Jagjit Singh, a Friend For All Seasons

Jagjit Singh or Ghazaljit Singh as Gulzar once called him - he should know for the two worked on several albums together and shared an easy camaraderie. Or Ghazal King, as he was popularly called, because, as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his tribute to the maestro, he made ghazals accessible to everyone.

In the palimpsest that is India, ghazal arrived to its shores on ships that sailed from Persia, on horseback as marauders galloped down from central Asia, in the songs of mystics who roamed Hind in the wake of the conquerors. With the eclipse of Persian in the Mughal court, the ghazal of Rumi and Hafiz transitioned to a polyglot language which was birthed in the Indo-Persian-Arabic roiling on the subcontinent, Urdu. 

Ghazal in India is supposed to have begun with Amir Khusrau in the thirteenth century and its golden period is the 18^th and 19^th centuries when luminaries like Mir, Dard, Ghalib, Momin and Zauq elevated this form of poetry. 

For the uninitiated, ghazal is a short poem, rarely exceeding a dozen couplets in the same metre. It always opens with a rhyming couplet called matla which sets the mood and tone of the poem. The last couplet of the ghazal is called makta and often includes the pen-name of the poet and is usually more personal than general in its intent.

Also, though a ghazal is commonly understood to be a love poem, (in Arabic the word literally means talking to a woman) it deals with the whole spectrum of human experience. Ghalib has such a vast oeuvre that it is said there is hardly any situation or state of mind which he hasn’t rendered in his inimitable style. Which, in turn, explains why he is the most quoted of all Urdu poets.

For a whole generation of Indians Ghalib came alive when Jagjit Singh sang his ghazals for the eponymous TV serial directed by Gulzar in 1988. His mellifluous voice gave new life to Mirza Ghalib’s lyrics as entire India nodded and hummed to ‘Zulmat kade mein’, ‘Dil-e-nadaan tujhe’, ‘Bazeecha-e-atfal hai’, comprehending some of the lyrics and suspending incomprehension for the balance, as the voice and words alighted straight from the ears to the heart. 

Jagjit Singh is rightly credited with reviving ghazals in India, with giving them a home again in Bollywood, and with filling our drawers and shelves with cassette tapes, then CDs, now ipods of his melodious renditions.  

In my childhood I was surrounded by Mehdi Hassan and Begum Akhtar and in my adulthood I discovered Abida Parveen. But Jagjit Singh was a friend I made in adolescence, and since then he has remained a steadfast ally. He made the genius of Mirza Ghalib accessible to me; he molded the pain of being away from home by his rendition of Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s Birha da Sultan; he lifted ordinary Bollywood films with his magical singing; his rendition of Bahadur Shah Zafar’s ‘Meri tanhaiyon tum hi laga lo mujh ko seeney sey’ has provided a balm on many a sad day; his Punjabi tappe cheer me up; his teaming with wife Chitra a continual delight both to listen and to watch …

 I have had the good fortune to attend some live performances of the maestro and the delight with which he rendered the ghazals was always palpable – it got the audience clapping hands and jigging shoulders while seated until, eventually, the tapping feet led to dancing in the aisles. For all lovers of Urdu poetry, of ghazals and ghazal-gayaki, he was our rockstar.

Now that he has passed into that great unknown, perhaps his journey will take him to a caravanserai where Rumi and Ghalib are in a mushaira and an enthralled audience is deep into wah-wahs, and Jagjit Singh will pick up the matla, and, with his trademark glint, will begin strumming the rhyming couplet, ta-nana-ta-nana-na-nana …

As for me, I shall always have the company of the friend I grew up with. Jagjit Singh is a friend for all seasons as he so beautifully extolled in Mirza Ghalib’s couplet,

Yeh kahaan ki dosti hai keh bane hain dost naasih,

Koi chaara saaz hota, koi ghamgusaar hota.

What use is this friendship where there is much advise,
O for a friend, who’ll share with me my sighs.

P.S. Note his trademark wit right at the beginning of the above video

A great story never ends where it is expected to!

For me, the great pleasure of a well-thumbed, much-loved book is that when I am busted after a day of writing, or when I just want to read someone other than myself (the travails of a writerly life, eh!), I pick up one such friend.

Recently, I was browsing through The Hakawati, and was joyously rewarded for my effort. It is a lush luxuriant book, filled with nested narratives, and transports you to a new land - what more can you ask of any friend?

I reviewed it for the SCMP when it was launched, loved it and am sharing the review here. If you want to earmark a book for the long summer days, let it be this!  

The Hakawati

by Rabih Alameddine

Picador

HK$ 208

****

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

FICTION

To represent The Hakawati as a sprawling epic would be limiting; to liken its narrative to a set of nested Russian dolls would be prosaic; to describe the prose as inventive would be an understatement – what then is The Hakawati? The bare facts: It is the third novel of Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer, who took eight years crafting its 513 pages. In Arabic the title means storyteller and the novel is a contemporary Arabian Nights. Now, for the juice: a luscious Lebanese meze rustled up from the Quran, the Old Testament, Levantine folk tales, Panchatantra, the Thousand and One Nights and shot through with a narrative of a young émigré returning to his native Lebanon, The Hakawati is storytelling on steroids.

Beginning with the simple instruction – Listen – the novel opens with the story of an emir who has everything he desires except for a son. He consults his vizier and on his advice packs off his slave girl Fatima to Egypt to fetch the miracle cure. This saga intertwines with the story of Osama al-Kharrat who has returned from US to Beirut to his dying father’s hospital bedside. The war-ravaged city has changed beyond Osama’s recognition; childhood friends have grown up into selves as varied as militiaman, sycophant, femme fatale, businesswoman; and the large family has unravelled. But it is Eid-al-Adha, the traditional time for a family feast, and since the patriarch is bedridden an elaborate home-cooked meal is rolled into the hospital room on a gurney amidst gossip, laughter and stories.

As Osama’s feisty sister Lina, pregnant niece Salwa, best friend Fatima, obsequious cousin Hafez, and Aunt Samia hover about the hospital in concern, the narrative bubbles with their individual stories. Mingled with these are Osama’s reminisces of his grandfather Ismail – the original Hakawati of the story, his father Farid and his favourite uncle Jihad. And how, despite his father’s disapproval of the grandfather’s lowly storyteller’s profession – that had earned the family name al-Kharrat, fibster in Arabic – Osama was weaned on stories by the old man. Through the tangled skein of individual idiosyncracies, personal privations and lost loves emerges a microcosm of Lebanon during its independence, civil war and reconstruction.

The Hakawati is Alameddine’s Rushdiesque paean to the place of his birth. His invigorating tales of love, lust and longing juxtapose gentle pigeoneers with the adventurous Mamluk slave King Baybars, nosedive into the Biblical saga of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar and take flight with the fabulist fantasies of demons, imps and magic carpets. “Reality never meets our wants, and adjusting both is why we tell stories," observes a character in the novel, and as the novel proceeds the reader begins to glean the leitmotif coursing through the web of stories. It becomes apparent that sometime in his growing-up years Osama had fallen out with his father Farid, the relationship thereon marked by a stony silence.

Now, as Osama keeps vigil over his prostrate father, the only way he knows to communicate with him is through stories. Like a contemporary Sheherazade, Osama attempts to stave off his father’s death through the narration of myriad tales. Thus the story loops back to the beginning, the first and last word being the same – Listen – and one realizes that all along the Hakawati was none other than Osama.

The book could have done with tighter editing, the buffet table sags under its sumptuousness. That quibble aside, reading The Hakawati is like embarking on a steam engine train to a wondrous terrain – surrender to its meanders, forget the destination, and you will discover, as a character quips, “A great story never ends where it is expected to”.