Now, the bhajan king croons qawwali

Anup Jalota is a familiar name in every Indian household. Be it a small puja in the house or a big religious ceremony, he has ruled it all. For the past 25 years he has dominated the Indian music scene as the Bhajan King. The man with the divine voice, which made every melody sound like a soulful offering.

But as we know, music has no boundaires nor do musicians, this stands true for Anup Jalota too. He ventured into areas other than bhajan singing and emerged successfully. Talking of how it all began he says, “I had a musical atmosphere in my house. My father Purshottamdas Jalota is a singer himself. He is also my guru. When I first started as a singer, those were the days private albums were in. I did albums of both ghazals as well as bhajans”. But why this special inclination towards bhajans? “After a couple of my albums were released, I realised that my bhajans were a lot more impactful than the other songs that I was singing. And that is reason I concentrated more on them.”

He is presently releasing a qawwali album called Laut Ke Phir Kab Aaoge. The songs are romantic. “I wanted to experiment with a new form of singing. And this album is more on the lighter side. Lyrics are simple in easy Urdu and Hindustani by Kumar Sagari and the music has been composed by Lalit Sen”.

Sometime back he had done the audio of Ramayan which was a set of 20 cassetttes. Right now he is working out plans to do a set of cassettes on the Bhagavad Gita which will have about 700 Sanskrit shlokas.

On what he feels about being associated with bhajans for so long, this is what he says, “It gives me a sense of immense satisfaction, when I find people bringing up my name every time there is a talk of bhajans. I am a performer who performers to the best of his abilities”. He strictly believes in being the master of one than being the jack of all. “I have been into music for a long time now. If I wish I could try my hands at lyric writing or some other talent. But I feel that one person can do only one thing at one time”.

Though the present music scene is very much western oriented, he is as interested in film and pop music as anyone else. “Music is a form of expression. I sing a lot of bhajans where they praise the lord, talk of spiritual upliftment and devotion. But that does not mean that I hate all the tapori film songs. In fact Aati kya Khandala is one of my favourite numbers. The reason being that this is this is a song of the common man. It is his way of expressing. You wouldn’t expect an under-educated roadside romeo to recite a shayari to impress a girl.”


Lopamudra Bhattacharya