New Delhi: My friend Omkar Bhattacharya, a director with Print, has a hotline to Kishore Kumar, sorry, Amit Kumar. And he knows a lot about the family. Once I asked Bhattacharya if he could get Amit Kumar for a session on Kishore Kumar for our conversational platform Half Pencil. “It will take a whole week, maybe a fortnight,” was Bhattacharya’s quick reply. I think we had the conversation some years ago.
Now I am landed with the most definitive biography of the creative genius, penned by Anirudha Bhattacharjee and Parthiv Dhar from the home of Harper Collins. And it is very, very tough to scan up the legend. Kishore Kumar was everything the world had heard about him. He was a genius who had an amazing command over playback singing, grew up listening to the songs of KL Saigal and made yodeling look easy after he picked up the technique from listening to the records of Tex Morton and Jimmie Rodgers. And he was almost anything and everything you need to be in the showbiz. And he was ahead of his time, says the brilliantly-researched book.
A book about Kishore has to be anecdotal and I found the tome peppered with many such delightful stuff. I remember the ones I heard: Kishore once sat in a small boat in a pond next to his home and asked a pesky reporter to sit on the ghat and ask questions. And once he almost bit off a journalist’s ear for writing nonsense against him. But the book has many more.
Kishore’s meteoric rise came with the release of Shakti Samanta’s Aradhana in 1969. But then, Kishore was popular much before that. The movie, and the songs, and of course the music from SD Burman plugged Rajesh Khanna as the superstar. Each song was crafted meticulously, including the most popular Roop Tera Mastana that almost went to the traditional Bengal boatman way (read bhatiyali) before Kishore rescued it with some clever talk that floored Burman Sr. After Aradhana, it was not a hop-skip-jump life for Kishore, it was a jump-jump-jump life for Kishore. He was unstoppable, on a roll, seen as the voice of the young, and he kept on belting hits after hits, thanks to some soulful music composed by the ever-talented Rahul Dev Burman. The 70s was full of the legendary troika of RD, Khanna and Kishore. Film critics called it one of the finest decades of Indian cinema.
And Kishore rocked throughout. Every time there was a live performance, he would regale the audience with all his memorable songs, the entire atmosphere would be electric. The book makes it clear – in pages after pages, chapter after chapters – why he was immensely talented. He was an incomparable singer, actor, music composer and lyricist rolled into one. Bhattacharjee and Dhar did some solid research, mainly because the subject died over three decades ago and then a biography of Kishore Kumar must generate excitement and curiosity in the same breadth. Kishore died on October 13, a day before the Indian Peacekeeping Forces landed from choppers in a school in Jaffna to contain the marauding LTTE. And then, it was the year of the Reliance ICC World Cup.
So it’s tough to write a book that talks of two phases. One before 1987 and one post 1987. You need to keep both the camps super happy.
Now let’s get back to Kishore, Kishore and Kishore. He was just a maverick, helping people out of the blue, the list including the legendary Satyajit Ray when the master was stuck with low cash while filming Pather Panchali, which was called by Hollywood as the ultimate human document. Kishore sang one song for Ray’s Ghare Baire and he also cut an album of Tagore songs that the hardcore masters of India’s most popular bard called Rabindranather jogakhichuri (Tagore’s terrible mishmash) in a review in Desh, a top Bengali literary magazine. Kishore was down but not out. I read how Kanika Banerjee, considered one of the greatest exponents of Tagore, wrote to Kishore and said she liked the songs. That means That was the spirit of Kishore.
The book explains a lot, leaving out some intricate details of his love life and his marriages. And how did Kishore pick up success to such varying degrees. Surprised? No you should not be. Because Kishore was not just a singer but he was also an actor, director, composer, writer, lyricist and even a producer. And then his four marriages, starting with the very talented Ruma Guha Thakurta and the immensely talented Madhubala. I also wanted to know his innumerable income tax issues and if those were triggered off by Sanjay Gandhi who was miffed with Kishore because he refused to sing for a government show (was it during the Emergency?) and subsequently, his songs were banned on the state-owned All India Radio (AIR). How did he resolve the crisis? And the movies he announced and dropped like rotten mangoes. And the mother of all – if he really had a showdown with the legendary Amitabh Bachchan?
But if you are ready to ignore these very minor issues about the legend, this book is a compulsory reading for all Kishore fans in India and abroad. I reproduce the words of Prince Ravi Verma, Carnatic singer and veena exponent, in the introduction, “Kishore Kumar was a miracle of nature, who was blessed in equal measure, with unbridled energy, complete lack of inhibition, breathtaking versatility, extraordinary range, absolute precision and gut-wrenching emotional intensity, sensitivity and tenderness.”
My former editor, Pritish Nandy has written the foreword and Sromona Chakraborty, vocalist and daughter of Kishore’s first wife Ruma Guha Thakurta wrote the afterword. The writers have divided the book into three broad sections – Bhairav: The Morning, Poorvi: The Afternoon and Kalyan: The Evening, all named after classical ragas, including the sub-sections. The chapters explain in detail why Kishore did what came to his mind. Consider the case of his directorial venture, Door Gagan Ki Chhaon Mein, where he cast his son Amit Kumar without informing his wife Ruma. She was terribly upset, yet attended the premiere held at Bombay’s Metro cinema.
I could go on and on and on. But every review takes a break, like a reader putting a pagemark and waiting to resume the chapters again. Grab a copy, you will be soaked in both love and music.
