Anupama Nair
When I think of music, I always think of my favorite writer Shakespeare and his quotes “If music be the food of love, play on; Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken, and so die”. I will take you on a journey of Hindi film music and then talk about the Noor of Indian music Noor Jehan. Hindi film music has a long history and still decides the fate of a movie. The film music from the beginning till the 1990s had poetic lyrics and melodious music. However, with the arrival of the millennium, music lost its touch. No poetic lyrics or melodious music exist, very rarely in films like Parinita, but mostly do not exist anymore. It pains my heart to see this fall. Hope the yesteryears come back, at least for music.
The first film in Hindi with recorded music was in the movie “Alam Ara” made in 1931, and the first song had the lyrics “De Khuda Ke Naam per”. In the 1940s they are many songs which after 80 years are still popular. Some of those songs are “Akhiyan Milake (Ratan), Jawan hai Muhabbat (Anmol Ghadi), and Awaz de Kahan hai (Anmol Ghadi). The songs sung by Suraiya and Noor Jehan are still super hits.
Noor Jehan was a famous Indian singer and actress who worked both in India and Pakistan. She had a highly versatile personality, and could sing in several languages including Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi and Sindhi, and had recorded over 10,000 songs in her career. She was born into a Muslim family with a rich musical tradition, in British India, and she was exposed to the world of show biz at a young age. She began singing at the age of five and received early training in classical singing from Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. He introduced her to the stage and before long she had blossomed into a talented and confident stage performer.
She developed an interest in acting along with singing and made her initial film appearances as a child actor. The famous theatre owner Diwan Sardari Lal took her to Calcutta in the early 1930s and her entire family moved to Calcutta in hope of developing the film careers of Noor Jehan and her older sisters, Eiden Bai and Haider Bandi. Mukhtar Begum, who was a famous actress encouraged the sisters to join film companies and recommended them to various producers she knew. She also recommended them to her husband, Agha Hashar Kashmiri, who owned a maidan theatre or a tented theatre to accommodate large audiences. It was here that she received the stage name, Baby Noor Jehan. Her sisters were offered jobs with one of the Seth Sukh Karnani companies, Indira Movietone and they went on to be known as the Punjab Mail.
In 1935, she acted in a Punjabi movie called ‘Pind di Kuri’ in which Noor Jehan acted along with her sisters and sang the Punjabi song “Langh aja patan chanaan da o yaar”, which was her earliest hit. She then acted in a film called ‘Missar Ka Sitara’ by the same company and sang in it. Jehan also played the child role of Heer in the film Heer-Sayyal in 1937. All these Punjabi movies were made in Calcutta. After a few years in Calcutta, Jehan returned to Lahore in 1938. In 1939, renowned music director Ghulam Haider composed songs for her, which led to her early popularity, and he thus became her early gurus.
In 1942, she had her first Hindi hit Khandaan opposite Pran. It was her first role as an adult, and the film was a major success. The success of Khandaan encouraged her to move to Bombay – the center of Bollywood, with the director Syed Shaukat Hussain Rizvi. She shared singing with Shanta Apte in Duhai released in 1943. She married Rizvi later the same year. Badi Ma released in 1945 is a social drama film based in the time of the Second World War. It was produced and directed by Master Vinayak. The film starred Noor Jehan, Ishwarlal, Yakub, Sitara and Girish. It could be called a vintage film as it had Lata didi and Asha Bhosle acting alongside Noor Jehan.
(to be continued…..)
