Retro Express | Why 8 AM Still Sounds Like K. L. Saigal

The words Kundan Lal Saigal will probably not do much for the current generation of millennials who, incidentally, are officially “old” as per the latest reports. For my generation too, he was just another guy who sang through his nose, and who, for some reason your father (or uncle or grandfather) was obsessed with. Listening to Saigal’s songs today, it is hard to imagine them as the equivalent of chartbusters, but whether you liked it or not, you had to listen to him every day, if you grew up in my time.

For me, KL Saigal meant getting ready for school. Depending on when his song appeared in the stage of getting-readiness, it would indicate whether I should panic or not. As a DI3K (Double Income Three Kids) family, the baton for the getting-readiness for the four of us would be handed over by my mother, as she was the first one to leave the house at 6.10 AM to be in time for her primary school teacher job. From there on, it was up to me and my father to finish the cooking, prepare the lunch boxes for the four of us, wake up the twins, get them bathed and dressed and out of the house by 7.45 AM (for school at 8 AM) after which it was just the two of us. I left the house the last, at 8.45 AM (for school at 9 AM), and if my dad was lucky, he scuttled out at 8.10 or 8.15 AM to catch the fast train to work.

Every morning, Radio Ceylon’s playlist of ‘old’ songs from 7.30 till 8 AM would end with a Saigal finale, usually slated to play around 7.56-7.57 AM, timed in such a way that it would end at 8 AM. As a young person, you just wanted the song to be over because then Radio Ceylon would start playing “new” songs. But for my father, as long as the song was playing, he knew he wasn’t late for work. The perfect timing would be when my father came out of his bath and the song was still playing, but that rarely happened. Usually, he was rushing in for a bath, and would linger a bit when the song began, or ask me to increase the volume so he could listen to it in the bathroom—a thing that annoyed me no end.

When we made fun of Saigal, my father would remind us of his greatness - that inspired Mukesh, Talat Mahmood and many others who went on to achieve more fame, simply by emulating him. Mukesh’s first song “Dil jalta hai” and Kishore Kumar’s first song “Jagmag jagmag karta nikla” are both sung in Saigal’s style. So is Talat Mahmood’s “Sab din ek saman nahin tha”. “Poor fellow,” my father would say. “Died too early. Drinking problem.”

I understood much later why my father spoke of him with such gravity

A singer-actor who left behind a repertoire of around 200 songs (not much in the reel and YouTube shorts era), K.L Saigal’s influence was unparalleled on the Hindi film music industry and he was undoubtedly the first definitive singer-superstar of India, with most of his live performances being sold out, as described by Pran Neville in his biography of Saigal.

His popularity soared after Devdas (1936), in which he was the lead singer and actor and the movie was remade a couple of decades later with Dilip Kumar playing the role of Devdas (1955), and again in 2002 with Shah Rukh Khan in the lead. It is said that Saigal enjoyed a peg of whiskey, which he called “Kaali Panch” after each rehearsal and lore has it that he felt that his voice sounded better and mellower after he had his whiskey. He died at the young age of 42 due to liver cirrhosis, much like the tragic hero Devdas.

Saigal was stereotyped at least by our generation (that grew up on Kishore Kumar and Mohammed Rafi songs) as being a singer of melancholic songs, almost depressing. We “youngsters” at the time often sang one of his songs ironically at an antakshari game, such as his famous song of heartbreak, “Jab dil he toot gaya, hum jee ke kya karenge” from Shahjehan (1946), or our favourite song to indicate boredom: “Soja Rajkumari, soja!”, his famous lullaby .

But even today, listening to Saigal’s “Kahon na aas niras bhayi”, when you are having a particularly bad day, makes you feel that this too shall pass and touches you with just the right amount of nostalgia. Perhaps, this is what endurance really looks like—not relevance measured in streams or remakes, but memory lodged so deep, it resurfaces uninvited. K. L. Saigal no longer announces deadlines or dictates morning panic, yet his voice still carries that strange reassurance of order—that something will end exactly when it is supposed to.