WHEN all else is forgotten, the medley of music and song sweeping subcontinental cinema during the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, will be remembered. Impossible storylines, the same themes repeated endlessly, films otherwise full of kitsch and dripping sentimentality but music unforgettable and a select band of singers, the most favoured of the gods, entering the halls of everlasting fame.

First and foremost, Kundan Lal Saigol, who sang like no one did, his voice touched by heavenly fire. Scan all the songs you want, of things lost, of hopeless love, no one sang more touchingly.

Years ago when the radio was the great means of mass communication, I heard the mellifluous Shamshad Begum say that Saigol was the first singer in Indian cinema to sing like a ‘man’. He was thus a trail-blazer, the father of modern Indian song. But his singing was rooted in its own time and place. You can’t replicate Saigol now. His style would sound out of place, just as I imagine someone trying to copy Bach and Mozart would sound out of place.

Close on Saigol’s heels came the equally great Muhammad Rafi, who broke out of the Saigol mould and pioneered a new kind of singing which holds the stage till today. When they first began singing, Mukesh and Kishore Kumar were heavily influenced by Saigol. Listen to Mukesh’s ‘Dil jalta hai tau jalney dey’ (if the heart burns, let it), a not very good Saigol copy. Rafi followed no bent but his own from the beginning.

I suppose the difference lay in the quality of their voices. Saigol’s was the heavier voice, a baritone, and therefore more at home among the lower and middle scales. Rafi was a tenor, his voice capable of touching the highest scales. But merely being able to sing at a high pitch is not everything in singing. If your voice is not beautiful, if there is no touch of magic about it, you can reach the uppermost registers and yet leave your audience unaffected. Rafi’s voice was distilled from the purest nectar and wrapped in beaten gold. That is why his best songs will live forever.

But if I am permitted a caveat, because Rafi sang so many songs, some of them are of an indifferent quality. Personally speaking, some of them I can’t listen to at all. Rafi in snatches provides a lesson in immortality. But Rafi in bulk can be a bit trying. This is where the great Saigol stands out supreme. There is nothing indifferent about any of his recorded songs. Even the least, the most inconsequential of them, has a touch of the divine spark. But then we are talking of 80 or 100 Saigol songs set against several thousands by Rafi. In so huge an output there were bound to be shallow patches.

Strange in a way — is it not? — that both these titans of singing were from Punjab, Saigol from Jallandhar, Rafi from Lahore? Something, after all, to be said about the land of the five rivers.

As for female singers, what a bevy of bewitching stars the 1940s produced: peerless Khurshid, Kaanan Devi, Amir Bai Karnataki, Uma Devi, Zohra Bai, Surraya, Shamshad Begum and Nur Jehan. Listen to them at their best and you are transported into another world. Take Khurshid’s ‘Panchi bawara chaand se preet lagayey...’ mad bird in love with the moon — whose very first notes pluck at the heart-strings.

S. M. Shahid, who knows as much about classical music as anyone in Pakistan, in his excellent primer on the subject ‘Immortal Film Songs Inspired by Raags’ informs us that this song is in raag Kidara. And of the song’s effect he says that Gyan Dutt, the composer, “must have composed (it) in his finest hour.” You can well believe it after listening to Khurshid.

The famous qawwali from the film ‘Lahore’, ‘Aahen naa bhareen, shikway na kiya’, besides being a beautiful song, is instructive about the hierarchy of female singing in the period leading to partition. There is Zohra Bai in the qawwali and some other singers and, of course, they are glorious. But then soaring above all others is the voice of Nur Jehan, the undisputed queen of Indian singing at the time.

When Nur Jehan came to Pakistan, she left the Indian stage to Surraya and Shamshad. This was a world in transition, the old still around but making way for the new. Just as Rafi had heralded a new era in male singing, female singing was also on the verge of being transformed by a new phenomenon trying out her talent in the wings: the nightingale of India, Lata Mangeshkar.

Names famous before her had heavier, more rounded and sonorous voices. Lata’s voice was somewhat thin and therefore not quite in the mould of what was then current in the recording studios of Bombay. For this reason, strange as it may sound now, she had difficulty in getting singing roles. But when she finally made it, no one was left in any doubt that something wholly new and enchanting had arrived. The age of the heavier voices was over.

Of the 40 songs that S. M Shahid puts together in his collection ‘Immortal Film Songs Inspired by Raags’, 19 are by Lata. Listening to them gives you a measure of her unsurpassed genius. Lata favourites? Too many to enumerate. After all, she ruled her kingdom unchallenged for close to 40 years, singing thousands of songs in the process. In Shahid’s collection, however, my favourite is: ‘Baandh preet phool dore’. Let Shahid speak for himself: “...who will deny that this song is one of the finest compositions in raag Jaijaiwanti? (It) puts you under a strange spell and I do not find any other song which remains so strictly within the discipline of this beautiful raag...The piano has been used very effectively and the rhythm is unusually uniform throughout without being monotonous.” It is a truly haunting song. The way Lata sings “bhool jaana na, door jaana na, rooth jaana na” — don’t forget me, don’t go away, don’t be angry with me — is enough to break the most impervious heart.

(I have in my collection a Jaijaiwanti by Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. Magisterial is the only way to describe it. The very first notes and the spell is cast, and sustained to the very end.)

What accounts for the trance-inducing quality of the film music of that period? A combination of three factors unique to the sub-continent: classical music, lyrical poetry and some of the finest voices ever created. The equivalent in western music would have to be the poetry of Shakespeare, Goethe or Shelley set to the tune of a Mozart or Beethoven composition and sung by Caruso or Callas — clearly an absurdity.

With us it happens all the time. Ghalib and Zauq sung by Saigol, Ghalib by Surraya, Faiz by Nur Jehan, Faiz and Faraz by Mehdi Hasan, all set to unforgettable music. Or Amir Khusrau by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: there is just no equivalent to this in western music, the two traditions being altogether different.

But things are never static, they change. The golden age of subcontinental film music lasted for some three decades — from the 1940s to about the middle of the 1960s — before other influences crept in to change it. The old music mirrored a quieter, slower form of existence. Everyday life acquiring a quicker pace, music and film were bound to be affected.

That’s how life is, not always changing for the better, but always on the march, things in flux, the old giving way to the new, one thing mutating into another. In the case of our music, the age of Saigol and Khurshid giving way to the era of Rafi and Lata. That in turn giving way to ‘modern’ music.

All is not lost, however. The songs and music of that period have already attained classical status. And just as we return to the classics, whether in literature or music, to reinvigorate mind and spirit, even a thousand years from now, whatever else happens, people will still listen to the songs of that golden period, awe-struck at the divine grace which made them possible in the first place.