Khumar Barabankvi

Khumar Barabankvi (1919–1999), born Mohammad Haider Khan on 15 September 1919 at Barabanki, Uttar Pradesh, was the classical ghazal's great mushaira voice — a poet whose singing delivery made him, with Jigar Moradabadi, a guarantee of any mushaira's success. He grew up in a house of poets: his father Dr Ghulam Haider wrote salaams and marsiyas as "Bahar", and his uncle Qaraar Barabankvi corrected his early verse. After high school at Government College, Barabanki, he left intermediate studies at Lucknow for poetry, and chose the classical ghazal as his lifelong service — "after analyzing all the genres of speech, I found the classical ghazal to be the most suitable," he wrote. In 1945 he came to Bombay with Jigar and Majrooh Sultanpuri for a mushaira; A. R. Kardar heard him and asked for a song for Shah Jahan, sung by K. L. Saigal — the start of a film career that included Saaz aur Awaaz and K. Asif's Love and God, though he soon grew dismayed at falling film standards and returned to the ghazal. His collections Aatish-e-Tar, Raqs-e-Mai and Shab-e-Taab carry the voice his audiences knew: gentle, musical, steeped in love and longing, and later, after he gave up drinking, in a deeper tenderness. He died on 19 February 1999 and lies at Karbala Civil Lines, Barabanki, where the Khumar Memorial Academy keeps his name.