ome poets are fortunate in the voices that carry their words into the world. Faiz Ahmed Faiz was one of them. His work found its way to singers of extraordinary calibre. In their hands, the ghazal, once confined to intimate salons and private gatherings, entered a new era. The meeting of Faiz’s poetry with the finest vocalists of the Twentieth Century did not merely produce memorable recordings; it altered the trajectory of Urdu music itself.

To understand how Faiz came to be sung in this way, it is necessary to trace the shifting landscape of musical culture in the subcontinent. During the early decades of the Twentieth Century, the Urdu ghazal underwent a transformation. What began as a minor form, sung largely within the closed world of salons, gradually acquired a broader acceptance and dignity. As gramophone records spread and audiences widened, the ghazal escaped its earlier associations with mujra performances and the world of courtesans. Female vocalists of the era frequently performed the verses of Daagh Dehlavi, tailoring their musical expression to an environment where seduction and theatricality shaped both composition and performance. But as radio and cinema emerged as dominant media, the tone and texture of the ghazal began to shift.

This change was partly driven by listeners themselves. Urban audiences, newly exposed to a spectrum of musical genres, started to listen with different expectations. They sought greater emotional depth and a more thoughtful engagement with the words being sung. The emphasis on poetic meaning grew stronger, sometimes to a disproportionate degree. The evolving place of the film song played a role here: anchored in narrative situations, cinematic music gave the ghazal’s lyricism a new readability. A song could no longer be entirely abstract; it had to carry a sense of emotional context.

This is where artistes like KL Saigal and Akhtari Bai Faizabadi, later known as Begum Akhtar, decisively shaped the form. Saigal, with his immense cinematic popularity, made the ghazal accessible to audiences far beyond classical music circles. Begum Akhtar, after her own career in early films, returned to the ghazal with a seriousness of purpose that changed its artistic standing. Her style blended classical training with a deep sensitivity to poetic nuance, restoring the ghazal’s introspective core.

The nazm, however, followed a slightly different path. Unlike the ghazal, it was not bound by a strict metrical or rhyme scheme, and historically, there is limited evidence of how it was originally sung. It may be that the expanding possibilities of film music, which allowed more flexible structures, encouraged composers to explore new ways of rendering the nazm. Without the constraints of repeated rhyme or refrain, the melodic and rhythmic demands of the form altered, requiring a different musical imagination.

That challenge became evident in one of the most iconic musical moments associated with Faiz: Rashid Attre’s composition of Mujh say pehli si mohabbat mairay mehboob na maang, sung by Noor Jehan. The song demanded a style that captured the poem’s shifting emotional registers — longing, resignation and a politically inflected compassion. Composers had to move beyond earlier patterns of light-classical music and interpret the nazm’s underlying structure rather than impose a conventional melodic frame. The result was a work that helped set the standard for nazm-gaiki for decades.

In the years that followed, the nazm found other gifted interpreters. Iqbal Bano’s rendition of Dasht-i-tanh ee main ai j n-i-jah n larz n hain, composed by Mehdi Zaheer, is often cited as a turning point. Her voice combined classical restraint with emotional intensity, allowing the nazm to breathe as a continuous, unfolding statement rather than a sequence of disconnected verses. It was nazm-singing informed by the poem’s inner logic rather than by external musical expectations.

Cinema, too, played its part. SD Burman’s settings of Sahir Ludhianvi’s nazms in Pyaasa looked beyond strict meter to find a musical order aligned with the poet’s sensibility. These experiments in film music helped legitimise the nazm as a vocal form capable of sophistication and narrative coherence.

Yet among all these contributions, Mehdi Hassan’s relationship with Faiz’s poetry remains unparalleled. When he sang Gulon mein rang bharay, he did more than offer a technically immaculate performance; he revealed the text’s quiet suffering, its aching sense of suspended hope. His interpretations of Faiz, Mujh say pehli si mohabbat, Ranjish hi sahi, Gulon mein rang bharay, set a standard so high that subsequent generations of vocalists have measured themselves against it. His style balanced classical precision with emotional clarity, placing Faiz at the centre of the modern ghazal repertoire.

What made these encounters between poetry and music so powerful was the way each vocalist understood the demands of Faiz’s verse. His imagery was evocative but never ornate; his metaphors carried layers of political and emotional meaning; and his diction, rooted in classical tradition, spoke to contemporary realities. To render Faiz was to capture both the lyricism of romance and the weight of collective suffering, a delicate balance only a few singers could maintain.

By the late Twentieth Century, the ghazal had fully escaped its earlier confines. It became a genre capable of literary depth, musical sophistication and cultural resonance. Its evolution reflected wider changes: the growth of urban audiences, the influence of cinema and the emergence of radio as a national platform. Through this journey, Faiz’s poetry, interpreted by Noor Jehan, Iqbal Bano, Mehdi Hassan and others, helped establish the modern ghazal as an art form both intimate and universal.

Faiz found the right voices, but the voices also found in him the right words. It is in this meeting, between the poet and the singer, between text and sound, much of the magic of Twentieth-Century Urdu music resides.

The writer is a culture critic based in Lahore.