Mukesh

Mukesh was born in Delhi in 1923, the sixth of ten children of an engineer. He had no musical training beyond listening to the music teacher who came for his sister, and after school he worked in the Public Works Department. A distant relative, the actor Motilal, heard him sing at a wedding and brought him to Bombay in 1940, arranged lessons with Pandit Jagannath Prasad, and got him a role as actor-singer in Nirdosh (1941).

His first hit as a playback singer was Dil Jalta Hai To Jalne De in Pehli Nazar (1945), composed by Anil Biswas for Motilal — sung so closely in the manner of K.L. Saigal that Saigal himself is said to have asked when he had recorded it. Naushad's Mela and Andaz (1948–49), for Dilip Kumar, moved him out of the Saigal shadow, and Barsaat (1949) began the association that defined his life: Raj Kapoor, Shankar-Jaikishan, and the lyricists Shailendra and Hasrat Jaipuri.

Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955) took that voice across the world — Awaara Hoon was sung in the streets of Moscow, Tehran and Istanbul — and for the next quarter-century every Raj Kapoor film had its Mukesh songs: Anari, Jis Desh Mein Ganga Behti Hai, Sangam, Mera Naam Joker. Raj Kapoor said that Mukesh was his soul and he only the body. He also sang for Manoj Kumar, Sunil Dutt and Feroz Khan, and the composers Kalyanji-Anandji, Salil Chowdhury and Roshan gave him some of his best songs outside the Kapoor camp.

In the early 1950s he tried producing and acting — Malhar (1951) and Anuraag (1956) — and both failed and left him in debt; he returned to playback full time. He won the National Award for Kai Baar Yunhi Dekha Hai in Rajnigandha (1974) and four Filmfare Awards, the last for Kabhi Kabhie in 1976. He was known in the industry as the gentlest of men, devout and unhurried.

He died on 27 August 1976 in Detroit, of a heart attack, during a concert tour of the United States with Lata Mangeshkar; he had sung the previous evening. Raj Kapoor said he had lost his voice. His son Nitin Mukesh and grandson Neil Nitin Mukesh followed him into films.

Mukesh's voice sits in a narrow middle range, with a slight nasal tone and an audible catch that composers used for pathos. He did not improvise and rarely ornamented; what he had was tune, diction and a kind of truthfulness — the sense that he meant each line — and a way of making a simple melody sound inevitable. Shailendra's plain-spoken lyrics and Shankar-Jaikishan's broad tunes suited him exactly. His happy songs are rarer than his sad ones, but Mera Joota Hai Japani shows he could carry the Chaplin side of Raj Kapoor as well as the tears.