K.L. Saigal

Saigal was born in Jammu in 1904, the son of a tehsildar in the service of the Maharaja. He had no formal training to speak of — a little from a Sufi, the rest from listening — and worked as a railway timekeeper and a typewriter salesman for Remington, travelling the Punjab and singing where he could. In Calcutta the composer R.C. Boral heard him and brought him to B.N. Sircar's New Theatres in 1932.

Puran Bhagat and Chandidas (1933–34) made him known; P.C. Barua's Devdas (1935), in which he played the drinking, dying hero, made him the biggest star in the country, and the songs Balam Aaye Baso Mere Man Mein and Dukh Ke Ab Din Beetat Nahin were sung across north India. At New Theatres he worked with Boral, Pankaj Mullick and Timir Baran, learnt Bengali, acted in Bengali films and recorded Rabindrasangeet with Tagore's approval. Street Singer (1938), with Babul Mora sung live on camera as he walked through the streets, is the performance most often shown today.

He moved to Bombay in 1941 to work for Ranjit Movietone: Bhakta Surdas, Tansen (1943) with Khemchand Prakash's score, and Shahjehan (1946), for which Naushad composed Jab Dil Hi Toot Gaya — Saigal asked that it be played at his funeral, and it was. By then he was drinking heavily and his health was failing; Parwana (1947) was released after his death.

He died in Jalandhar in January 1947 at forty-two. His records, re-issued on every format since, kept him in circulation for eighty years; Radio Ceylon played a Saigal song at the close of its morning programme every day for decades.

Saigal sang in a rich, slightly nasal baritone with a natural resonance that needed no amplification, and he sang simply — the words first, a few ornaments where the raag asked for them, and a sense of unforced sadness that suited the tragic heroes he played. Because the actor and the singer were the same man, his songs have an intimacy that playback later lost. Everything that followed in male Hindi film singing starts from him.