Talat Mahmood

Talat was born in Lucknow in 1924 into a conservative family that did not approve of music as a profession. He studied at the Marris College of Music (now the Bhatkhande institute) and began singing ghazals on All India Radio Lucknow at sixteen. HMV recorded him from 1941; his 1944 non-film ghazal Tasveer Teri Dil Mera Behla Na Sakegi sold in numbers that made him a name before he had sung for a single film.

He went to Calcutta and sang in Bengali films under the name Tapan Kumar, acted in a few, and came to Bombay in 1949. Anil Biswas gave him Ae Dil Mujhe Aisi Jagah Le Chal in Arzoo (1950) for Dilip Kumar, and the tremor in his voice, which other composers had told him to suppress, became his trademark. Over the next decade he sang for Naushad (Babul), Shankar-Jaikishan (Daag, Patita), S.D. Burman (Taxi Driver, Devdas, Sujata), Madan Mohan, Ghulam Mohammed and Khayyam (Footpath).

He was handsome and the studios cast him as a leading man — Dil-e-Nadaan, Waris, Sone Ki Chidiya with Nutan, Ek Gaon Ki Kahani with Mala Sinha — and he later said that acting cost him singing assignments, since composers thought of him as a star rather than a playback voice. By the early 1960s Rafi and then Kishore had taken the leading men, and the soft Talat style went out of fashion; Jahan Ara (1964), for Madan Mohan, is usually counted as his last great film score.

He turned to the concert stage and the non-film ghazal, which had never left him, and toured the world from the 1950s onward — he was one of the first Indian singers to give concerts abroad, in East Africa, the West Indies, Britain and America. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1992. He died in Bombay in 1998 at seventy-four.

Talat's voice is small, soft and intimate, with a natural vibrato — the famous tremor — that gave every line a sense of being held back. He sang quietly, close to the microphone, with Urdu diction of a Lucknow precision, and never forced a note. That is why he was unmatched in the slow ghazal and useless for the shouted hero's song; composers who understood this — Anil Biswas, Madan Mohan, Khayyam, Sajjad Hussain — gave him some of the most delicately written songs of the 1950s.