ਜਗਜੀਤ ਸਿੰਘਜਗਜੀਤ ਸਿੰਘ

Jagjit Singh (born Jagmohan Singh Dhiman, 8 February 1941 to 10 October 2011) was an Indian singer and composer who took the ghazal out of the courts and concert halls of connoisseurs and made it the music of ordinary homes. With his wife Chitra Singh, he formed the first successful husband and wife duo in recorded Indian music, and his deep, unhurried voice became the sound of the ghazal for two generations.

A Punjabi childhood between Rajasthan and Punjab

He was born in Sri Ganganagar, then in Bikaner State in British India and now in Rajasthan, into a Namdhari Sikh Punjabi family. His father, Sardar Amar Singh Dhiman, was a surveyor with the Public Works Department who came from Dalla village in Ropar district of Punjab. The family hoped the boy might become an engineer or a government officer, but his father also recognised the child's gift and had him trained in music.

Singh was educated at Khalsa High School and Government College in Sri Ganganagar and took an arts degree from DAV College, Jalandhar, where his professional career began in 1961 with singing and composing work at All India Radio's Jalandhar station. He later completed a postgraduate degree in history from Kurukshetra University. His teachers were Pandit Chagan Lal Sharma, a visually impaired master of Hindustani classical music, and Ustad Jamal Khan of the Maihar gharana, who trained him in khayal, dhrupad, thumri and the other classical forms. That grounding explains why, however modern his arrangements became, the singing always rested on classical discipline.

Bombay, struggle and Chitra

In March 1965, without telling his family, Singh left for Bombay to try his luck in the Hindi film industry. Work came slowly: advertising jingles first, then small playback assignments. In 1967 he met the Bengali singer Chitra Dutta, and they married in December 1969. After their son Vivek was born, the two began performing as a duo, singing the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib and other poets to audiences that were still small.

The ghazal world they entered was dominated by established names, many of them from Pakistan. The Singhs' answer was to change the form itself: simpler poems, simpler tunes, and modern instrumentation, so that the words reached listeners who had never studied Urdu poetry. Jagjit put it plainly himself: he was determined to polish up the genre and make it acceptable to modern tastes.

The Unforgettable and the ghazal revival

The breakthrough came in 1977 with The Unforgettable, the couple's first LP. Its song Baat Niklegi turned them into stars almost overnight, and the album is still described as a before and after moment in Indian popular music. Through the late 1970s and 1980s the duo recorded a stream of albums, among them Shiv Kumar Batalvi: Birha da Sultan (1978), which carried the Punjabi poet's verses to a vast audience, Live in Concert at Wembley (1979), and The Latest, whose Woh Kagaz ki Kashti, Woh Baarish ka Paani became one of the most loved ghazals ever recorded.

Film and television widened the reach further. Singh sang and composed for Prem Geet (1981), Arth (1982) and Saath Saath (1982), films whose songs, Tum Itna Jo Muskura Rahe Ho, Jhuki Jhuki Si Nazar and Tum Ko Dekha To Yeh Khayal Aaya, entered the permanent repertoire. His music for the television serial Mirza Ghalib (1988) is credited with reviving popular interest in Ghalib himself. His 1987 album Beyond Time was the first digitally recorded release in India. Across a career of five decades he sang in Hindi and Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Nepali, Gujarati and Sindhi, and his catalogue runs to more than eighty albums.

Loss, and singing on alone

In 1990 the couple's only son, Vivek, died in a road accident at the age of twenty. The joint performances ended: Chitra, unable to sing after the loss, withdrew from public life, and Jagjit too fell into deep depression before returning slowly to solo work. His later singing carried that grief openly, and audiences heard it in songs such as Chithhi Na Koyi Sandesh. He went on to record Sajda with Lata Mangeshkar and two albums of the poetry of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Nayi Disha (1999) and Samvedna (2002), becoming the only singer to compose and record a serving prime minister's poems. In May 2007 he sang Bahadur Shah Zafar's Lagta Nahin Hai Dil Mera in the Central Hall of Parliament to mark 150 years since the revolt of 1857.

Why is Jagjit Singh called the Ghazal King?

He earned the title because he changed who the ghazal belonged to. Before him it was an elite, semi classical art guarded by a few masters; he kept its poetry and emotional depth but simplified the composition, put the words first, a style critics call bol pradhan, and added western instruments beside the tabla and harmonium. The result was critical respect and mass popularity at the same time, a combination no ghazal singer before or since has matched at his scale.

Honours followed the work: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1998 for popularising Ghalib, the Padma Bhushan in 2003, and an honorary doctorate from Kurukshetra University. He also gave time and money to causes including Bombay Hospital, CRY and Save the Children, and spoke out, alongside Ravi Shankar and others, about the neglect of India's folk artists. Singh marked his seventieth birthday in February 2011 by planning seventy concerts around the world. On 23 September 2011, hours before he was to perform in Mumbai with Ghulam Ali, he suffered a brain haemorrhage. He died on 10 October 2011 at Lilavati Hospital, Mumbai, and was cremated at Chandanwadi. Rajasthan gave him its highest civilian honour, the Rajasthan Ratna, posthumously in 2012, and India Post issued stamps in his honour in 2014. The biography Beyond Time and the documentary Kaagaz Ki Kashti now carry his story to new listeners.