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

La Rambla, Levitating Ganesha, and Lethal Desis – A Barcelona 101

Barcelona, to me, was a sunny Mediterranean city that registered on my consciousness during the 1992 Summer Olympics. Thereafter, as the Spanish economy boomed it became the city to go to, the kind that attracts travel tips from the editors of Conde Nast Traveler.

 All of which was very good until I stumbled upon a book called The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon. Now, I am a writer, and I love all things writerly – the smell of new books, the sound of old pages, the feel of a good pen as it waltzes over white, the strange new worlds that black ink transposes us to – and The Shadow is a very writerly novel.

At its heart is a book – rare, obscure – that falls into the hands of a boy who must protect it because someone is determinedly burning every copy of every book ever written by its author. It features a Cemetery of Forgotten Books – a capacious sanctuary where books are guarded from oblivion, a wise bookseller father, a boy who reads voraciously, and the city of Barcelona.

But the Barcelona of the book is set in the ‘50s, post the Spanish Civil War – a far cry from the sun-kissed widely-advertised Barca of today. The narrative traverses through the labyrinth of Barri Gotic (the nucleus of Old Barcelona) and down La Rambla, as mist rises from the Marina and engulfs the streets. It is a wonderful sprawling Gothic novel and I would recommend it to anybody looking for a book to lose themselves in. (If it helps, it is the highest selling Spanish novel after Don Quixote, and I reviewed its sequel here.) But best of all, it captures the spirit and skeleton of Barcelona better than any guidebook.

Because, even today, the best way to see the city is by strolling down the wide boulevard of La Rambla and careening off into the side alleys which spit you into the maze of the old quarter. Barcelona is at once ancient, medieval, Gothic and contemporary, and all of it can be discovered within a 2-mile radius!

So much so that tourist companies have come up with ‘The Shadow of The Wind Walking Tours’!

So you can imagine my excitement when we landed in Barcelona during Easter break. Especially considering my prior visa travail which I blogged about here, hubby was skeptical about the city that I had been slobbering over – not to mention that we were visiting from Pa-ree, that moveable feast!

We had deliberately chosen to stay in a hotel off La Rambla to ensure we wasted no time in cabs. La Rambla, a broad pedestrian boulevard flanked by narrow traffic lanes, runs down the length of Barcelona’s tourist hub, marks the southwest flank of the Barri Gotic, and is arguably the most famous Spanish street. It takes its name from a seasonal stream (raml in Arabic) that once ran here.

If you can withstand crowds, it is an excellent way to begin sampling Barcelona – throw yourself in and go with the flow. Start from Placa de Catalunya, named after a drinking fountain, a drink from which is rumoured to return you to Barcelona. Not a bad premise, but considering the swathe of pigeons that flock the fountain, you might just want to make a wish in your heart J Don’t get distracted by the stores all around – El Cortes Ingles, Barcelona’s Selfridges will be towering over you – there’ll be time for that later. This is also the place for celebration by fans when FC Barca wins, and the place to book and board the popular Bus Turistic for an open-top ride through the city.

Hang around, experience the place, then head southwards on La Rambla. If the UN had a bazaar it would be like this: multiple languages at once bouncing off hawker wares, flowers sellers, bird cages, fresh produce and intriguing buskers.

We saw several characters out of Pan’s Labyrinth, and … a levitating Ganesha! See it for yourself. Suffice to say he had a large audience and hubby’s mechanical engineering skills were challenged as he tried vainly to figure how the man was managing to stay afloat. I was happy to assign the mystery to the Goth character of the city.

And as we thus happily strolled down I overheard my mother tongue with all its lavish expletives – an excited Punjabi youth told another how they had beaten the Bengalis the previous night! Gulp! Even outside of India what identifies an Indian is our cantankerous interactions with our own countrymen. Now I have many Bengali friends and publishing is full of Bong editors but I have been aware of the strange Bong-Punj animosity. When I joined IIM Calcutta a Bong friend cheekily informed me of a popular expression: “Pagol na Punjabi”. Meaning, are you mad or simply Punjabi? Then he proceeded to add that ‘Punjabi’ was a euphemism for ‘Sardar’. And for an average Punjabi, a Bengali is at the dismal other end of the martial scale. So it shouldn’t surprise me to overhear that conversation a thousand miles from home. 1.2 billion of us are bound to show up through the cracks around the world and when we do, we are like this only!

Further on, we stumbled upon Miro’s mosaic. If I hadn’t been looking out for it, I’d have – like most other pedestrians – walked blithely over it, unaware that the famous painter had created a large circular tiled mosaic in the middle of La Rambla. Look for the Liceu metro and you’ll find it. One tile is signed by the artist and I was able to locate it!

What did Miro have in mind when he created the pavement mosaic? People trample over it, and every now and then someone notices it and pauses, or reaches it after scouring La Ramblas and gazes in awe … Either way, the mosaic is an integral part of the bustling boulevard.

Miro said, “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it’s an exchange of blood, a total embrace – without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.”

Perhaps that explains why Miro put his art at the feet of the public.

I will continue this post in a series – Barca is too much of a good thing to squeeze into one blogpost. So watch out for the next one where I shall take you into the ancient heart of the city, the Barri Gotic. Meanwhile, if you figure the secret of the levitating Ganesha, do write in.

Cheers!