an extra with ambitions to sing, it was mandatory to have a sure grounding in classical music and since the young man had none, it was not of much use to try him out in the cinema. The competition was too great and too aggressive to survive in the industry when even the best faltered. Each time Bali visited Calcutta and stayed with Boral, the subject of Saigal was brought up, and each time the matter would end inconclusively. Those were the days before the birth of All India Radio. It used to be known as the Indian Broadcasting Company, and R. C. Boral worked as a producer in its studios. At that time Boral spent the whole day at the Radio. Returning late in the evening he used to stop his taxi near the place in the Esplanade where the Metro cinema was later built, to buy a _paan_, after which he went to Tollygunje to the studios of the New Theatres. From Tollygunje he returned late at night to his house at Boral Street. When Bali used to be his guest he would have very often retired for the night by the time Boral returned. Nevertheless he used to open the door to Bali's room just a little to peep in and see if his guest was settled for the night and, if awake, exchange a few words before Boral himself retired for the night. On one occasion, Boral recalls, how waiting at Esplanade for his daily _paan_ he heard a voice behind him that attracted his attention. Almost without knowing it he turned his head in the direction of the voice. A little distance away there was a tallish man talking to another among the crowd preparing to cross the road. Boral remembers merely glancing at him and then resuming his journey to Tollygunje. He had returned later than usual that night having walked a little while on the banks of the Hooghly on his way back, and found that Bali had arrived sometime during the day, and had already turned in for the night. As was his habit he looked into his room on the way to his own and found Bali in bed, on the floor near him slept a man completely covered by a sheet. Boral gestured to ask who he was and Bali gestured back that he would explain the next day. The young man who stood before Boral the next morning, his palms joined in humble greeting, was the same that Boral remembered seeing the previous evening at the Esplanade. Seeing him at close quarters, he seemed taller and leaner. Now he stood before him looking uncertain in aa _pyjana_ and _kurta_, his feet bare. Bali introduced him. Kudan Lal Saigal was able to sing, he said, rather well in fact. Boral asked him to sit down. But the young man would not. So he stood. Since it was about seven in the morning, Boral thought of _todi_ or _bhairav_ or _ramkali_ and asked the man if he might hear him sing. Saigal replied that he knew no _ragas_ but he would be able to sing if he was shown what it was. So Boral asked him to sing whatever he knew. So the man began singing almost at once standing up without any accompaniment in his bare voice. Boral is not able to recall what it was that the young Saigal sang that morning. Perhaps it was _bhairavi_ or perhaps it might have been _asavari_. He thinks that the latter was more likely, for Saigal sang _asavari_ uncommonly well. In any case it was a morning _raga_. Of that Boral is sure. To say that Boral was surprised that morning would be an understatement. He was astonished and puzzled. It was nothing that he had expected. If the young man who stood before him singing impressively with his lips bare moving had sung like an _ustad_, or had exhibited an unforgettably beautiful voice, or if he had been a blinding technician and virtuoso, Boral could have dealt with the situation very easily. God knows he looked for nothing in the style of young aspirants who wanted to break into the big time by their skill and musicianship. Composers, performers, ventriloquists, he had seen them all. It was a _bhajan_ the young man had chosen to sing. The voice was sure, very precise, finely focussed on the note. He did not seem capable of wasting a particle of breath, and had a timbre that rang like a _been_, _been_ whose every string had been carefully and magically tuned. Although there was not even a whistle accompanying him there seemed as though an invisible _sarangi_ was following his every move prowling about near his notes nudging him along to elaborate. As the young man went on singing with the most eloquent and hardly audible _gamaks_, Boral suddenly felt that this young man was not a singer but troubadour. His _swara_ beckoned like a church bell or like a Mullah's call from the mosque for _namaz_. Slowly his voice trailed away and there was silence. Almost simultaneously the boy fell at his feet in a long supplicating gesture, asking as though for help, for succour, for the certitude of a sustaining hand. The song and this gesture were as though all of one piece, and Boral felt strangely moved. Boral does not remember after all these years, whether it wa a _bhairavi_ that Saigal had sung that morning, but he feels that it had something to do with him making "babula mora" the theme song of 'Street Singer.' That Saigal was a strangely compelling singer was left in no doubt that morning in P. C. Boral Street. But what use could be made of him in the films was a question to which Boral could not find a ready answer. In Bengali films in those years the face of the hero was the face of Promothesh Barua, smoldering, delicate of build, almost feminine in his comeliness and a profile that seemed cast in alabaster. Saigal was already balding. He was tall by the standards of the time, rather large-boned and lanky like an adolescent as though he had yet a lot to grow. His face besides did not have the characteristics of veiled passion which was the stamp of the romantic hero of the 1930s. The noisy, wild, and flamboyant hero of today was unthinkable in those days. In 'Shesh Uttar', in 'Mukti', the intense face of Barua had already etched itself on the hearts and minds of the Bengalis. The other names of leading men of the decade were Johar Ganguly, Dhiraj Bhattacharya, and Durga Das Bandipadhyaya of 'Vidyapati' fame. There was Pahari Sanyal and Ashok Kumar, all men highly endowed in beauty of face and a certain delicacy and refinement of person. On superficial examination Saigal did not fill the bill. His face and manners were like his music remarkable examples of understatement. He would not say it all, nor indeed look it all. Besides he was still a Punjabi. How was he to be fitted into the mould of a culture that had blown in Bengal from Shantiniketan. All these elements were matters to which Boral could not find easy answers. It was difficult for Boral to conceive that this young man who stood before him was a _sadhak_ and that such men do not go through their lives on their inheritance, but on the strength of the transformations that they have wrought upon themselves and the pledges they have redeemed. This realisation, however indirectly and subtly, did not take long to come and with it came Saigal's dizzy rise to fame. But on that mellow morning on P. C. Boral Street the problem was a practical one. How was this waif, this foundling to be affianced to the New Theatres. -----------------------------------------------------------------
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian