Wo aa rahen hai jo biimaar kii dawaa ke liye
Khamosh baithe hain sab chaaraagar duaa ke liye
(he is expected to arrive with a cure for my pain..and the healers quietly wait too, with their hands raised in prayer)
These lines are from a ghazal Begum Akhtar wrote though few know just what became of her poetry. It was her voice that people remember. A voice that was almost as dramatic as a thunderclap, as deep as a soul wound, as cathartic as rain, as warm as a glowing ember. More than anything else, it was a ‘knowing’ voice. A voice that knew of what life is meant to be, what happens when the heart longs and grieves, is denied what it seeks. This was the voice of hijr (longing) that somehow turned pain into a prayer. A couplet into an image. A ghazal singer into a ghazal.
What is miraculous is how she found this voice and the courage to own its power given the odds she was up against. She was born over a century ago in Faizabad district. Her mother, the second wife of a lawyer was ‘disowned’ along with her two daughters. It was during this emotionally bereft time that a young Akhtri was drawn to a touring theatre group and the voice of one of their artistes Chandra Bai. After learning from an assortment of ustaads, she finally found her true mentor in Calcutta. He was Ustad Jhande Khan and a public performance followed with even India’s nightingale Sarojini Naidu acknowledging her brilliance.This was a hugely courageous step for a young woman in that era because she chose not to relegate herself as female artiste confined to private mehfils and instead claimed ownership of the public concert stage.
She went ahead and cut a disk too and her thumris, ghazals and dadras began to gather a following. There were film offers and the only one we still remember is her magical moment in Satyajit Ray’s opus Jalsaghar. Her life was however now becoming what it was always meant to. A celebration of music where classical ‘pukhtagi‘ met a light classical touch and made ghazal accessible even to those who had never heard it before. During this phase, some of the ghazals she sang for Mehboob Khan’s 1942 Roti were edited out from the film but are available on long playing records.
Her creative freedom however was severely curtailed when in 1945, she married a Lucknow-based barrister, Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi. Akhtari gained the respectful moniker, Begum but lost the choice to follow her passion for music. Her melancholy deepened and she fell severely sick. What a triumph, it would have been then for her to return to Lucknow’s All Indian Radio Station in 1949, sing to her heart’s content and then dissolve in tears. And perhaps resolve to never again cage her voice.
Though she sang a lot of poetry created in the sub-continent, one of her most notable synergies with a poet unfolded when she met a very young and relatively unknown Sudarshan Faakir (who would also form another equally memorable partnership with Jagjit Singh).
The poet first met her at All India Radio in Jalandhar, where he worked as scriptwriter. This was in 1966 and Begum sahiba was already a legend. He was just 25. He showed her his poetry and the ghazals she was instantly swept away by were Kuchh to duniya ki inayaat ne dil tod diya and Ishq mein gairat-e-jazbaat ne rone na diya. Both renditions by Begum sahiba catapulted Faakir into immortality. She passed away shortly after giving her last concert in 1974. Her voice however refuses to be conquered by trends, by newer voices.
Till date, there is no other female voice that can sing Faakir or Daagh or Jigar or Ghalib better or turn a moment into a lump in your throat or sear your soul with, “tujh se milkar hamein rona tha bahut rona tha..tangi-e-waqt-e-mulaaqaat ne rone na diya.”
with The New Indian Express Reema Moudgil works for The New Indian Express, Bangalore, is the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, an artist, a former RJ and a mother. She dreams of a cottage of her own that opens to a garden and where she can write more books, paint, listen to music and just be.