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Donald's Encyclopedia of Popular MusicA B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y ZGHAZALLight classical poetic Indian music form, latterly also associated with popular music and Muslim Northern India and the Urdu language. In the Hindu subcontinent the bhakti movement (the reforming Hindu movement preaching religious devotion as a means of salvation, often adduced as the Hindu equivalent of Christianity's Protestant Reformation) produced a comparable literary flowering. The roots of ghazal can be traced to what in Western terms would be pre-mediaeval Persia, for by the seventh century the art and conventions of ghazal as a concept were well established. Like many Arabic and Persian literary forms, its superficial semantic meaning can be a veil. It customarily concentrates on love poetry in all its senses: sacred-profane, mystical and spiritual; during the 20th-century ghazals (songs in ghazal form) embraced political and ethical subject matter, and therefore became the well from which poets such as Ghalib, Mir and Faiz Ahmad Faiz would draw inspiration. Parallel with these developments (and they did not spring fully formed in this century) has been the adoption of the ghazal form by other linguistic groups, by poets writing in Gujarati, Hindi, Pashto, Punjabi and Sindhi. However, in a place which sets a premium on the recognition of and respect for antiquity, the ghazal form is astonishingly robust, relevant and adaptable, and it also has profoundly inspired the popular and poetic music of other regions. Qasidah in the Indonesian region owes much to the poetic and musical sensibilities of ghazal. Imagining it to be some rarefied, allegorical exercise in intellectualism is to misunderstand profoundly its potency as a vibrant musical form. It attunes a present-day audience with the old days. Thus many songs draw upon the famous love story of Majnun and Laila (the Middle Eastern equivalent of Romeo and Juliet in cultural terms, and a tale that inspired Eric Clapton and Richard Thompson alike), but they reinterpret that theme in a way which reinforces both the tale's timelessness and contemporary significance. Many major popular and light classical Indian vocalists have performed in this genre, including Lata Mangeshkar, Jagjit and Chitra Singh, Asha Bhosle, Ghulam Ali and Talat Aziz; while up- and-coming vocalists such as Penaaz Masani, Najma Akhtar, Mitalee and Bhupinder Singh and Shankar Das Gupta have all drawn on it. That the form has spawned an Indian film counterpart should be taken as understood; filmi (Indian film music) devours any cultural form with a fire-like hunger. Dil Padosi Hai on EMI India from the team of music director Rahul Dev Burman, vocalist Asha Bhosle and lyricist Gulzar is typical of this trait. Intellectuals may rail that the Indian film industry's appropriation of such a venerable tradition is a debasement, but it could equally be argued ghazal is a form that has weathered so many cultural changes that cinema is but another, and that its robustness is unassailable. Jagjit Singh (b 8 February 1941, d 10 October 2011) was called "Ghazal King"; he was criticised by purists, but had his own standards in his film music career, refusing to sing anything he did not consider worthy. |