One can’t think of many poems which have such never ending appeal. If it would not have been for his rendition of ‘ Baat niklegi tou phir door talak jayegi’ - written by a not-so-well-known poet from Jalandhar at the time, Sudharshan Faakir - many poetry-enthusiasts, more in Pakistan than India, would not have even heard his name.

Jagjit-Chitra, the most popular singing couple - Photograph courtesy HarperCollins Publishers Indiaįor his part, Jagjit Singh chose simpler poems and rendered them with intense feelings.

They started singing ghazals, most of which were composed by themselves. But they did not bask in reflected glory for a long time. Another point which merits mention is that despite the disadvantage of singing in what was not their first language, the two singers’ pronunciation of Urdu words was just as flawless as their command over the ragas that they chose to base their compositions on.Ĭoincidentally, both of them started their careers by singing film songs of established singers – Mehdi Hasan chose velvety-voiced Talat Mehmood, while Jagjit opted for a highly versatile Mohammed Rafi on stage. Like Mehdi Hasan, whom he called his mentor, Jagjit was totally immersed in the poems he sang and internalised his rendition. In India – the land of its birth – Urdu has, over the last few decades, been sidelined as the language of Muslims (no one community can be held be responsible for this), but full marks to film music and no less to ghazal singers from both sides of the Wagah border, for its admirers are growing despite the overwhelming majority’s unfamiliarity with its traditional script. In the last seventy years or so, if there has been one singer after Begum Akhtar and Mehdi Hasan to have placed the ghazal gayeki on a firm footing, he is none other than Jagjit Singh.

Jagjit singh top songs