Today is the birth centenary of the ‘King of the Ghazal’, the inimitable Talat Mahmood. Talat was born on February 24, 1924 in Lucknow, and it was in Lucknow itself that he obtained his initial training in music: at the Marris College of Music, where he learnt classical Hindustani music from Pandit SCR Bhatt. By the age of sixteen, Talat was singing the ghazals of Urdu’s foremost poets for All India Radio Lucknow, and was soon taken on by HMV as well. His first introduction to cinema came through the film industry in Calcutta, where he not only sang songs (under the name ‘Tapan Kumar’), but also acted in several films. In 1949, at the age of twenty-five, Talat moved to Bombay, and the rest, of course, is history: he went on to become one of Hindi cinema’s most distinctive voices, and his songs—romantic, filled with pathos, tender, soulful—still live on.
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