निसार और कज्जन: भारत के पहले गायक-सितारे

Master Nissar and Miss Kajjan — the talkie's first hit singing pair, drawn from the Parsi stage by Calcutta's Madan Theatres, who rose with Shirin Farhad, Laila Majnu and Shakuntala (1931) and faded as film music changed.

When Indian films began to speak and sing in 1931, the studios needed performers who could both act and sing — and such people were found above all in the Parsi theatre. The Madan Theatres company of Calcutta drew two of its stars straight from this stage: Master Nissar and Jehanara 'Miss Kajjan'. Both had long sung and acted on the boards; theirs were high, open, declamatory voices built to carry to the back row without a microphone. The talkie carried those same voices onto screens in hundreds of towns. Almost overnight, stage performers became the country's first film singing-stars.

The story of the Indian talkie was, from the start, a rivalry between two cities. In Bombay, Ardeshir Irani's Imperial Film Company won the race to the first talkie with Alam Ara (14 March 1931). But in Calcutta, Madan Theatres — already a vast empire of drama troupes and cinema halls — had no intention of trailing. Madan moved quickly into talkie production and put its own stage stars, above all Nissar and Kajjan, on screen. Bombay held the first technical victory; Calcutta held a ready-made pair of singing stars and a hit partnership. Indian film music spent its infancy in this contest.

Nissar and Kajjan won their real fame through the very Parsi-theatre romances that Madan now brought to life on screen. Shirin Farhad was among the most talked-about song-heavy films of the era — it is said to have carried dozens of songs, with the Nissar-Kajjan duets at its heart. Then came Laila Majnu, that immortal tale of desert love, in which the pair sang as the doomed lovers. Madan films such as Shakuntala (1931) widened their reach further still. The songs of these films descended from the tradition of celebrated theatre poet-dramatists like Agha Hashar Kashmiri — a rich Urdu-Hindi diction, soaring melody, and a theatrical directness that went straight to the heart.

The very Parsi-theatre style that made Nissar and Kajjan stars eventually became the cause of their fading. Their voices were built for the stage — high, full, theatrical. But as the 1930s wore on, film music began to change: a softer, finer, more intimate close-to-the-microphone singing came into fashion, and after 1935 playback split acting from singing altogether. A new generation of singing-actors arrived, and the talkie's first pair was slowly left behind. Yet history remains in their debt: Nissar and Kajjan were the first faces-and-voices to prove that, in India, the film song could make stars.