मुश्ताक़ हुसैन

Mushtaq Hussain was a Hindi film music director active in the 1930s and 1940s, trained as an Ustad in classical music before entering the film industry. He began his career at New Theatres, Calcutta, before moving to Bombay's Film City studio at Tardeo. His debut as a film composer came with Aurat Ka Pyar (1933, directed by A.R. Kardar, with lyrics by Agha Hashar Kashmiri), and over the following years he scored music for around a dozen and a half films, working with singers including Mukhtar Begum, Ashraf Khan, Fakr-e-Alam Kawwal, Afzal Lahori, Ameerbai Karnataki, Zahoor Raja, Shahu Modak, Shantareen, and Ram Sahgal. He specialised in ghazal and thumri-based compositions and was known for insisting on extensive rehearsal before songs were filmed, which kept his overall output relatively small.

Mushtaq Hussain is historically notable as an early employer of Naushad, who would go on to become one of Hindi cinema's most celebrated composers. After arriving in Bombay in the late 1930s with little money and reportedly sleeping on footpaths while struggling to find work, Naushad secured a job as a pianist in Mushtaq Hussain's film orchestra, an apprenticeship that gave him his first real foothold in the industry before he stepped out on his own as a composer. Mushtaq Hussain's last known credit as a music director was for the film Bombay (1949). He died in 1982 in Bombay.