The last svar of discipline

He was born with a svar on his tongue - Prabodh Chandra Dey, Calcutta, May 1, 1919. The world would call him Manna later. His mother's pet name became a nation's.

In the old house in Calcutta, music didn't enter through the door, it lived in the walls. His uncle, Krishna Chandra Dey - a blind magician for he saw through sound - taught him the first truths: practice is prayer, and precision its only God.

When the boy followed his guru-uncle to Bombay, the city smelled of celluloid and sea. He began not at the microphone but behind it, assisting KC Dey, then SD Burman, sweeping floors of studios that would one day echo his own voice.

When he sang his first film song, for Tamanna, the world did not notice; it rarely does when greatness whispers. Soon, under the tutelage of Ustads Dabir Khan and Aman Ali Khan of Bhendi Bazaar gharana, his voice found its discipline - half khayal, half cinema.

Their discipline tempered his mischief, turned his laughter into taal. The film world often sought glamour; Manna gave it grammar. He could thread a Raag Bhairavi through a comic duet, or lace a patriotic march with the ache of bhajan. Across thousands of recorded songs, in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada and Assamese, he became a polyglot of mood and metre.

He shared microphones with Rafi, Kishore, Mukesh, Lata, and Asha, but never borrowed from them. If Kishore was the laugh, Manna was the lesson. Playback music may have been an industry, but for him it remained a riyaz.

Recognition, when it came, wore the patina of delay - the Padma Shri (1971), Padma Bhushan (2005), Dadasaheb Phalke Award (2007), and Filmfare Lifetime Achievement (2011).

By then, the studios had changed their acoustics, but his voice still carried the grain of the tanpura.

In his memoir Jiboner Jalsaghorey, he wrote not of fame, but of form - of a musician's duty to precision.

When he passed on October 24, 2013, aged 94, India did not lose a singer; it lost its conscience of svar. The tanpura hummed a moment longer, as if refusing to let go. And that is why it still sings, long after the orchestra has packed up.