THE GOLDEN VOICE LIVES ON: CELEBRATING MOHAMMED RAFI ON HIS BIRTH ANNIVERSARY

When the Partition of 1947 divided India and Pakistan, Rafi chose to stay in India because his career had just taken off, but Bashira refused to leave Lahore.

- TDG NETWORK

On 24 December 1924 a boy was born in the tiny village of Kotla Sultan Singh near Amritsar. In that conservative Punjabi household music was frowned upon, yet the boy, Mohammed Rafi, was drawn to sound.

A travelling fakir who sang in the streets of nearby Lahore fascinated him; Rafi would follow him for long distances, memorising his chant. Decades later his son Shahid recalled that the fakir asked Rafi why he followed him silently; when the boy sang back the same tune, the fakir blessed him and predicted that he would go far. Rafi himself remembered a similar incident in a 1977 BBC Hindi interview - he loved the fakir's voice and discovered his love for singing by following him around. Those blessings, and a stubborn passion to sing, would take a barber's son from Lahore to the pinnacle of Indian cinema.

Rafi's family moved to Lahore while he was still a child. His father opened a barbershop, and the teenager spent his days trimming beards and cutting hair. Music, however, remained irresistible. He studied classical music under Ustad Abdul Waheed Khan of the Kirana gharana, and his talent surfaced at public events. During a performance at Lahore's Pan-India Exhibition in 1937 a power failure left the stage silent; the thirteen-year-old Rafi took the microphone and entertained the crowd. In the audience was the celebrated singer K. L. Saigal, who predicted that the youngster would one day become a big star. Rafi recorded his first duet with Zeenat Begum for the Punjabi film Gul Baloch in 1941, but his conservative father still opposed a musical career. When producer-actor Nasir Khan and composer Shyam Sunder offered to take the teenager to Bombay, it took persuasion from Rafi's elder brother to convince the family. Bombay offered a new horizon.