Naushad

Naushad Ali was born on December 25, 1919, in Lucknow, then part of the United Provinces of British India, into a family with no professional connection to music ^[1]. His father, Wahid Ali, worked as a munshi, a court clerk, and regarded a musical career as disreputable. The boy's fascination began elsewhere: at silent film screenings in Lucknow, where he watched the musicians who accompanied the pictures live and lingered afterward to study their instruments ^[2].

Lucknow in the 1920s remained a centre of Hindustani classical and light classical music, and the young Naushad absorbed what he could from the city's ustads. He took lessons from local teachers, repaired harmoniums at an instrument shop in exchange for practice time, and joined amateur theatrical companies that toured the region ^[2]. His father opposed all of it. Accounts of Naushad's youth describe an ultimatum at home, music or family, and the teenager chose music.

In 1937, still in his late teens, he left Lucknow for Bombay with little money and no contacts in the film industry ^[1]. The move was a gamble typical of thousands who arrived in the city during the first decade of Indian sound cinema, but few of them would leave a mark as deep as his.

Bombay was unsentimental to newcomers. Naushad spent his early months sleeping on footpaths, a detail he recalled often in later interviews, including the observation that his eventual success came within sight of the same pavement opposite Broadway cinema where he had once slept ^[2]. He found work as a pianist and assistant in film orchestras, serving under established composers including Ustad Jhande Khan and Khemchand Prakash, from whom he learned orchestration and the practical craft of recording ^[3].

His first independent assignment came with Prem Nagar in 1940 ^[1]. The early films earned him steady work rather than fame, but that changed decisively with Rattan in 1944. The film's songs, several sung by Zohrabai Ambalewali and Amirbai Karnataki, became enormous popular successes, and the soundtrack's earnings reportedly far exceeded the film's production cost ^[3]. Rattan made Naushad one of the most sought-after names in the industry while he was still in his mid twenties.

For anyone asking who was Naushad at the close of the 1940s, the answer was already clear: the composer producers queued for. Films such as Anmol Ghadi (1946), with songs performed by Noor Jehan, and Andaz (1949), which paired his melodies with the voices of Mohammed Rafi and Lata Mangeshkar for stars Dilip Kumar and Raj Kapoor, confirmed his position at the top of the profession ^[4]. He was known for demanding long rehearsal periods and for insisting on control over which singers voiced his tunes, habits that set him apart in a fast-moving industry.

The 1950s produced the work on which any Naushad biography must rest. Baiju Bawra (1952) was his manifesto: a film built around classical music itself, with songs composed in specific ragas and a climactic sequence featuring the voice of the great vocalist Ustad Amir Khan and D. V. Paluskar ^[3]. The score demonstrated that raga-based music could dominate the popular charts, and songs such as "O Duniya Ke Rakhwale," sung by Mohammed Rafi, pushed the singer to the upper reaches of his range. For Baiju Bawra, Naushad received the first Filmfare Award ever given for Best Music Director, presented in 1954 ^[4].

Mother India (1957), Mehboob Khan's epic that became India's first submission to the Academy Awards, carried a Naushad score woven from folk melodies of rural North India ^[4]. Three years later came Mughal-e-Azam (1960), K. Asif's monumental production about Emperor Akbar and the dancer Anarkali. Naushad's music for the film, including "Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya" sung by Lata Mangeshkar and classical pieces recorded with Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, is often cited among the finest achievements in Indian film music ^[3]. Persuading Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, who disdained film work, to sing for the picture was itself considered a coup.

Among the most repeated Naushad facts is the closeness of his partnership with Mohammed Rafi, whose career he did much to build, and his long association with the actor Dilip Kumar, for whose films (Deedar, Aan, Uran Khatola, Kohinoor, Gunga Jumna, Ram Aur Shyam) he supplied a string of celebrated scores ^[4]. He also expanded the physical scale of film music in India, using large orchestras and, for the song "Aan" recordings of the early 1950s, ensembles reported at around one hundred musicians ^[2]. Beyond composing, he tried his hand at production, backing films such as Uran Khatola (1955) and Malik (1958), and he contributed to story and screenplay work on occasion, including for the film Babul's banner productions ^[1].

Naushad's signature was the marriage of Hindustani classical structure with the accessibility of the film song. He composed extensively in ragas, favouring forms rooted in the Purab and Awadhi traditions of his native region, and he drew freely on the folk music of Uttar Pradesh: chaiti, kajri, and the boatmen's songs that surface in scores like Mother India and Gunga Jumna ^[3]. Critics noted that even his simplest melodies carried a classical grammar underneath.

He was equally a moderniser of the recording studio. Naushad was among the early Hindi film composers to separate the recording of voice and orchestra, to use sound mixing techniques for effects such as the echo in "Aayega Aanewala" era productions of his peers, and to write full western-style notation for his orchestras ^[2]. He treated song situations as dramatic problems: the melody had to advance the story, not decorate it, a conviction he repeated in interviews throughout his life.

His output was deliberately small by industry standards. Across some sixty-five years he scored fewer than seventy films, at a time when rivals accepted dozens of assignments simultaneously ^[4]. The scarcity was strategy. He argued that music composed in haste died in haste, and the durability of his catalogue has largely borne the claim out.

Naushad married in the early 1940s and raised a large family in Bombay; the household eventually included several sons and daughters ^[2]. He remained a practising Muslim throughout his life and was known in the industry for personal austerity, an old-world Lucknawi courtesy, and a devotion to Urdu poetry. He wrote verse himself, publishing a collection of his poetry under the title Aathwan Sur (The Eighth Note) ^[1]. Fishing was his favourite recreation, and colleagues recalled him spending long mornings at Bombay's shoreline with rod and line.

The arrival of new musical fashions in the 1970s, western rhythms, electronic instruments, and the rise of composers such as R. D. Burman, pushed Naushad toward the margins of the industry he had once ruled. His assignments thinned, though the quality of scores like Pakeezah (1972), where he composed the background music after the death of Ghulam Mohammed, kept his reputation intact ^[3]. Recognition of a different kind followed: the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Indian cinema's highest honour, in 1981, and the Padma Bhushan, one of India's senior civilian awards, in 1992 ^[4].

He never formally retired. In 2005, at the age of eighty-five, he composed the songs for Akbar Khan's Taj Mahal: An Eternal Love Story, his final film score ^[4]. Naushad died in Mumbai on May 5, 2006, after a period of declining health, and was buried at the Juhu Muslim cemetery. Tributes came from across Indian public life, and obituaries in the international press described him as the man who gave Hindi film music its classical spine ^[5].

Naushad's achievements reshaped what an Indian film song could be. By proving with Rattan and Baiju Bawra that classically grounded music could sell, he opened the door for a generation of composers to treat the film song as serious musical work rather than filler ^[3]. Singers he championed, above all Mohammed Rafi, and the vocal standards he enforced in rehearsal became benchmarks for the playback tradition that still defines Indian cinema.

His scores continue to circulate far beyond their films. "Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya" returned to theatres with the 2004 colourised re-release of Mughal-e-Azam, introducing his work to audiences born decades after the original recording sessions ^[5]. Scholars of Indian film music treat his career as the central case study of the classical-popular synthesis, and Raju Bharatan's full-length study Naushadnama examined both the music and the exacting man behind it ^[6].

Institutions have kept his name in public view. A road in Mumbai's Bandra district was named for him, the Uttar Pradesh government instituted honours in his memory, and his native Lucknow claims him as one of its most famous modern sons ^[4]. For students who search for a Naushad biography today, the essential point is simple: over six decades and a comparatively small body of films, he set the standard by which Hindi film composition is still measured.