25 SONGS BY MEHDI HASSAN:
Mehdi Hassan
By Ustad Ghulam Haider Khan
His first important ghazal was a Mirza Ghalib number. The words were ‘Arz-e-niaz-e-ishq ke qabil nahi raha’. It won him a band of followers, who expressed their delight in letters of appreciation they sent to the radio station. The idea that Mehdi Hassan’s voice was particularly suited to the ghazal form had begun to take hold in the popular imagination.
Some people have pointed out that the post-Partition roster of towering Pakistani singers is lacking in testosterone. This is partly true – no male voice has dominated the musical scene here for too long a period of time. (The only male voice that comes to mind in this regard is that of the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, and even he was famous in the national and eventually global sense for only the last decade of his life.) But that is because the popular music scene – and I mean the whole of it, from filmi geet to folk tune to ghazal – was dominated for a good 50 years by that tough old bird called Noor Jahan, who insisted on hogging the limelight and was known on occasion to have even threatened her competitors with physical violence if they didn’t get out of her way. Most of these hapless competitors were women, of course; but in the course of her singing career the feisty Madame came across one male voice that even she couldn’t put down or snuff out. And this was the voice of Mehdi Hassan. In her televised interviews she claims to have heard him only in the 60s (and this is part of a characteristically embellished Noor Jahan anecdote that comes complete with glamorous innuendo): she was once driving around (late at night, of course) in Lahore with her then-husband Ejaz, and while passing a khokha she heard the words ‘Yeh dhuaan sa kahan se uthta hai’. “Stop the car!” she claims to have told Ejaz, who then indeed stopped it so that Madame could listen to the enigmatic male voice that was singing that particular ghazal.
But the truth is probably different. Noor Jehan knew of Mehdi Hassan and even recorded a song with him in 1958 for the film Qaidi. This was ‘Aik dewaney ne iss dil ka kaha maan liya’ and it was an instant hit. Soon after this success, Mehdi sang for the film Susraal. The song was ‘Jis ne mere dil ko dard diya’. It was composed by the talented Hasan Latif. This was the song that made Mehdi Hassan a big name in the world of Pakistani music: after this he never looked back.