Nayyara Noor
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A brief profile
Rakhshanda Jalil, August 24, 2022: The Indian Express
Nayyara Noor showed a generation of ghazal lovers the power of singing poetry adorned only with a beautiful voice
Rakhshanda Jalil writes: A far cry from the opulent diamond-dripping, sequin saree-clad begums who had hitherto ruled the ghazal circuit, she was starkly simple and bereft of the faintest whiff of 'ada', considered the hallmark of concert singers
As her soaring, lilting voice filled my silent room at 3:30 am, I found myself wondering: How did people remember singers once they were gone in the olden times? Now, with technology providing instant recall, a voice is a living presence; but in an age when music was memory, how did one pay homage to a lost voice? And, for that matter, can a voice or a song, once heard, be perfectly preserved in memory with nary a change in tone and tenor caused by time?
As I sit down to write this tribute, I find myself flooded with memories. In trying to recall my earliest memory of Nayyara Noor, I find myself drawn back in time. Newly married and setting up our own home with limited funds, we had virtually no furniture but we did have a rackety old tape recorder. Someone had gifted us an EMI cassette jointly produced by Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s talented son-in-law Shoaib Hashmi and the recording company as a birthday gift for the poet in 1976; it bore the legend: Nayyara Sings Faiz. After all these years, I have a visual memory of its cover and a near-perfect recall of how her voice filled our almost-empty flat, entering the nooks and crannies of our imagination, conjuring brilliantly colourful word pictures, more than making up for the absence of material possessions in our modest home. The splendour of her voice and the treasure that was Faiz’s poetry combined to fill our life with an abundance of riches as we played that cassette over and over again, day in and day out; it even travelled with us on long drives so it could be played relentlessly in our dinky Maruti car!
Perhaps it would be no exaggeration to say that nearly every song in that cassette is associated with a vivid memory of those halcyon days, especially ‘Barkha barse chhat pe’ which she sang with Sheheryar Zaidi, whom she married. While each of the 12 pieces remains indelibly etched in my memory, looking back it is hard to say if an enduring love for Faiz was born when this cassette played ceaselessly around me or that love was nurtured by Nayyara Noor’s voice as she sang ‘Uttho ab maati se uttho’, ‘Aaj bazaar mein’, ‘Tum mere paas raho’, ‘Ye dhoop kinara’, ‘Ye haath salamat hain jab tak’, ‘Aaiye arz guzarain’, each more lilting than the other, each transporting us to magical realms of immense possibilities. Then there was Faiz’s haunting dirge-like ghazal, ‘Hum ke thehre ajnabi itni madaraton ke baad/ Phir baneingey ashana kitni mulaqaton ke baad’ (We who have remained strangers after so many hospitalities/After how many meetings will we become acquaintances) with its dauntingly long behr (metre) that I initially mistook for a romantic ghazal. Written in 1974 after Faiz’s return from Dhaka and his first visit to Bangladesh since the creation of the new country, to us in India it revealed an immense loss and a powerful acknowledgement of a great betrayal.
With the advent of new technology, one began to see Nayyara Noor and also hear her. While her public performances began to diminish, the number of recordings from her old PTV days began to increase exponentially on the internet. And there she was, simply dressed in a salwar kameez, with eyes demurely down-cast behind those outsize glasses and looking, if anything, more like a senior secondary school teacher than a concert singer. A far cry from the opulent diamond-dripping, sequin saree-clad begums who had hitherto ruled the ghazal circuit, she was starkly simple, unadorned, almost austere. What is more, she would be seated in the tashahhud posture, usually associated with the namaaz, with her knees folded beneath her as she sat erect and unsupported, her hands by her side as unlike other ghazal singers, she never played the harmonium as she sang. Bereft of the faintest whiff of ada, a word that covers the gamut of expressions from charm to coquetry and which is considered the hallmark of concert singers, Nayyara Noor showed an entire generation of ghazal lovers the power and beauty of singing poetry adorned by nothing save a melodious voice.
