Ameen Sayani
This is a collection of articles archived for the excellence of their content. |
A brief biography
Avijit Ghosh, February 22, 2024: The Times of India
Sayani shaped & expanded golden era of radio
From 1950s-70s, radio ruled indoor entertainment in India. With a voice that seemed to be shaking hands and a style that was intimate, Sayani not only personified “the golden years of radio” but also shaped and expanded it. At a time when songs sold films, his show was pivotal to the fortunes of the Hindi feature. It spawned hundreds of shrota sanghs (listeners’ clubs) in towns and kasbahs. Overcoming the faint and wavering sound of short-wave radio, hundreds would press their ears to the ‘transistor’ to engage with a weekly register of songs. The programme’s emotional bonding with the listener is hard to explain, impossible to replicate.
Binaca (later Cibaca) Geetmala was born at a time when Hindi songs were banned on All India Radio by Union I&B minister B V Keskar, a classical music purist. Radio Ceylon grabbed the opportunity.
“Geetmala came on the scene as a low-priced experiment. I was given the job because none of the senior broadcasters cared much about it,” he told this reporter in a 2009 email interview.
The job entailed listing songs, writing the show’s script, presenting it and handling the feedback for Rs 25 per week. “Within a few months, AIR lost a major chunk of its popular listenership,” said Sayani, who was mentored by his elder brother Hamid, a reputed broadcaster.
The format of playing 16 hit tracks of the week for an hour (initially 30 minutes and seven numbers) was novel and exciting. But it was Sayani’s voice that became the 41-year-long show’s endearing USP. At its peak, the show received 65,000 letters every week.
Sayani’s easy, relaxed and flowing style led to first-rate interviews with major composers, lyricists and singers of the time. S Kumar’s Ka Filmi Muqaddama was another popular 70s show of his. Prolific with ad jingles, he also occasionally worked in the movies. The radio compere introduced Dev Anand’s Teen Devian (1965) with a background commentary and did a cameo for Mehmood’s Bhoot Bangla (1965).
Born into an enlightened and well-heeled Khoja family, Sayani graduated in history from St Xavier’s, Mumbai. Not many know he assisted his mother, Kulsum, in editing, publishing and printing afortnightly journal for neoliterates on Mahatma Gandhi’s instructions. The fortnightly, Rahber (1940-60) was published in Devanagari, Urdu and Gujarati scripts.
Sayani also brought out a highly popular CD and cassette series, “Geetmala Ki Chhaon Mein”, which was peppered with film star interviews as well as digressions into the music of the past. He received Padma Shri in 2009.
Why Sayani’s Geet Mala was broadcast from Lanka
February 23, 2024: The Times of India
If a diverse country like India has any unified popular culture, it is the Hindi film song. These are the songs many of us can hum, it is what we have in common. But once upon a time, it was considered too ‘common’ to be played on national radio.
All India Radio banned Hindi film music in the 1950s, as it tried to orchestrate a new national culture around traditional classical music. And that’s when Sri Lanka’s Radio Ceylon capitalised on this void. Set up around the same time as AIR, its Hindi film music station and the popular show Binaca Geetmala, hosted by Ameen Sayani, became enormously popular, creating a new mass culture as people across India tuned in. Within a few years, AIR had to bend to the demand for Hindi film music.
Ideological Project
Why did this ban happen? BV Keskar was the minister of information and broadcasting from 1952 to 1962, a long and influential tenure. He had decided views on music and culture: Hindi film music was an ‘exotic cocktail’ of alien origins. It was hybrid, streetwise — it blended Urdu with Hindi dialects, it was open to Western influences and disreputable performers.
For him, creating the nation’s soundscape was an ideological project — to patronise musicians and promote a specific form of high culture as the nation’s legacy. A Maharashtrian Brahmin who’d been trained in classical music, he aimed to restore India’s musical heritage to a Hindu-Sanskritic past. In his view, classical music had been artificially bifurcated into Hindustani and Carnatic, and it had been sullied by Muslim rulers and Muslim musicians, who severed it from its spiritual roots and eroticised its content.
Keskar even objected to the harmonium as a European import and banned it from AIR, though the instrument livened film music. Keskar’s stated mission was to fight the ‘music mob’. Music was of profound importance in ‘regulating’ the social order and emotional lives, according to Keskar. He also wanted to counter commercial forces, not wanting AIR to be a platform to advertise the wares of the film industry.
Saving Classical Artistes
Keskar’s intervention was timely in a certain way, as the pandits and ustads had lost their princely and feudal patronage. The government was to be a steady patron of these arts, and Keskar created a plan to administer the sector. At AIR, artists were not merely performers. Staff-artistes were made into production heads. Artistes were to be ‘graded’ and paid accordingly; with an audition that triggered protests among many artistes who alleged disrespect and arbitrariness in the process.
The National Programme of Music and Radio Sangeet Sammelan, begun in the early 50s, continues to be broadcast now, and created a new vitality to classical music. He certainly brought classical music out of its elite audiences, made them accessible to common people through Akashvani. They also preserved these archives. The best of MS Subbulakshmi, DV Paluskar, Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, Bismillah Khan, Pannalal Ghosh, Kumar Gandharva, Semmangudi Srinivas Iyer, S Balachander, Bhimsen Joshi and others are now available through recordings of their performances here. After the 80s, as TV captured attention, these sammelans have been cut in size.
Vividh Bharati Is Born
Hindi film music, though, was an unstoppable juggernaut. Radio Ceylon’s Hindi service had taken off, with support from Hindi movie producers. Binaca Geetmala, the song show presented by Ameen Sayani became hugely popular. The tremendous force of the audience won, they had clearly voted for the fun and romance of film music, and AIR had to change its tune too. By 1957, AIR introduced Vividh Bharati, its commercial channel, and the bulk of its content was Hindi film music.
Every piece of media creates a new public, and several generations were raised on this fare. For many Indians, these strains of film music were a part of their emotional lives. They were a vehicle for poetry and sentiment, they were the glue that connected Indians across spaces and contexts.
