Delhi’s Kamani Auditorium hosted a captivating celebration to commemorate the centenary year of popular singer Talat Mahmood’s birth anniversary.
Talat Mahmood was one of the most phenomenal singers of the Indian cinema’s golden era, and his therapeutic voice healed every broken heart who would listen to it.
The show was hosted by ‘Media net Works’ in collaboration with “Jashn-E-Talat” of Sahar Zaman, the grandniece of Talat Mahmood. Former Delhi Lieutenant Governor Najeeb Jung was the chief guest at the evening.
The show commenced with a musical performance of vocalist, Amrish Mishra, who filled the evening with some iconic songs of the legendary singer.
Following this, Sahar Zaman shared some unknown stories of her “Bombay Nana” from her recent book “Talat Mahmood: The Definitive Biography”. She shared how he always remained ground to earth even though he was the recipient of India’s third-highest civilian award, the Padma Bhushan.
Sharing the pioneering journey of Talat, she revealed, “Talat was the first Indian playback singer to start world tours.”
“He started them because he wanted to expand the reach of Indian music by taking it around the globe. The success of his tours inspired his colleagues including Lata Didi and Mukesh ji to also start such tours,” Zaman said.
She also added, “He was the first singer to lead a collective protest of singers demanding royalty rights in the 1960s as he was the secretary of Playback Singers Association. It was ‘mic down protest’ as singers stopped recording for three months as a symbol of dissent.”
“Even during Talat’s college days, he was often stopped by his college girls who would force him to sing for them. His popularity in college came from his earlier work in AIR Lucknow from where his voice became popular,” the author said.
Zaman also told the audience that her ‘nana’ (grandfather) sang under the name of Tapan Kumar in Bengali and his fluency in Bengali often made people think that Tapan and Talat were different individuals with Tapan being a native Bengali singer. He sang fluently in more than 16 languages, including Marathi, Telugu, Gujarati and many more.
Sahar revealed that Talat was not very fond of acting but due to his good looks, he was forced by directors and producers to work as an actor. His performance in “Sone Ki Chidiya” (1958) where he shared screen with actress Nutan was well-recieved.
The event ended with Ravi Rastogi’s dance group ‘Moving Souls’ performing to the famous songs of Talat Mahmood.