Recently someone, in an display of ignorance and inability to appreciate what I term "music", said about Hemanta Mukherjee : "I have always held that he is another singer who is grossly overestimated. Singer of olden days is about the only tag you need to get laurels or so it seems" !!!!!!!
Not that I give a damn that the writer does not appreciate the soft sensitiveness propagated by Hemantda's voice. It is apparent that s/he is still in the "nursery" section of RMIM Gharana. But the remark, did get to me, maybe because I feel that on the contrary, Hemantda is one of the grossly underestimated singer of the olden days. The least I can do is bring Hemantda's songs some visibility, even if only on RMIM. Discussions generated by such posts would be worth the effort of typing out elaborate posts. We all learn more and realize that our exposure to songs could be very limited and hence our opinions. There is no doubt that Hemantda was a niche singer. The quality and range of his voice limited him to a particular type of songs. The soft, sensitive, romantic ones..He couldn't have sung "Bachana aiye haseenoo.." or "aaja aaja main hun pyar tera..."(or maybe he could have, but he wouldnt have been able to carry that mood), but he atleast has the decency/intelligence to not overstep the bounds set by his voice-quality. I have rarely found a song of Hemantda's that I have found noisy/besura genius. "Yeh baharon ka sama....chaand taaron ka sama..."(TAJ). (Is anyone aware of the Raaga?) Perfection to the core. You can rip the song apart but you will not find a note wrongly sung or composed...or music deficient or overly done. Everything from the lyrics to the music is just sufficent/perfect(that includes tune, interludes, preludes, orchestration, singing). But I don't want to digress into his compositions. I want to talk only about his singing. His duets with Lata, rate as one of the best romantic combos of all time. And this is not because I am a Lata devout...it is the synergy between them.
He has decent duets with Geeta too. This Bhajan, in my opinion, transcends all human voices and singing by the bhakti it carries in both the voices. Divine, sublime, heavenly, ethereal, spiritual...all adjectives together cannot explain the effect this bhajan would have on you, were you to listen to it with agarbatti smell drifting around you (this is not a required feature to "feel" the "out of this world" - Anand Tiwari, please note what "out of the world" means - quality of the song...but with me it is a regular feature every morning). The atmosphere it creates is that of peace and the aura that of piousness. It is composed by Hemantda and sung by Hemantda and Geeta Dutt. The recording version of the song has 5 stanzas, each dealing with one incarnation of vishnu. (I wish they had sung all the shlokas) Thus it is a sub-set of the first poem of 'Geeta Govinda' which has 10+1 stanzas, one each for the 10 incarnations and a concluding stanza. Interestingly, in the Jaydev canon of ten , there is no Krishna incarnation; the 8th incarnation is Haladhar (Balarama). All the stanzas were posted on RMIC by Sairam(or was it Shankar Iyer?) some time ago. The stanzas here are the ones included in the 'Anand Math' song. Another difference from 'Geeta Govinda' seems to be the first line of the film song. It seems to be 'hari stuti' from elsewhere. It is musically a very unusual composition, with Geeta singing all the way through the end of the song, alternately in the foreground (only a couple of times) and in the background as Hemantda sings the next shloka. Both of them sing in their own different tune without making is sound noisy. A wonderful song. As for the availability, it can be found on the 'Bhajans from Hindi Films - Golden Collection', CD release by HMV. The song starts with Hemantda singing