A lyricist Layak no other

Subhash Rajta

Layak Ram Rafiq spent the last decade of his life in darkness. Glaucoma stole his eyesight, but could not keep him from pursuing his lifelong passion — conjuring up fresh lines for Pahari songs and penning them down, though with a helping hand. “He would make his visitors sit down with a copy and a pen and dictate the lines he had thought up,” says Hari Krishan, a young lyricist inspired and influenced by Rafiq.

“When I visited him a while back, we ended up filing up almost an entire copy,” says Kishan Verma, a popular Pahari singer. “He didn’t allow blindness to come between him and his passion... He wrote about 10 songs for me alone after losing eyesight.”

This unbridled love for writing and creating songs made him the most prolific writer of Pahari songs. Rafiq wrote about 2,500 songs before he drew his last breath last week at the age of 78. Impressive indeed, yet his most significant contribution to Pahari music lies elsewhere. A native of a small village (Naleha) near Theog in Shimla, he will be best remembered for his remarkable contribution in widening the appeal and popularity of natis (folk songs) and making them commercially viable. Before Rafiq arrived on the scene, and music director SD Kashyap opened Himachal Pradesh’s first-ever studio in Mandi, natis were almost entirely folk-based.

“Traditionally, natis were based on real-life incidents and people. The songs celebrated real love stories, bravery and good deeds etc., and mourned tragedies like accidents, murders,” says Mohan Singh Chauhan, a popular Pahari singer. “Besides, the song was not written by one individual. It was done in a group — one person would compose one stanza, and the others would come up with alternatives and subsequent lines. That’s the reason why our traditional songs are lyrically so tasteful.”

The ambit widens

Despite rich content and tasteful lyrics, the traditional natis found a barrier too high in the diversity of language that the state abounds in. “In the hills, language changes after every 10-15 miles. So, the traditional songs created and sung in a particular area were not always appreciated and understood as much in other areas,” says Hari Krishan. It’s here that Rafiq comes into the picture. Moving away from traditional natis, he made romantic songs his forte and wrote them in a simpler language that could be understood by a much larger audience.

“He had a tremendous grasp over the languages spoken in different areas of upper Shimla region. It helped him create a much larger audience for natis, making the genre commercially viable,” says Kashyap. Mohan Sahil, a well-known poet, seconds Kashyap’s observation. “He avoided area-specific words. Besides, he would try and convert Hindi songs into natis, thereby giving them a much larger audience,” said Sahil.

Incidentally, it was Kashyap who pushed Rafiq into song writing. He loved writing from his schooldays, but was known more as a dholak player and singer. The writer in him blossomed after he came in touch with Kashyap. “He first came to me as a dholak player in 1991. One day while composing a nati, I got stuck as I didn’t know the language. Rafiq walked up to me with a few lines scribbled on a page. They were wonderful. I encouraged him to start writing seriously. That was all the encouragement needed to awaken the writer in him,” Kashyap recalls. He worked along with Rafiq for long, and changed the contours of Pahari music.

With the bouquets, Rafiq’s massive body of work also received some brickbats. The biggest criticism was the “one-dimensional” nature of his work. “He dabbled too much in romance, much of his work focused on woman, wooing and longing,” said a singer on the condition of anonymity. “Besides, the popularity of modern songs is killing our age-old traditional songs. If we lose them, we will lose a huge chunk of our culture. Sing modern song by all means but let’s also keep our folk alive,” advised the singer.

Valid or not, the criticism cannot take away from the fact that he changed the script of nati.