A legend betrayed

The dictionary defines ‘definitive’ as ‘decisive, unconditional, final’ or ‘most authoritative’, and ‘biography’ as ‘a written account of a person’s life.’ The book falls short on both premises. Firstly, it is based on secondary sources that are again presumptuous by nature. “It is said,” sums up the author, “that Saigal took up a job in the Delhi Electricity Department.” Next, he is believed to have “worked as a hotel manager”; “there are three different versions of how he landed up in Calcutta and at the New Theatres.”
Just to list out a few samples. Nearly half ‘the definitive biography’ consists of appendices.

The main text, which has 132 pages, includes photographs, using up 48 pages, and segmented into 13 chapters. In the ‘Author’s Note’, Nevile confesses: “There are very few written records of Saigal’s life and his contribution to the music and cinema of his time — no diary, no letters, no media interviews are available.” In the same breath, he also states that he “was able to gather first-hand information from Bina about her father — the artiste and the person — that she had learnt from her mother Asharani, who died in 1978.” The text does not carry a single quote from any Saigal kins, besides they are long dead anyways. There is, however, one quote attributed to his late son, Madan Mohan, from a reported interview to a Hindi magazine. Yet, the author and the publishers have the audacity to call it ‘the definitive biography’.

The rest of the information about Saigal, contained in the book, is available elsewhere: that during his short life-span he worked in 45 films (seven in Bengali), and rendered 187 songs including six non-film songs in Bengali, Persian and Punjabi; seven each of Ghalib and Seemab Akbarabadi, four of Arzoo Lucknowi, two each of Bedam Warsi, Ibrahim Zoke, one each of Amir Meenai, Kidar Sharma ‘Hasrat’ and an anonymous song, and 11 bhajans (information not included by Nevile). The book carries no insight into the man and his family life. The few pages devoted to ‘The Artiste and The Man’ are also limited to generalities.

Although the information collated from various secondary sources is useful, the material is irritatingly repetitive, thus giving rise to the doubt that the various chapters had been written at different times. Besides, in a book devoted to the famed actor-singer, chapter headings like ‘Saigal’s Heroines’, ‘Saigal’s Ghalib’, ‘Saigal’s Mentors and Associates’, ‘Saigal and the Kotha Culture’, do distract (his visiting singing girls from an early age is a constant refrain in successive chapters).

In summing up, the only valuable or otherwise information one can extract from the book is that K L Saigal was born in Jammu on April 4, 1904. He was the third of Amir Chand and Kesari Devi’s four sons. He was a bad student, and spent more time with Sufi saints and singing girls, left home clandestinely, and took up “all sort of jobs” in Lahore, Kanpur, Bareilly, Moradabad, Simla (what jobs?), Delhi and landing up eventually in New Theatres in Kolkata, where he worked in 11 Bengali films, before moving away into a rented flat in Bombay’s Matunga suburb. He moved back to his ancestral house in Jullunder on December 25, 1946. He breathed his last there on January 18, 1947.

The ‘definitive biography’ is silent about when he got married to Asharani (she supposedly died in 1978), and whether daughter Bina (whom the author befriended in 1974) and son Madan Mohan (whom he never met) were the only offsprings; and what they did after the legendary artiste’s premature death.There is also no clear reference to his infamous addiction to the bottle.

K L SAIGAL: the definitive biography
Pran Nevile
Penguin,
2011, pp 218
Rs. 299