RMIM Archive Article "235".
From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian
#
# RMIM Archives..
# Subject: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara 2
#
# Posted by: ADhareshwar@WorldBank.Org (Ashok)
# Source: K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara
# Clarion Books, New Delhi, 1978
# Author: Ragava R. Menon
#
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:K. L. Saigal: the pilgrim of the swara
Ragava R. Menon
:2 rishabha
The first remark you hear if you reminisce about Saigal with
someone will be "he was a natural singer," or "his voice was born
with him," or "golden voiced he was," and so on. This would be
true whether the person had been closely associated with him
professionally, or had been a friend or a relative, or merely an
admirer from afar. These phrases have become over the years so
many cliches about Saigal and have been repeated so often that
they have assumed an appearance of truth. As though a golden
voice was all he had.
If after hearing such remarks you say nothing, the speaker
will go on to point out that no one taught him any music, that he
had come in singing and left likewise. There were several
apocryphal materials on this. One of them is about an elder
brother who was taught some music because he had become ill and
needed to be distracted and the young Kundan Lal, it would seem,
just sat outside the closed door of the brother's sick chamber
and became a musician. No one for instance would dream of
calling Pankaj Mullick a natural singer or Krishna Chandra Dey or
Sachin Dev Burman or even the greatest classical singers of the
time, natural singers. Only Saigal was natural. This statement
needs to be examined critically before being accorded credence.
What is a natural singer as opposed to a singer who acquires
singing by practice? Was it his singing style, its seeming ease
and content that made it earn the definition "natural"? Was his
voice golden as it was often described? Was it possible that
there was some kind of effort he made, but that no one knew about
it?
Was it also possible that the effort he had made was not the
usual effort people can recognise and classify as practice or
_riaz_ in the music teacher's meaning of the term? Was it likely
that the kind of effort he had made was unknown among post people
and his effort gad gone beyond the natural frontiers of practice,
and had become so much a part of his life that it seemed to be as
natural as speech, or life itself? Probably it was a problem of
words, inaccurate words being used to describe him and his art.
There are many witnesses to the fact that Saigal was not as
simple or feckless as he is made out to be. To be sure, there
was a quality of disarming innocence about him that seemed almost
childlike in its candour. For instance, he could never be
knowing or wily, or self-conscious, about his music. He could
not or perhaps he would not discourse about the technicalities of
musical phrases or _ragas_ or compositional intricacies. Since
he himself admitted to the fact that he did not have the
conventional training in music from a teacher, people thought
that he did not know, and he did not seem concerned about
establishing a reputation for being otherwise. So they took him
to be a kind of freak, a phenomenon, a valuable money-spinner for
India's infant cinema industry no doubt, but an odd bird. One
more reason for this attitude towards him was because he
placed no price on his music. He did not consider his music as a
bit of property, an investment like a joint-stock company. He
gave freely of his music, for there was more left from where it
came from. You often hear of singers who will not condescend to
open their mouths in song unless you pay them first, and we know
from our own experience how careful you have to be to persuade a
well-known singer to sing for you even in the most ideal
conditions. What a lot of effort and planning would have to be
traversed before the promised land of a performance heaves into
sight.
Saigal was never of that disposition. It took him many
years to realise how little capable he was to make his art yield
him the highest material benefit. Music was his life and he was
always a little surprised at the fact of it, and so never had a
feeling of proprietorship over his art. Kanan Devi describes in
her autobiography how with a "take" all ready and the camera and
crew in place, the set would wait for Saigal to turn up and when
they had waited for a long time they would find him, to their
surprise, arrived and ready but "lost" in a corner of the vast
studio with a harmonium, singing.
He would be so simple and disarming and so completely
sincere in his embarrassment for having kept the technicians
waiting that no one would have the heart to complain.
This was only one more reason why people called him a
natural singer. Most people get their musical achievement after
what they believe a gargantuan effort. So they guard it
jealously. Saigal did not consider the effort he had put into
his art as being much at all. Indeed he did not think that any
effort that anyone may conceivably put into the art as enough.
If one would not strive without measure, without hope of gain,
the art never truly became one's own. And if it is not one's
own, one would be guarded and calculating with it and never be
natural with it. For, if anything becomes one's self, it shares
a little of the "self's" immortality.
For, you can hear him even now almost as often as you could
when he was alive almost three decades ago. And today the voice
issues the same way from wireless sets and record players all
over the country. Sometimes it is softly whispered about as
audible as a wish in your heart and at other times brilliantly
like great flashes of light.
A long time ago, someone told me that when in a _hhor_ or
_bhajan_, Saigal held the top _shadj_ for a little more than
three beats, the sound made her dizzy. Yes, it was a dizzying
voice, if you went it for that sort of metaphor and it swung a
little bit sometimes, swaying a little in its middle like a flame
taken in a light wind. And all of it was voice. There were no
opaque patches in it, all of it equally lambent and pure and
fused with radiance.
Sometimes it was the _tanpura_ that you heard for half the
turn of the record, its _jawari_ slightly muted so that its twang
was subdued and then his voice would emerge from somewhere in the
silence beyond accompaniment and lead you gently by the hand with
infinite tenderness into the soft moist interior of the his song
and in those four minutes made you believe that there must be a
God that made us and the wondrous universe of his song.
You became peaceful with the knowledge of sorrow or despair
or wonder. You never returned empty handed. And he was always
truthful, sincere, never trying for an effect. There was never
one statement anywhere in his song that did not passionately
mean. And then he would make the most daring understatements.
And you believed in him because he did not say it all. He
respected your intelligence, gave you credit for feeling, and
cautiously refrained from feeling all the way for you. Naturally
he made you a partner with him in his song and so transformed you
emotionally into a singer like he was, and you were grateful to
him for this consideration.
Naturally his accompaniment was always restrained and
evocative, rather than loud and assertive. It was always a mere
_tanpura_ and a harmonium and _table_ that accompanied his songs
outside the films. If there was an orchestra, it always stood
aside to let him pass between it. He would sing _kafi_,
_khamaj_, or _desh_, he would take a line of _alaap_ and made you
wince for wanting more, he would fill with light and shade the
flat commonplace compositions and tip their turns and corners
with such deftly-cut edges that the phrases stood out like slim
minarets, from the surface of the song.
He was one of the most vitally male singers of the Indian
cinema in his manner of singing as much as his voice. Think of a
voice with the most elusive register. In pitches where an Indian
voice would sound tenor, he was baritone, baritone in the lower
tetrachord and a twanging tenor in the upper.
Think of his voice with layers in it, which in the
pianissimos, was huskily laminated. Then imagine this voice as
being its own accompaniment, so that against a background of
complete silence, a single note from it would glimmer as though
it had a halo round it. Then there was a threat in it, a threat
of concealed power like a coiled spring, so that however
delicately the voice coaxed and pleaded with you, it always
seemed like the tenderness of a very strong man caressing a
child.
It is difficult to describe his singing in other metaphors.
If you to think of nature, his singing did not connote a garden
brimming with summer flowers. It was more the magnificence of
mountain peaks, or the loneliness of heath and meadow. If you
thought of perfume, he was not Chanel. He was lavender and
cologne. And if you went in for textiles, he was the finest
quality muslin, never silk or polyester. There was a manly
isolation in his singing manner. Even if it were a simple love
song he was singing, it was always stoic and tearless.
Today when singing stars with hired voices howl and sob, you
marvel at the terse, compelling musical demands Saigal made upon
his heroines that made their eyes sparkle with delight. His
singing and speaking voices merged imperceptibly without
discontinuity, for it was the same voice that sang and spoke the
same exquisite intonation. He spoke with beaded definition in
prose, sliding quickly into song. You were content.
Even when the tale was tragic and everything had soured and
turned rancid on him like in 'Devdas' when he was quickly
guttering into death, his sorrow and despair had a grandeur in
his singing of them. He would never whimper or be peevish with
his song. He would sing at anchor and convey his meaning simply
and clearly in some of the most poignant musical idioms ever
heard.
He would bring the wild, freewheeling timbre of the street
singer and juxtapose it with a phrase of such polished competence
that it made you gasp with astonishment. Perhaps he did this on
purpose to set off the endearing contrast of manners, for there
is an atmosphere of focussed intention in all his singing.
Nobody could have composed for him the quality of what he
actually sang.
Who could have made him pointedly scan his metre with a
slight edge on the _tala_ and who above all could have taught him
to coax those despairing _dhaivats_ and glittring _gandharas_
from any of the _ragas_ he chose to sing. Do you remember a
certain _madhyam_ from his voice rising in a swelling wave out of
the _tanpura_ and he singing it as though he had discovered that
note for the first time in the history of our music? Can you
recall the delight and the joy of that note lovingly meditated
and sung with infinite compassion?
Who taught him the amazing economy of his style--just so
much and no more? How did he learn to economise his variations
with such surgical precision? And what about those pauses, those
rich prescient silences? Where did he pick those up?
It was the simple things he did in his music that moved you,
not his virtuosity, nor his seeming effort. His singing was
patent and self-evident and needed no musical sophistication, nor
an interpreter to experience. For he would leap straight at us
at our inner beings and our inner beings are mute and need no
language. This must have been the reason why they thought he was
natural--a natural singer.
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From the RMIM Article Archive maintained by Satish Subramanian