Lahore: a musical story
Khalid Hasan
Writing is difficult work and writing about music is the most difficult of all, which is why we are in Saeed Malik’s debt for having produced a book that brings together Lahore’s musical history and heritage. Considering what it was and looking at what we are left with today, one can only feel a deep sense of loss.
The great musicians that Lahore once knew are either dead or they have left, and of those that have stayed, their voices are stilled. Ustad Fateh Ali Khan, the prince of Patialia school, rarely performs. Amanat Ali Khan’s son, who inherited some of the sweetness and light that was his father’s voice, frittered away his gift. Others from that house are simply not imbued with the genius that their elders had. Nazakat Ali Khan and Salamat Ali Khan are dead and their heirs can carry forward their musical legacy in name only.
Today, anyone who can get a couple of his friends together and raise the money to buy a guitar or two and a pair of drums becomes a music group. Almost none of them can sing or play. The sound they produce is a bastard sound, neither East nor West. Barring two, possibly three exceptions, the rest of the Pakistani “rock” groups are an embarrassment. That they get an audience is due not to the quality of their music but to the desperation with which the young seek entertainment in an entertainment-famished land that the Mullah is beginning to rule under the benevolent indifference of the state.
Saeed Malik’s Lahore: a musical companion, published thanks to the public-spirited munificence of Syed Babar Ali, sums up the city’s glorious musical past. He laments the departure of non-Muslim musicians in 1947 to India. Manto wrote Toba Tek Singh about the “partition” of the Lahore lunatic asylum. Someone should write about the “partition” of Lahore’s music. Those who went across included Pandit Jeevan Lal Mattoo, the two sisters, Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur, and film music composers Shyam Sunder, Amar Nath, Gobind Ram and Dhanni Ram, among others. The great Bade Ghulam Ali Khan and his son Munawwar Ali Khan left for India some years later, a cultural loss that is not possible to quantify, such was its immensity and so impoverished did it leave us.
But we were fortunate in gaining the arrival from India of Roshan Ara Begum, the lady who sang for the gods, though in the presence of mortals; Nazakat and Salamat Ali Khan; the great sarangi player Ustad Bundoo Khan; the scions of the Patiala gharana; Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan of Kairana – he died on a short visit to India – and from among folk singers, that most mellifluous of performers, Tufail Niazi. Khurshid Anwar, who put his unmistakable stamp on every composition he authored, stayed on in Bombay but returned to Lahore a few years into independence.
Saeed Malik recreates things that exist no longer, such as Lahore’s great baithaks and takiyas in the old city, which were the true nurseries of classical music. On Mohni Road, there stood a music school established in 1901 by Pandit Vishnu Digamber, which trained hundreds of serious students, some of whom like GA Farooq became quite famous. Haveli Mian Khan, built in Emperor Shahjehan’s reign, was a Lahore landmark but time wasn’t kind to it. It housed at different times such men as Ustad Kaley Khan, Ustad Eeday Khan and Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, whose grandfather worked at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. According to Malik, “With the ill-planned horizontal expansion of Lahore, a large number of professional musicians had to shift to other places. No one can now find a practising musician living within or near the precincts of Haveli Mian Khan. The exodus of musicians from the Haveli has depleted the melodic resources of Lahore, affecting the music culture of the Walled City.” Another of Lahore’s depleted music centres was Katri Bawa, which after 1947 became home to the Rubabi clan of musicians.
Saeed Malik describes a Roshan Ara Begum performance in words that I could not agree with more, having heard her at the Open Air Theatre many times. He writes, “She was bestowed with the ability to command instant respect and appreciation from her audience. She did so by using long sweeps of notes, or applying meends , and swinging flights, which were supplemented by her emotion-charged voice. Her manner of voice production contained fullness as well as delicacy. . . She had an extraordinarily keen and subtle perception of sur , so much so that even the slightest lapse from the correct intonation of a note in the rendering of a raga would be seen reflected in a knowing look on her face.” The late Hayat Ahmed Khan would always recite this couplet before bringing on Malika-e-Mauseeqi, “Uss ghairat-e-naheed ki her taan hai Deepak: Shola sa lappak jaaye hai awaz tau dekho .” And she would take her place with a grace that could only be called queenly. I would often see Khurshid Shahid strumming the taanpura behind her, wearing a blazing orange Benarsi sari. Ustad Nathoo Khan would be on the sarangi and the incomparable Ustad Shaukat Hussain on the tabla. When something particularly subtle or difficult that her accompanists had executed pleased her, she would turn her face toward them for a fleeting moment and smile like an angel. She was dark and plain but a strange beauty would irradiate her being when she was performing. She was the queen of the Kalyan thaath and her Jhanjhoti thumri, a tribute to her great ustad Khan Sahib Abdul Karim Khan, was something to die for.
Saeed Malik also recalls perhaps the greatest ghazal singers of all times, Ustad Barkat Ali Khan, whose pupil Ghulam Ali has done him proud. “The adroitness and confidence with which Barkat Ali Khan used to render thumris, dadras and ghazals created a hypnotic spell on his audience . . . His renditions were interspersed with ornamentations. The flourish and ease with which he embellished his compositions with short melodic phrases, intervals, pauses, swings and suspended cadences served as a clear pointer to the command he had over the entire gamut of ghazal singing,” Malik writes. Mukhtar Begum, Agha Hashr’s lifelong love and the older sister of Farida Khanum, who performed the night President Ayub Khan came to the All Pakistan Music Conference, was a perfect singer. So superb was her rendition of both the word and the note that she left her listeners breathless. She would always sing one or more of Agha Hashr’s ghazals with a feeling that could only have sprung out of her love for and devotion to the man who was called “the Indian Shakespeare.”
Saeed Malik also writes about the great composers of film music associated with Lahore, men such as Ustad Jhandhey Khan, Rafiq Ghaznavi, Master Ghulam Haider (who gave the young Marathi girl called Lata her big break), Shyam Sunder and, of course, the one and only, Khurshid Anwar. Ustad Jhandey Khan, born in Jammu or one of its suburbs to a Brahmin family in 1895, is to be remembered for a musical feat never accomplished before or since. All twelve songs of Kedar Sharma’s pre-1947 classic Chitralekha were set to the raag Bhairvin. He composed music for about 30 movies, left Bombay after partition, came to Lahore, composed for two movies and then settled in Gujranwala where he spent the rest of his life in prayer. He is buried in that city that is associated with wrestlers and gangsters. Saeed Malik traced Ustad Jhandey Khan’s daughter in that town in 1982 but writes that “she did not wish to be identified” with her father considering the low esteem with which professional musicians are held in our society.
And that is our shame.