Mohammed Rafi

Rafi was born in 1924 in Kotla Sultan Singh, a village near Amritsar, into a family with no connection to music. The story told in his family is that as a boy he followed a wandering fakir through the lanes of the village, imitating his singing, and that this is where people first noticed the voice. The family moved to Lahore, where his elder brother ran a barber shop, and it was there that he began formal training — under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, and later with Pandit Jiwan Lal Mattoo and Ghulam Ali Khan of the Patiala gharana.

His first public break came in Lahore in 1937, when the singer K.L. Saigal's microphone failed at a concert and the thirteen-year-old Rafi was allowed to sing to the restless crowd. By the early 1940s he was singing on All India Radio Lahore, and in 1944 the composer Shyam Sunder gave him his first film song, a Punjabi duet for the film Gul Baloch. He reached Bombay the same year, recommended to Naushad, and his first Hindi film songs followed — small parts in Pehle Aap (1944) and a line in Saigal's chorus in Shahjehan (1946).

The breakthrough was Naushad's score for Baiju Bawra in 1952. The songs O Duniya Ke Rakhwale and Man Tadpat Hari Darshan Ko Aaj showed that this young singer could carry full classical compositions with a power that reached the back of a cinema hall, and from that point he was Naushad's first choice. Through the 1950s he became the voice of Dilip Kumar, of Dev Anand in his early films, and of Guru Dutt — the songs of Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), written by Sahir and composed by S.D. Burman, are among the most quoted in the history of Hindi film.

The 1960s belonged to him almost completely. He sang for Shammi Kapoor in a loud, swinging style that was the opposite of his Guru Dutt work; for Rajendra Kumar in the long romantic melodies of Shankar-Jaikishan; for Dharmendra, Joy Mukherjee, Biswajeet, Manoj Kumar and Sunil Dutt. He won his first Filmfare Award in 1960 for Chaudhvin Ka Chand, and the National Award in 1967 for Babul Ki Duayen Leti Ja from Neel Kamal. In 1965 the Government of India gave him the Padma Shri. He was also, by then, the regular male voice of the Binaca Geetmala year-end lists.

When Kishore Kumar's voice came to dominate the early 1970s after Aradhana, Rafi's work thinned for a few years. He came back strongly in the second half of the decade — Kya Hua Tera Wada from Hum Kisise Kum Naheen won him both a Filmfare and a National Award in 1977, and the films of Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Rishi Kapoor's early career (Sargam, Amar Akbar Anthony, Karz) kept him busy until the end. He was recording until days before his death. He died of a heart attack on 31 July 1980, and his funeral procession in Bombay, in heavy monsoon rain, is remembered as one of the largest the city had seen.

Rafi was known inside the industry as a quiet, devout, generous man who sang for new composers without charging them and who rarely spoke about his own work. He is estimated to have recorded between five and seven thousand songs in Hindi and Urdu, plus Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and a handful in English. Singers who came after him — Shabbir Kumar, Mohammed Aziz, Anwar, Sonu Nigam — built the early part of their careers on how closely they could sound like him.

What set Rafi apart was control at both extremes. He could whisper a ghazal line almost without breath, as in Chaudhvin Ka Chand or Dil Ke Jharokhe Mein, and in the next recording hit the top of his range at full volume for a Shammi Kapoor number, with no sign of strain. His classical training showed in the long taans of Madhuban Mein Radhika Nache Re and the devotional pieces for Naushad, while his comic timing in the Johnny Walker songs — Sar Jo Tera Chakraye, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil — came from an actor's ear for character. Composers said he sang the actor, not just the tune: his Dilip Kumar and his Shammi Kapoor sound like different men.