लखनऊ का वह लड़का जिसने बंबई बदल दी: नौशाद और 'रत्तन' की तासीर

In 1944, a young music director from Lucknow named Naushad composed the score for a medium-budget Bombay film called Rattan, and Hindi film music was never quite the same again. Naushad Ali had grown up in Lucknow's Qaiserbagh neighbourhood — the same streets where, a century earlier, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah had held his

In 1944, a young music director from Lucknow named Naushad composed the score for a medium-budget Bombay film called Rattan, and Hindi film music was never quite the same again.

Naushad Ali had grown up in Lucknow's Qaiserbagh neighbourhood — the same streets where, a century earlier, Nawab Wajid Ali Shah had held his thumri baithaks and where the courtesan tradition of light classical music had developed into the most refined popular music culture of the subcontinent. As a boy, Naushad had absorbed both: the classical training of the gharana tradition that still echoed through the city's music circles, and the folk songs that drifted in from the surrounding countryside — the Purvanchal viraha geets (songs of separation sung by women whose husbands had migrated to distant cities), the Punjabi dhun rhythms that came with traders and travellers, the Awadhi seasonal songs of sawan (monsoon) and phagan (spring).

When he arrived in Bombay in the late 1930s, Hindi film music was divided between two schools. Calcutta's New Theatres had built a refined, classically-anchored idiom around the voices of Saigal and Kanan Devi, with composers like Pankaj Mullick drawing on Bengal's Rabindra-sangeet tradition. Bombay's studios were producing something looser and more commercially aggressive, but without a clear aesthetic identity of their own.

Rattan gave Naushad the chance to propose one. He brought in dholak and sarangi as primary instruments — not as folk colour applied to an otherwise Western or Calcuttan orchestration, but as the structural core around which the melody was built. He set 'Ankhiyan Milake Naina Se Naina' on a Khamaj-adjacent tonal base that made it feel simultaneously like a raag composition and a folk song at a village wedding. He assigned Zohrabai Ambalewali — a singer with a slightly husky, earthier contralto than the lighter voices the market had been trained on — as his principal female vocalist, and her voice gave the recording a geographical specificity: this sounded like the music of the Gangetic plains, not of a recording studio.

The result was a commercial phenomenon. Rattan's 78-rpm records sold in numbers that Bombay film music had rarely seen, and 'Ankhiyan Milake' was played on All India Radio repeatedly through the year. More significantly, the film established a template — classical foundation, folk surface, large live orchestra — that would define the Bombay film sound through the 1950s. Every composer who subsequently claimed to be 'bringing folk music to Hindi cinema' was working within the framework Naushad laid out in Rattan.

For Naushad himself, the film was the beginning of a thirty-year run of musically ambitious scores — Anmol Ghadi (1946), Andaz (1949), Baiju Bawra (1952), Uran Khatola (1955), Mother India (1957), Mughal-e-Azam (1960) — that would eventually earn him the epithet 'Sur Sameerat' (Emperor of Melody) and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. But it began here, in 1944, with a medium-budget film about a romance, and a dholak pattern that Naushad spent hours getting exactly right.