So Off Key on Saigal

The image of the unrequited hero,“failing” in love and in life and swiftly meandering towards a sodden end,sat well with the magical Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib as he employed the allegory to lament over the decline of the Mughal empire being trampled over by colonial masters in the debacle of the 1857 War of Independence. But it is hardly clear why some seven or eight decades later,Ghalib should re-enter popular,national consciousness even as “the idea of India” was consolidating. There is very little reflection on why Ghalib (outstanding as he is) returned via the (literally) intoxicated tones of a Saigal or a Begum Akhtar. Why the “new India” did not inherit a tradition of rousing anthems or people’s revolutionary songs,but a bag of narcissistic,self-indulgent,wallowing-in-self-pity numbers is surely a subject for future research.

But you will not find any of those answers in Pran Nevile’s new book. In fact,the author’s own impulse for writing this rather sketchy,disorganised,peripatetic,perambulating,un-insightful and gratingly repetitive “definitive” biography is not very clear. He has already authored an illustrated coffee-table book,K.L. Saigal: Immortal Singer,brought out by the Department of Culture during the Saigal Centenary in 2004. What fresh inspiration or insight troubled him to launch on this current project is opaque.

The motives for the book are fuzzy beside the fact that,growing up in Lahore,he was in the audience at some of Saigal’s public concerts,that he was himself responsible for the song-selection for HMV’s double LPs of Saigal’s songs in 1965 and that he keeps describing Saigal as the “greatest” Indian musician of the last century,peppering his narrative with such an unrestrained barrage of hyperbolic adjectives that one wonders at the figure of the absent editor at Penguin. Besides,much of the sketchy material on Saigal’s life has already been dealt with in earlier,rather thin narratives on him by HMV executive G.N. Joshi and music critic Raghav R. Menon,who have been liberally quoted here.

Ironically,the most insightful piece on Saigal was perhaps the 1947 obituary on him in Filmindia magazine by its editor Babu Rao Patel,which has been reproduced in full as an appendix. (In fact,the last 85 pages of the book are appendices). The roughly 2,000-word obit says more about Saigal and his times than Nevile’s entire book which meanders aimlessly. On the other hand,Babu Rao Patel swiftly and pithily summarises that “In (Saigal’s) death died the music of a million souls…” and that “Saigal cannot be forgotten so easily,not till this music-mad nation suddenly goes dead and ceases to hypnotise itself with the soulful melodies which the great artiste has left behind as a precious heritage for posterity”.

Patel is eloquent when he describes Saigal as carrying “nature’s harp inside him” and analytical when he describes the popularising aspects of Saigal and his music as having “lent to the Indian film industry a stability which a hundred of its so-called industrial captains would have failed to give in another hundred years”. He is also perspicacious when he describes the damage done to Saigal when he moved from New Theatres,Calcutta,to the Bombay industry,tempted,as he says,“by money”. He felt that the Bombay producers throttled the great artist and squeezed the soul out of his throat: “Gold had taken the golden out of his voice.”

Compared to all this,Nevile certainly has problems with framing his jumpy narrative which seems unable to make up its mind about whether it should be on Saigal or on landmarks of Indian cinema,or Indian music from ancient times,or on the kotha traditions. The resultant repetitions of ideas,sentences,paragraphs at frequent intervals in the book leaves one agape at the publishing house’s falling standards. For,it leaves you feeling that a book on an adored musician has been put together by people who are tone-deaf.