Pankaj Udhas (1951-2024): Soul Singer

IN A NEWSPAPER INTERVIEW a few years ago, when asked about the state of ghazal in India, Pankaj Udhas said it was ailing. There was no money in it because the days of cassettes and CDs that once drove the market were over. The odd single that went viral didn’t mean much. All of this culminated in young singers with talent giving the artform a wide berth. So was ghazal on its way to extinction? He said it had survived for centuries and that wasn’t going to change. Ghazal has its periodic rejuve­nation and when Udhas was beginning his musical journey, he was the right voice at the right time. The 1980s were when ghazal singers became musical stars, finding a place beside Bollywood playback singers. Udhas, who died on Monday, February 26, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 72, was one of the luminaries of that universe.

It cut both ways. If the moment was ripe for him, he also contributed to making ghazal popular. He had worked his way up, both in terms of deciding that this was the form he would focus on and then becoming its ambassador by dint of his own success. Udhas was born into a zamindar family in Gujarat. His father, a government employee, was musically inclined, an exponent of the dilruba, a stringed instrument that resembled a leaner version of the sitar but one that also had a bow. He had three sons and they all imbibed his love for music. He sent all of them to the Sangeet Natya Academy in Rajkot.

The eldest, Manhar Udhas, came to Bollywood and found a footing there in the 1970s. Pankaj Udhas started off with the tabla at the academy and then moved to vocals. The interest and focus on ghazals came later as the 1980s came calling and he firmly got on that train. He brought to his ghazals a simplicity that made his songs appealing to a wider audience. To criticism of being experimental with the form, his reply was that all music does that, even Hindustani. In an interview in 2009 to radioandmusic.com, he would say: “When I started singing in the 1980s, I resolved to make this folk music as popular as possible. I experimented in the use of instruments, musical compositions, mode of style and other areas. Over the years, many have appreciated my efforts for making the genre popular but also have criticised me on the basis of ‘pure and impure’ ghazal, but have themselves failed to distinguish between the two.” His audience loved it. Soon, albums were selling in the lakhs and he was getting invitations to perform not just in India but abroad as well.

It was 1986 that marked a turning point in his career. That was the year the movie Naam was released and one of its songs, ‘Chitthi aayi hai’ became a chartbuster. In the film, Udhas is pictured singing it on stage and when the movie became a huge hit (among other things, reviving the career of Sanjay Dutt), and the song itself a paean to the nation as home for those settled abroad, he became the voice of ghazal in India. He was asked not to sing it before the film was released but couldn’t resist doing so at a performance in New York. In the silence once the song ended, he thought it had bombed but then the applause began and it just wouldn’t stop. Decades later, he was still being requested to sing it during performances and gleefully obliged.

Even though by the end of his life, Udhas had come out with around 50 albums, he remained a performer. He drew vitality from singing live before an audience, soothing them with that layer of velvet his voice lent to renditions on love—yearned for, found, lost, and remembered. It was also why the pandemic and lockdown hit him hard. It taxed him psychologically, to the extent that he had to find his confidence to perform again. And then came cancer and one of the worst—that of the pancreas. His death is a loss to Indian music but there will be lonely people sitting through melancholic evenings with a drink in hand and his songs for solace for a long, long time.

Chitthi aayi haighazalNaamPankaj Udhassinger