Jagjit Singh: Touching the sky, caressing the soul
It was in the early 1980s and youth was still part of life. Romance was in the air, had been since the mid-1970s. And romance is something that often stays with you, must if life is not to reduce itself into a sorry patchwork of mere banalities. Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, in that particular season when Mohammad Rafi had been dead a year, came prancing into my life with pehle to apne dil ki raza jaan jaiye. The song was a gift, embedded in an audio cassette. That song was an inaugural, an initiation as it were, in the world of Jagjit Singh melody. I was not to look back after that burst of light.
In the evening before the morning of his passing on Monday, I sent off a poignant line from one of Jagjit's heart-cracking songs to a friend suddenly gone quiet. As yet, there was no intimation that the man who had infused new verve into ghazals was into his few remaining hours of mortality. But that line, chitthi nai koi sandes / jaane wo kaun sa des / jahan tum chale gaye, went off to my friend somewhere in America. It worked. She came back to me. And that is what has always been true of Jagjit Singh. In his songs there were always the soulful, sometimes perspicacious images of life renewing itself in the setting of the sun.
Jagjit's songs pierced the heart inasmuch as they plumbed the depths of the heavens. On quiet, rain-drenched evenings in London, I have heard, over and over, his rendition of Ghalib's wo firaq aur wo visaal kahan / wo shab-o-roz wo mahosaal kahan. It is devastation wrought by lost time you observe rising before you once more. It is a blighted world, post-1857, you recall in that song. Only Jagjit Singh could have brought the necessary pathos into the elegiac lyrics. And he did. Turn away from the historical, toward the personal. You have loved and lost, in that Tennysonian mode of tragedy. But then, she you love, she who seeks to turn her gaze away from you, has lost too. Feel that pain in kabhi khamosh baitho ge / kabhi kuchh gungunao ge.
Jagjit Singh was always insistent about ghazals following the rules of mathematical precision and grammatical formulae. You observe his adherence to this principle in all his forays into the world of music. Not a word misplaced, not a breath missing, not a note gone awry. Think here of koi ye kaise bataye ke wo tanha kiyun hai / yehi duniya hai to phir aisi duniya kyun hai. The existential is at work in you as it is in Jagjit. He has that special ability in him to make the ghazal soar and yet have it remain within the bounds of general comprehension. He made ghazals part of our lives at a time when music had seemingly become identified with movies. And he did it in plain fashion. His wit at the live performances, his self-deprecating humour, his evocation of poetry's towering figures all came together to create a composite image of the modern ghazal as an image by itself.
Imagery is what strikes you even in the simplest of Jagjit's ghazals. Go on, hum honton se chhoo lo tum / mera geet amar kar do. Immortality comes to you when the beloved transforms your verse into song with her fragrance. And fragrance, that quality which defines the essence of the throbbing of the heart, is to be spotted aplenty in tere aane ki jab khabar mehki / teri khushboo se sara ghar mehki. The loved one is a blossom, indeed a bouquet. Or perhaps an entirety of a garden ready to preside over a metamorphosis of the world of the one who loves into a universality of emotions resting on primordial love? How else would you explain sarakti jaaye hai rukh se naqaab / aahista aahista?
In Jagjit Singh's world of dream-filled twilights, someone stands at the door in the trepidation of rising love. She breathes a trifle heavily. A sigh escapes her. He who worships her sings jhuki jhuki si nazar / beqarar hai ke nehi / daba daba sa sahi / dil mein pyar hai ke nehi.
Which makes you wonder . . . baat niklegi to phir duur talak jayegi …
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