Radio
God’s award is remixes!
Hooked to reality TV and remixes of her songs 40 years after she first sang them, legendary singer Shamshad Begum is delighted with life at 89
SHE’S hooked on to youngsters crooning her songs made unrecognisable on reality TV, but she has no angst for the past. Shamshad Begum at 89 is as good a sport as she was as the little girl of 16, who began her career before even radio was invented! “Over 60 per cent of my songs have been remixed. That’s what I read somewhere recently,” she smiles unguardedly. “What fun, I retired more than 20 years ago. These songs I sang 20 years before I retired. Imagine that! If they are still being sung today, see how popular they must be,” she says excitedly. “I like that boy — Shankar Mahadevan. But I sang ‘breathlessly’ long before he did,” she smiles.
Begum has watched the industry start and grow from pre-Partition, with the Jenaphone Gramophone Company. “I look at how all these people look, so smart. I never bothered about how I looked because I was never the one facing the camera,” she says. “Today, playback singers are as much on TV as the actors.” Is that why she never allowed herself to be photographed? “I was a Muslim girl from Lahore. It was bad enough that I was going out of the house to work at all,” she explains. She had the support of her chacha, “to have been photographed would have added insult to injury, so I never allowed it,” she says.
“Then Partition happened when I was in Mumbai, and I never saw my family again. So I maintained it as a mark of respect for my father.” She adds, “I wanted to work, and I wouldn’t let anyone stop me. It is important for young girls to be independent, to have their own dreams,” she adds gently. “I didn’t rebel, argue or fight, but in return I kept my head in my work.”
She attributes her entire life and career to the grace of God. “Every time circumstance threw an obstacle in my path, God created a way around it for me. When the gramophone business was not profitable, the radio was invented. Because of the radio, my voice reached people who gave me my opportunities.” She has seen the best of the rest come and go.
“Once this boy in the orchestra sat near my feet and was telling me how depressed he was. His older brother was accomplished, and he was worried he would never be anybody. I told him ‘You will be greater than all of them put together’. I did not rem e m b e r this,” she s m i l e s . “But Kishore Kumar came back to me when he was famous, and told me ‘You may have forgotten, but I never did’,” she says. Similarly, Madan Mohan was in the orchestra, she recollects, “but after he became a music director, he expected me to salaam him, which I wouldn’t do. So he never gave me work.”
She recollects Raj Kapoor’s debut. “Someone introduced him saying ‘This is Prithviraj Kapoor’s son.’ So I met him. He said he wanted to do his first film and could I sing. Those days, I was recording back to back, so I told him, come to my house in my lunch break. Everyday at lunch, Raj Kapoor would come with Shankar (of Jaikishen fame), on the tabla and Ram Ganguly, the music director. ”
Never having received an award doesn’t hurt her, but it does to those who love her, like doting daughter Usha Ratra. Shamshad Begum concludes, “I have never asked anyone but God for anything. why would I ask mere mortals for anything? I did what I had to, they did what they had to. I have no patience for lobbies. His award is that children are singing my remixes 40 years later!”
Shamshad Begum
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Music forms a part of me again It gives Shape to my faceless Expressions...To my Thoughts. {Alochana}
November 4, 2006