Mohammed Rafi’s gift was that he had no voice of his own, and it cost him about what you would expect
In 1952 a film called Baiju Bawra put out a Krishna bhajan that people still play in temples.
Man Tarpat Hari Darshan Ko Aaj is set in raag Malkauns, which is about as solemn as Hindustani music gets, and it is a song of pure longing to see God. The words were written by Shakeel Badayuni. The tune was composed by Naushad. The voice belongs to Mohammed Rafi. All three were Muslims, and Naushad is said to have asked the musicians to bathe before coming to the session, out of respect for what they were recording.
Nobody involved appears to have treated this as a statement. It was a job, and they did it properly, which is a more durable version of the thing India argues about than most of the arguing.
Rafi singing for Dilip Kumar is careful and held back. Rafi singing for Shammi Kapoor yelps and skids around the beat. Rafi singing for Johnny Walker is doing comedy, with timing. Rafi singing for Guru Dutt sounds like a man who has given up. These are not one singer’s interpretations of different songs. They are different men.
The same flexibility ran across forms, not just faces. He recorded bhajans, qawwalis, ghazals, shabads and naats over a career that started in 1944, and sounded like a native of each of them rather than a visitor.
Shammi Kapoor said flatly that Rafi was his voice, and audiences agreed, which is a strange thing to be able to say about somebody whose face nobody in the cinema was looking at.
A man who does not put himself into the work tends not to claim it either.
His position on money followed directly from that. The producer pays a fee for a song, the singer sings it, and after that the song is not the singer’s business. He held that line even when it was argued with, and it is the reason he and Lata Mangeshkar did not record together between 1963 and 1967. He charged modestly by the standards of his standing and sang for people who could not really pay.
It was consistent, and it was expensive. He gave away a claim on the most valuable catalogue of male vocals in the country because he did not think of it as his.
1969
Then Aradhana came out, and Kishore Kumar took the decade.
The new sound wanted personality, and Kishore had an enormous one. Rafi’s work fell away sharply in the early 1970s. It is the obvious risk of a career built on self-effacement: a singer with no persona can be replaced by a singer who is nothing but persona, and the industry will not notice what it has swapped.
He came back in 1977 with Kya Hua Tera Vaada, which won him the National Film Award, twenty-five years after the bhajan. He had six Filmfare awards and the Padma Shri by then, and had not changed his method at all.
31 July 1980
He died of a heart attack at fifty-five, a teetotaller and a non-smoker.
He had been in a studio days earlier, recording. What followed was one of the largest funeral processions Bombay had ever put on for anybody, in the middle of the monsoon, for a man most of the mourners had never seen perform.
They knew the voice. They had heard it coming out of thirty different faces for thirty years and had never once needed to be told whose it was.
What he left
The catalogue is enormous and it is not the interesting part.
What is interesting is that he built a career on the deliberate removal of himself, in an industry that runs on the opposite, and it worked for three decades. He is not remembered as a personality because he refused to become one.
There is a version of this story that turns him into a symbol, and he does not need it. He was a professional with an unusual amount of self-control, working in a business that rewards the opposite, and he stayed at it for thirty-six years.
Man Tarpat is still played in temples by people who could not tell you who sang it. He would probably have thought that was the correct outcome.
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