Coca Cola and Pakistan have successfully created a universal folklore of fusing indigenous lyrics and modern music, a folklore under which modernity reveres tradition and tradition allows its reinvention through modern musical instruments. This visionary project, sponsored under the now well-known trademark of Coke Studio, is expanding to other regions of the world, including India, Africa, and the Middle East. The critics of corporate America may have to concede that capitalism through imagination can safeguard indigenous cultures and classical arts.
Coke Studio (Pakistan) recorded the first song in 2008 and has so far recorded more than forty (40) lyrics, rendered by renowned and emerging artists – singing and playing ageless and state-of-the-art instruments, such as flute, drums, piano, rubab, tabla, dhol, banjo, sarod, guitar, violin, and other instruments. Some indigenous lyrics in Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, and Baluchi were written as far back as the thirteenth century. Some lyrics written in Urdu are the new indigenous.
Jaan-e- Bahaaraan – A New Indigenous
Here, I want to tell the story of Jaan-e Bahaaraan, a song that the Coke Studio recorded in August 2017 in the voice of Ali Zafar, a 37-year-old famous singer born in Lahore. The team of artists and musicians producing this rendering has borrowed from the Flamenco folklore, a genre of music created in Islamic Spain (Andalusia) during the Moorish empire. This Moorish dimension to the Coke Studio rendering is subtle, incomplete, and no more than an exotic spice sprinkled over an otherwise home-cooked dish.
The song Jaan-e Bahaaraan was first put to music in 1962 and incorporated in a Pakistani movie Arzu (yearning). The singer, Saleem Raza, was a Christian born in India and his real name was Noel Dias. In 1947, upon the partition of British India, the 15-year-old Noel/Saleem migrated to Pakistan and settled in Lahore. Here, he started his singing career and within a decade became a famous singer. In 1962, Saleem was recruited to sing Jaan-e Bahaaraan. The song captured the imagination of the subcontinent on both sides of the border. While the song gained ascending popularity, Saleem fell out of favor in the Pakistani music industry. Frustrated, Saleem migrated to Vancouver, Canada, where he made an unsuccessful attempt to establish a music academy. At the age of 51, Saleem died and is buried in Vancouver. However, his voice singing Jaan-e Bahaaraan still lives on YouTube and in the hearts of his millions of fans in India and Pakistan.
Since 1962, Jaan-e Bahaaraan has been sung by other artists. That is a sure sign of a classical song that every generation desires to sing it in its own familiar voice with its own instruments and rhythm. Muhammad Ali Shehki, Waris Baig, and Kumar Sanu, and others have rendered this song in their own style, passion, and sensitivity.
Everything about Jaan-e Bahaaraan is universal: its author, its first singer, its words, its intrinsic music, its appeal.
Tanvir Naqvi, who wrote Jaan-e Bahaaraan, was born in 1919 in pre-partitioned Lahore. In the previous century, Naqvi’s family had migrated from Iran and settled in Lahore. Fostering the love of poetry and literature, Naqvi’s family of poets was well-versed in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu. Naqvi wrote lyrics in simple Urdu for films made in Lahore and Bombay. Many of the lyrics he wrote turned into popular songs adored in both India and Pakistan.
Jaan-e Bahaaraan, however, is out of the ordinary in Naqvi’s poetry. It is written in highly-stylized Persian; it is a collection of Persian pairs, whose meanings are esoteric, ambiguous, but appealing to our innate comprehension that triggers upon finding something unknown but beautiful. The Persian pairs interwoven in Jaan-e Bahaaraan draw our awareness to the “spirit of spring,” “poise of the garden,” envy of the houris,” “sin-inviting gestures,” “candle-lit eyes,” and “sweet tête-à-tête.” This all is in praise of the beloved. The lyrics of Jaan-e Bahaaraan fantasize a beautiful deity who has descended in human form, loving and lovable.
Everything about Jaan-e Bahaaraan is universal: its author, its first singer, its words, its intrinsic music, its appeal. The Coke Studio version with Ali Zafar, resurrecting the memories of Flamenco and Andalusia, adds new history and universality to a song that belongs to British India, Pakistan, and to the peoples of the world, who may or may not fully understand the meaning of the lyrics but will enjoy its various renderings in joyous as well as heart-broken personal times.