Though he was paired with many playback singers over a career spanning four decades, his more memorable songs were rendered with the iconic female vocalist, Lata Mangeshkar.

Rafi was a Punjabi Muslim, Lata a Maharashtrian Hindu. Their love songs still inspire millions.

The Lata-Rafi pairing was not some deliberate shoring up of maudlin secularism in the clichéd Hindu-Muslim mode. Just before them, the duets of Kundan Lal Sehgal and Khurshid were a rage in a self-assured India. After the trauma of 1947, Rafi and Lata, unconsciously and unobtrusively, came to symbolise the multicultural resilience and the feasibility of the experiment called India. And nearly all their duets were similarly — unconsciously and unobtrusively — a musical rejection of the idea of Pakistan, not necessarily the way its founder conceived it, but the way it evolved.

For decades after partition there were other ways in which India claimed the higher moral ground over Pakistan in the realm of popular and classical cultural motifs. I am privy to an ongoing discussion between worried artists, mostly from Pakistan, about the state of affairs. To back up their thesis they listed several grievances with their country.

Only on Sunday, says Waseem Altaf who seems to have initiated a web discussion in Pakistan, he was watching a TV programme on the novelist Quratulain Haider. She went to Pakistan in 1949 where she joined the Press Information Department. In 1959 her great novel Aag Ka Darya was published. It raised important questions about partition. It was this more than anything else, feels Altaf, that made it impossible for her to continue to live in Pakistan. So she returned to India and permanently settled there.

Similarly, Sahir Ludhianvi, a much-loved romantic poet, had settled down in Lahore in 1943, where he worked for a number of Urdu magazines. Everything was going well until his writings, influenced by communism, appeared in Savera. A warrant for his arrest was put out by the Government of Pakistan. In 1949 Sahir fled to India and never looked back.

Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, the magical classical singer, was a Pakistani citizen. He became so disillusioned by the apparent apathy towards him and his art in Pakistan that he applied for and was granted a permanent Indian immigrant visa in 1957-58. He migrated to India where he lived happily till his death. Perhaps all who migrated to India lived a full life and were conferred with awards and affection.

On the other hand, Saadat Hassan Manto, whose acerbically crafted stories of the partition still evoke and define the tragedy, migrated to Pakistan after 1947 where he was tried thrice for obscenity. Disheartened and financially broke he died at the early age of 42.

Zia Sarhadi, the Marxist filmmaker who made memorable films like Footpath and Humlog was a celebrity in Bombay when he chose to migrate to Pakistan. Rahguzar, his first movie there, turned out to be the last he ever directed. During Gen Ziaul Haq’s martial law he was picked up by the army and kept in solitary confinement in terrible conditions. The charges against him were sedition and an inclination towards Marxism. On his release he left the country to live in the UK never to come back.

The scholar poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz was arrested in 1951 under the Public Safety Act and charged in the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case. Later he was jailed for more than four years.

Ustad Daman, the popular Punjabi poet, had a charisma of his own. His radical views landed him in jail on one occasion following the discovery of a bomb planted in his room by his detractors. Pandit Nehru wooed him to take Indian citizenship but he stayed put in Pakistan in spite of the challenges he faced.

It was common to find Pakistanis seeking refuge in India right up to Ziaul Haq’s martial law regime. Indira Gandhi ensured that the special guests were well looked after. In the 1990s, the tide turned and this is what the excessively nationalist among Indian intellectuals fail to accept. They seem to have little idea of how deeply the rise of the rightwing in India corroded the very idea on which their country was founded.

The events in Ayodhya found a bewildered Jyotindra Nath Dixit, a fine diplomat who was foreign secretary when the Babri tragedy happened in December 1992, telling his team to simply admit to the worried world that the Indian dream had suffered a setback, not a reversal. Was he right? Time will tell.

Perhaps it is already too late. The rightwing rumblings in India, a country many Pakistanis till recently saw as an escape from Zia’s bigotry, was beginning to look like a replica of Pakistan. That’s how Fehmida Riaz, sensitive to India’s Nehruvian tryst, not the least because she had found refuge there through much of Zia’s military excesses, was moved to speak up. She wrote:

‘Tum bilkul hum jaise nikle? Ab tak kahaan chhupe thay bhai?
Wo ghaamadpan wo jaahilpan jisme humne sadi gawaee
Ab pahonchi hai dwaar tumharey? Arey badhaee, bahot badhaee.’

(And so you too turned out like us brother? How well you masked your bigotry. The easy ignorance, the rabid delinquency we nurtured for decades [in Pakistan], is knocking on your doors. Well done my friend, what else can I say?)

On one occasion when Fehmida was reciting the poem at a mushaira in Delhi, an enraged army officer believed she was insulting his patriotism and he whipped out a pistol. She was quickly rushed out and escorted to the safety of her hotel room.

The Lata-Rafi fan club is substantially curtailed today. Along with it the era of their multicultural representation of India has all but waned. It would strike anyone from that era as something odd to read a newspaper headline, as one did on Wednesday, news to the effect that the Indian government wants to correct the absence of an Islamic motif from the Commonwealth Games due in October in Delhi. Surprisingly, secular activist and lyricist Javed Akhtar was among those who advised the government’s move.

“Critical of the absence of any reference to ‘Islamic influence on Indian history’, in either the opening or closing ceremonies of the Commonwealth Games, (an empowered) Group of Ministers has asked the Games organisers to provide a ‘true’ representation of India’s inclusive culture by weaving this in.”

The Indian Express report may not impress all the Muslims of India of course. A few of them were busy applauding some of their own in Kerala who had happily chopped off the hand of a Christian teacher they accused of blasphemy. Fehmida Riaz was not wrong. Nor were Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammed Rafi — in creating their magic, which mostly seems to work despite the odds against it.

Jawed Naqvi