![]() By breaking away from the orthodox rendition of the classical ghazals of Mir, Momin and Ghalib, he began to pick up simple and light ghazals penned by Qateel Shifai, Gulzar, Kaifi Azmi, Nida Fazli, Sudarshan Faakir (Woh kaaghaz ki kashti, woh baarish ka paani. ![]() ![]() Without a skerrick of doubt, Jagjit Singh can be called the doyen and the finest exponent of popular and film ghazals. So he began to experiment with the forms and metres of conventional ghazals long before Pankaj Udhas, Talat Aziz, Satish Babbar or even Anup Jalota emerged on the scene in the eighties. In fact, Urdu came to him as a secondary language and a tongue out of his linguistic consciousness. In an interview to this writer for an Urdu daily, he admitted he was more at home with Hindi and Punjabi than Urdu. Yet, they remained somewhat out of bounds for the largely unversed and uninitiated audiences.īorn into a simple Hindi-Punjabi speaking family in Rajasthan’s Sri Ganganagar, Jagjit Singh observed this and decided the ghazal must be brought out of its confines. Both the stalwarts sang film as well as non-film ghazals. Even the great Talat Mahmood and the legendary Mohammad Rafi couldn’t popularise ghazals the way Jagjit Singh eventually did. Breaking into the ramparts of the classical ghazal and making it available to the masses was indeed a challenge. ![]() The ghazal enjoyed an exalted status among the elite, just as the sonnets (14-line poems) did in English poetry. Toffee-nosed purists of the sub-continent steadfastly adhered to the ghazal as a sub-genre of classical music and frowned on its entry into the public domain through films and mushairas (gatherings of poets). Considered a high-brow and indolent pastime, the ghazal had largely remained confined within high walls till the mid-60s. The name Jagjit Singh is synonymous with ghazals. ![]()
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