Rahul Dev Burman: A personal reminiscence of a master musician

Mayank Chhaya-

Mayank Chayya

The great sarod maestro and musician Ali Akbar Khan told me once this about Rahul Dev Burman, “Pancham (R D Burman) could pretty much do anything with music. He just lived music.” That was sometime in 1999, at Khan’s music academy in San Rafael, California where I had gone to interview him.

Khan was visibly happy to hear Burman’s name and, in fact, quickly hummed the great composer’s first song “Ghar aya ghir aayi” from the 1961 film ‘Chhote Nawab’ sung brilliantly by Lata Mangeshkar. Khan had a special fondness for Burman because as a child in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the latter learned the sarod under him. “He did not want to make a career as a Sarod player but strengthen his foundation as a music composer,” Khan told me.

Being a son the illustrious Sachin Dev Burman and himself a preternaturally talented musician, Pancham, as he was fondly addressed by his close friends, had his career laid out for him. At some level Burman seems like a figure from another era but at another level he is easily the most current of all Hindi cinema music composers nearly three decades after his death and over six decades after he started his career.

I had the good fortune to spend a couple of hours with Burman at his apartment in the suburb of Khar in Mumbai in 1993. As it turned my interview with him was among his last, barely months before he died on January 4, 1994 at 55.

I vividly remember entering his music room whose floor was covered with wall-to-wall mattresses in spotless white sheets with half a dozen bolsters, also in white covers thrown about casually.

Burman was sitting cross-legged and playing his harmonium. He was singing/humming something he had just composed. He was completely immersed in his composition, moving his head as if he was picking up invisible notes from the ether. His words were dummy, non-sensical even, but the composition was superb. Alas, I cannot replicate it in print.

He signaled me to sit down.

By the time I met him, he was well past his prime and made it a point to tell me that. “I have at least 1000 compositions sitting with me as of now,” he told me, “But no one wants them.”

“For the film industry, my time has passed but all that one needs in this business is one hit,” he said.

As it turned out, Burman was then in the midst of composing for his last film ‘1942: A Love Story’ directed by Vidhu Vinod Chopra, that very hit that would have compelled an apathetic industry to roll out the red carpet for him all over again. The songs from the movie became hugely popular and remain so three decades hence.

After our interview, he asked me to accompany him for a recording of one of the songs from the movie at a studio in Mahalaxmi. I remember Burman, noted lyricist Javed Akhtar and I took a cab from Khar to Mahalaxmi. Once at the studio, he told me that he had unabashedly copied “Baba”—his great composer father Sachin Dev Burman—in some of that film’s music. In particular, he pointed out that interlude from the song ‘Jane who kaise log’ from the 1957 classic ‘Pyasa.’ “If you pay attention, you would feel as if you are listening to Baba’s composition,” Burman said.

He said that with such a sense of accomplishment that I could not help humming a couple of bars from that song to him. “Oh, tum gaate bhi ho? (You also sing?)” he asked to which I merely smiled.

That particular day Burman was recording a singer called Shivaji Chattopadhyaya for the song ‘Yeh safar bahut hai kathin magar na udas ho mere humsafar’. Being a Bengali speaker he had trouble with some of the Hindi/Urdu pronunciations which Akhtar, a stickler for such details, kept correcting. It took some effort for Chattopadhyaya to get it right. I could see the Burman was getting restless and at one point said to Akhtar that as long the singer sang it right, they might have to compromise on his pronunciations.

That 1993 afternoon, it was a remarkable privilege for me to see one of the world’s great composers medleying through some of his never-before-heard compositions using dummy lyrics. Out of respect for his intellectual property rights, I chose not to record any. It is possible that someone in his family has preserved some of those compositions. It is amazing to think that he had more unused compositions in his stock than what most world-class composers may have produced in their entire careers.

Hindi cinema composers of the 1950s-1970s vintage were equally very prolific and eclectic with a range unrivaled anywhere in the world. And among those, there was Rahul Dev Burman who was first among equals, with such supreme command over all aspects of music. Had he lived another decade and more he would have added so much more to his already awe-inspiring oeuvre spread over 317 films starting with ‘Chhote Nawab’ in 1961. However, even before that he was a particularly productive assistant to his father as a teenaged prodigy.

In my book, Burman has always been one of the five greatest composers of Hindi cinema in this order—S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman, S.D. Burman, R.D. Burman and the fifth position changes among the others. That may seem like a controversial thing to say but we have to judge a Hindi cinema music composer, just as we have to do a cinema lyricist, by employing many varied yardsticks. The father and son have been unsurpassable from that standpoint.

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