43 f Mumbai Mixture
When veteran Indian singer Asha Bhosle met up with sitar virtuoso Shujaat Khan, everything got cooking. Ken Hunt unfolds the tale.
O
ver a lightly pulsating synthe- siser a sitar picks out a melody. The style is classically inflected but neither classical nor folk. After just over a minute a
woman’s voice declares, “I rue having locked eyes with you…” A tabla enters and almost two minutes into the song, a male voice croons back the line. Over the course of a performance lasting over seven minutes, Asha Bhosle and Shujaat Khan sing and bat back the lyrics, impro- vising and intensifying their responses live in the studio, with flourishes of sitar and guitar. This is the duo’s version of the title track from Naina Lagai Ke, a small masterpiece of a thing.
It is hard to come up with a western counterpart to quite match Asha Bhosle in worldwide cultural terms. Certainly Madon- na, Lady Gaga and their kind can’t hold a candle. The scale of her outreach mirrors the way Bollywood outperforms Hollywood films in cultural penetration terms world- wide and the way filmi sangeet (film song) reaches untold millions. One estimate put India’s population in 2008 at around 1,140,000,000. India’s preliminary census figures put it at 1.2 billion in 2011. The highest proportion of them will take to filmi sangeet like mother’s milk. Then add the wider subcontinent and its diaspora. Next factor in the generations of
cinema-goers around the globe who watch subtitled Bollywood films in Israel, Ethiopia, Ghana, Trinidad and so on where people without a word of Hindi learn favourite songs phonetically, parrot-fashion.
Despite the presence of Asha Bhosle, Naina Lagai Ke is no filmi sangeet project. Despite the presence of Shujaat Khan, it is no Hindustani classical waxing. And even though folk and possibly Sufi inflections surface at times, perhaps it is best to say it falls into the subcontinent’s uselessly imprecise genre, ‘Modern Song’. Its major point of departure for Asha Bhosle is that it captures her, aged 77, revelling in impro- vising with Shujaat Khan singing and play- ing sitar, a game of catch and return.
Born in May 1960, Shujaat Khan
knows a fair bit about Bollywood as well. Like his father, the illustrious beenkar or sitar maestro, Vilayat Khan, he was raised on a diet of raga and riyaaz (prac- tice). Many people considered him to be the greatest sitarist of his age. His father’s name and reputation cast a huge shadow over Shujaat and conse- quently he chose to make it in music, not as the offspring of some famous musician but on his own merits. He took the hard road. He served time as one of the nameless, uncredit- ed crew putting notes behind Bollywood playback singers’ voices or tingeing scenes with background music
colour. When the likes of Asha Bhosle, Mohammed Rafi or Kishore Kumar came into the studio, he was just one of many hirelings in a sea of faces that might run to between 30 and 50 in number. There was no interaction between the faceless and the playback principals. “And rightly so,” he adds, before anyone gets the wrong impression.
“So, I did meet and see Ashaji many times coming in and out of studios and this and that. In fact she doesn’t remember meeting me a couple of times. Because it’s, like, she’s meeting 50,000 other people,” he says in his English coloured by time liv- ing in the States. “If somebody had point- ed out to her that this is Shujaat Khan who is the son of Vilayat Khan, then she might
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