Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor who presided over a depleted empire, would have been a happy man if he were to visit Kollam on Thursday.
At the ghazal competitions for the higher secondary category as part of the 62nd Kerala State School Arts Festival, ‘Baat Karni Mujhe Mushkil’, one of the memorable ghazals written by him, was popular with the competitors, with more than one of them singing it, each in their own style.
Not just his ghazals, but that of Urdu poets Momin Khan Momin, Mirza Ghalib and Daagh Dehlvi, all of whom were part of Zafar’s cultural court, were heard at the competition which had 17 contestants. In the tenth year after ghazal competitions were introduced at the festival, the quality of the performances have certainly gone up, with a couple of them turning out to be exceptional performances, evident in how the crowd unanimously broke into applause for them. Seven of the contestants secured A grades.
K.P.Muhammed Mishal from Malappuram presented a soulful rendition of ‘Mere Humnafas Mere Humnawa’, the ghazal written by Shakeel Badayuni, which was made popular by Begum Akhtar and others. One of the most popular faces in the competition was Yumna Ajin, another Malappuram native, who has already proved her mettle in various reality shows and has lakhs of followers in her social media pages. Yuma, who has been training under her father Ajin since her younger days, rendered a very nuanced take on ‘Ab ke hum bichhde’, one of Mehdi Hassan’s popular numbers.
Quite a few of them had deep, textural voices suited for ghazals, while a few of them struggled to roll their tongues around the more complicated Urdu phrases. While most of the contestants had professional accompaniments on Tabla and Harmonium, a couple of them banked on their Shruthi boxes for support, while one contestant sang without any accompaniment. Though the participants are marked only based on their performance, the better accompanying artistes appeared to elevate the performance of the singers.
Amid the crowd of predominantly contestants and parents were a few ghazal connoisseurs who stayed all through the four hour-long competition. “Long ago, we had frequent ghazal nights in our towns. Now, it is a rare occurrence. Events such as this are a blessing. A soulful ghazal can make your blood pressure drop like anything,” says Subhash Chandra Bose, one of them.
