Begum Akhtar is celebrated as a great ghazal singer from India. Her 35th death anniversary is being observed this week with musical soirees. However, like it or not there are songs that we must not sing.

Ideally, the forbidden list should include all classical Urdu poetry. Much of its brilliant corpus is meant to be savoured, in my view, in the text form and not necessarily as musical composition.

If a single verse of Ghalib or Mir is worthy of life-long contemplation, where is the fun in bursting into a song with similar heavy verses? Ever thought of singing Milton, Elliot or, for that matter, Keats? So why play around with Urdu or even Farsi poets?

As far as I can tell much of the ghazal-singing of today is borrowed from the thumri that was given shape by Wajid Ali Shah, the tragedy-prone ruler of Awadh who was exiled by the British during the 1857 mayhem. Repeatedly stressing the bol or the words of a love song from folk poetry in dozens of different ways to bring out a range of meanings and nuances is really the thumri format.

The ‘ghazal queen,’ whatever that means, was in fact a great singer of thumri though not quite at par with Rasoolan Bai or Siddheshwari Devi. If ghazal singing must be counted as a talent of high merit then we have the formidable K.L. Saigal and the magical Kamla Jharia, both her predecessors, who would put her out of reckoning.

Her more contemporary challengers included Iqbal Bano and Farida Khanum, from across the border in Pakistan. It was not so easy to carry records of this or that musician across the border those days. So there is no certain way to figure out who was more popular. But the Khanum-Bano duo was routinely heard across India on the short-wave frequency of Radio Pakistan, which could not probably be said of the ghazal queen of India.

Yet there was that something about the Begum which made her an instant charmer. I think much of her mystique had to do with the social graces and the art of conversation she acquired as a coveted and popular courtesan. That was when she cut her first disc as Akhtaribai Faizabadi.

In Delhi, after she was recast as a Begum of sorts, she would often stay with an uncle whose play she wrote music for. But even here her past would cling to her.

The children called her ammi, an adulatory term for mother. But one day a visitor from Rampur, where the Begum had spent harrowing days in the court, remonstrated to her Delhi host that ammi was hardly an appropriate way to address a former courtesan.

When the ghazal landed in middle-class homes in India in the ‘60s, there was turmoil. This was partly due to the long distance between Urdu and its newly acquired snob value among the nouveau riche, and mostly Punjabi, patrons of Delhi. During one musical soiree, according to Begum Akhtar, a knowledgeable elderly gentleman received a rude tug from the society lady sitting next to him. The Begum was playing out the Ghalib verse: ‘Ki mere qatl ke baad usney jafaa se tauba; hai us zood pashema’n ka pashema’n hona.’

‘Excuse me,’ the lady wondered aloud to her neighbour, ‘what is the meaning of zood?’ The man scratched his beard and, peering over his glasses, replied: ‘Pasheman to aap samajh hi gayi hongi?’ (Surely you have understood the meaning of regret?)

‘Her natural bent was to turn the most unremarkable event into something scandalous, hilarious or dramatic,’ recalls the late Sheila Dhar in a chapter in Raga’n Josh, a delightful book of tribute to Dhar’s many musical associates and gurus.

The peerless sitar player Rais Khan who surprisingly migrated to Pakistan after he became a celebrity in India was at the receiving end of Begum Akhtar’s acidic wit. Dhar recalls how after a recital in Patna she shared the evening with ‘the young and beauteous sitar wizard’. The evening set off a series of extraordinary incidents, which could have happened only to Begum Akhtar.

‘I was waiting in the green room looking through my notebook, trying to decide which poets and which ghazals I would present this city of Urdu scholars and connoisseurs,’ the Begum told Dhar. ‘And then my dear, what do I hear but Rais Khan trying to sing a ghazal instead of playing his sitar! I had never been so insulted in my life! I swore to myself that at my next concert I would not sing but play the sitar instead! That would teach the little colt a proper lesson.’

Rais Khan’s crooning endeared him to the ‘less cultivated sections’ of the audience. However, Begum Akhtar’s wrath had to go through a few formalities before she could rugby-tackle her challenger. She sent word through Mohammad Ahmed to the sitar maestro Ustad Vilayat Khan that she wanted to become his disciple.

‘Vilayat Khan was quite excited at the prospect. I mean it was quite a scoop!’ exulted Begum Akhtar. ‘Can you imagine what kind of headlines this partnership would have made in the verbal world of the music world!’

However, the story ended with scintillating new twist. The day before her rendezvous with the Ustad, Mohammad Ahmed ‘sheepishly’ brought news to Begum Akhtar that Vilayat Khan’s mother had been making inquiries about what she intended to give as a nazar, a ritual offering, to the Ustad.

‘She had hinted that the diamond ring I had made from one of the pendants of a necklace I had once received as a gift from a princely state would be a suitable offering for this great occasion.’ Apparently the Ustad too thought the ring would be a good gift.

Begum Akhtar flew into a rage. And when the anger subsided when it did, revenge was unleashed. ‘And then I decided I would become the disciple of a sweet and mild vegetarian gentleman who was a pupil of Vilayat Khan. And I would widely advertise the fact … I would never let him forget what he had missed.’

Her transition from Akhtaribai Faizabadi to Begum Akhtar would not be possible without the intervention of Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi, a wealthy barrister of Lucknow, who married her in 1945.

But he also stopped her from singing in public. To give an inkling of the person he was, here is a gem from the Begum’s repertoire. When the watchman brought news to him that the Chinese had attacked India, Abbasi Sahab is said to have replied from his colonial-style armchair: ‘Dekho, phaatak band kar do.’ (Listen fellow, just shut the gates.)

But he too couldn’t lock up the ghazal securely. Such is the force of the laws of demand and supply in the marketplace of culture.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.