Pankaj Udhas, Bollywood singer and Maestro of the Ghazal, dies at the age of 72

Pankaj Udhas, a singer from India whose soulful renditions of ghazals, or lyrical love songs, were a cornerstone of many Bollywood films over his decades-long career, died Monday in Mumbai. He was 72.

His death was announced on social media by his daughter Nayaab Udhas. She did not specify the cause, saying only that he had died after a long illness.

Mr. Udhas moved generations of people in India and the Indian diaspora by singing ghazals, the lyric poems that have been written for centuries in Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish and other languages. He also worked as a playback singer, the term for a singer who recorded songs off-screen so actors could lip-sync.

Mr. Udhas became a fixture in the Indian music industry through both his discography of more than 50 albums and the enormous success of the films in which he sang.

But his real passion, he said in a 2018 lecture hosted by Google, was the age-old lyric form.

“My heart was always with ghazals,” he said. “Cinema, even though it was an attraction,” he added, “was never the first choice.”

Padmashri Pankaj Udhas was born on May 17, 1951 in Jetpur, a city in the western Indian state of Gujarat, several Indian news media reported. His father, Keshubhai Udhas, played the dilruba, a traditional Indian stringed instrument. His mother, Jeetuben Udhas, sang. And both his brothers, Manhar and Nirmal, became professional singers.

Mr. Udhas, who was trained in Indian classical music, was inspired not only by his family but also by hearing Begum Akhtar, an Indian singer and actress who popularized the ghazal, on the radio as a child, he said in the 2018 broadcast. interview.

“Her voice and her style really appealed to me,” he said. “That’s when I started following this form of music religiously.”

While studying at St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, he learned to speak Urdu, the South Asian language in which ghazals were often written, from a teacher who had taught his brother Manhar, then a playback singer.

He made his debut in the Indian film industry in 1972 as a playback singer for the film “Kaamna,” he said. The film was not a commercial success. But his popularity as a ghazal singer rose when he released his first cassette in 1979, called ‘Aahat’, which is Hindi for ‘sound’. That year he also met his wife Farida, with whom he married in 1982.

The Hindu Times reported that Mr. Udhas is survived by his wife, his brother and his two daughters, Nayaab and Reva. His daughter Nayaab did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Tuesday.

His career took off in earnest in 1986, when he sang several songs in ‘Naam’, a hit Hindi crime thriller. One of them, ‘Chitthi Aai Hai’ or ‘The Letter Has Arrived’, became one of his most successful songs.

His subsequent albums helped Bollywood fans learn more about the ghazal. The Hindi film industry also became an important platform for poets and singers of this form, at a time when ghazal singers not involved in the film industry were relatively obscure.

From the 1990s onwards, Bollywood tastes changed, turning away from ghazals towards other musical styles, including Indian pop. But in 2006, the Indian government recognized the lasting mark Mr. Udhas had left on the music industry by awarding him one of the country’s top civilian awards, the Padma Shri.

Even as Bollywood left the ghazals, Mr. Udhas continued to tour internationally, including in New Jersey in 2013.

“Music in India today is nothing but Bollywood,” he says told the AVS TV Network during his tour.

“If we get out of this rut,” he added, “then maybe not just ghazal, but there are so many other beautiful genres of music in India could flourish.”