Ten years ago, on May 25, Laxmikant, the senior half of Hindi cinema’s most prolific, variegated and enduring composing entity – Laxmikant-Pyarelal – passed away.

In this age of media-hype, lobbies and general lack of awareness, the film industry has all but forgotten that short, stocky, genial man who spun out five completely different tunes for one song in minutes, never lost either his cool or that easy paan-stained smile, and has yet (with Pyarelal) given more to Hindi films, stars, singers and music itself than any single composing entity. But as a lyricist perceptively pointed out, “More L-P songs will be sung centuries later as folk than anyone else’s, the way a Raghupati Raghav Rajaram is sung today.”

His early days

Laxmikant was born to a nurse and a musician who passed away at a premature age. His mother, Anandi, remarried so that her children could get a good childhood, and Kudalkar was an affectionate and caring - in fact an ideal stepfather. And yet the economic picture wasn’t rosy.

Laxmikant and his elder brother Shashikant (who later was L-P’s permanent chief assistant in charge of rhythm) began to learn the mandolin and the dholak respectively and Kudalkar was strict with them too, for he would lock them up in their one-room-kitchen home when he went to work, so that their riyaaz would go on for 12-14 hours daily, even if it often meant sore or bleeding hands. The result was that the brothers emerged among the country’s aces with their instruments.At the age of nine, Laxmikant became the youngest musician at song recordings, being made to sit on a box on the organ so that the composer and conductor would sight the boy!
It was at these recordings that another young boy would play the violin - Pyarelal, the son of music wizard Pandit Ramprasad Sharma. The two struck a friendship and later acted as child artistes in Hindi and Gujarati films to earn extra money.

Laxmikant and Pyarelal later became assistants to Kalyanji-Anandji and so their names were first sighted in the early K-A hit like Mehndi Lagi Mere Haath (1962).

Laxmikant considered music director Jaikishan (of Shankar-Jaikishan) as his idol, later copying his way of dressing and talking and looking out for a match for Hasrat Jaipuri after S-J objected to this poet working with L-P on two early songs. And Laxmikant found him in Anand Bakshi (beginning Mr X In Bombay in 1965).

Ever confident, Laxmikant told the then-top name S Mukerji (incidentally Kajol's grandfather) that they would become numero unos within five years when Mukerji in the mid-60s ridiculed them with “Why should I give you a film when 25 music directors are ahead of you?” And L-P replaced S-J at the top in 1969, to unshakably remain numero unos till 1993 despite turbulences like R D Burman and Rajesh Roshan in the 70s and Bappi Lahiri in the 80s!

The businessman

Laxmikant’s early struggles saw him emerge as a strange mix of businessman and an altruist. He devised the strategy of approaching big filmmakers attached to senior composers by telling them that they would work for a fifth of what they were paying their composers but would give as good or better music, a strategy then criticised as manipulative. “But they all stuck on to us only because we kept our promise of quality!” reasons Laxmikant.
On the other hand, in 1998 when they had lost ground, Laxmikant opted for a singer facing rough times – Mohammed Aziz – rather than a top name. Very often, songs that did not really need large orchestras found L-P using 100-125 musicians, and Laxmikant would smilingly explain, Bechare musicians ka ghar chalta hai.
Within L-P’s team would also be found names from the past– Marathi master composers like Srinivas Khale (Shankar Mahadevan’s guru), Prabhakar Jog and S-J’s assistant Dattaram – who had fallen on bad times. They were all employed and yet given the respect merited by seniors.

Even today, singers rave about the unique way Laxmikant taught them a song, and also encouraged them when they went wrong. “He never yelled at us or criticised,” recollects Nitin Mukesh, most of whose hits were with them (Kranti, Tezaab, Eeshwar). “If I did not match up, Laxmiji would say, “First class! But there are some parts where you can do better. Ho jaayega, don’t worry, we will do it again!” Laxmikant had obviously learnt the right lessons from watching seniors demoralise singers and musicians.

A Laxmikant gift was also his uncanny assessment of singers’ potentials. “He brought me out of the ghazal mindset by insisting I could sing a full-throated breezy teasing song in Gumrah – Main tera aashiq hoon,” raves Roopkumar Rathod.

It was Laxmikant who could visualise Lata singing the sensuous cabaret (Intequam, Night In London) as well as disco (Naseeb) and make Kishore Kumar dabble and dazzle in ghazals (Mehboob Ki Mehndi, Deedaar-E-Yaar), qawwali (Anokhi Ada) and mujra (Dushmun).

“Laxmi was an amazing blend of talent, speed and range,” said Manoj Kumar, even as Manmohan Desai ranked L-P as ‘Numbers 1 to 10’. Says Subhash Ghai, “Till they were around, they did all my movies because they could do any kind of film. Today, I have to select the right music director for each subject!”

In the 90s, Rahman showed that if a song had merits, its singer was irrelevant. L-P, for 36 years, highlighted the more creative side of this - that a music director (as frequently happened with others) should never be singer- or even lyricist-dependent. They remain the only composers to deliver singer-based hit scores (Shailendra Singh in Bobby, Manhar in Hero, Kavita in Chaalbaaz et al) with the widest spectrum of voices, which explains why they remained toppers even after their own favourites Mukesh, Mohammed Rafi and Kishore Kumar passed away and Lata Mangeshkar stopped singing for them in the late 80s.

On the other hand, Laxmikant introduced Shailendra Singh, Narendra Chanchal, Kavita Krishnamurthi-Subramaniam, Sukhwinder Singh, Roopkumar Rathod and S P Balasubramaniam (in Hindi films) and gave Manhar, Nitin Mukesh, Suresh Wadkar, Sudesh Bhosle, Pankaj Udhas, Mohammed Aziz, Alisha Chinai and Ila Arun their career-defining breakthroughs.

Changing with the times was a Laxmikant-Pyarelal hallmark, another key reason for their long reign. In fact, L-P broke trends set by others and replaced them with their own, the most spectacular being using Kishore Kumar (friend R D Burman’s pet) to ward off the professional threat by their buddy in the early 70s, bringing back Rafi in 1977 with Amar Akbar Anthony or annihilating the disco-Padmalaya Bappi Lahiri wave in the mid-80s with Pyar Jhukta Nahin.

Known as composers completely rooted in Indian ragas and folk while R D Burman and Bappi Lahiri remained the trendy westernised names, Laxmikant and Pyarelal remain the only composers to win an award for a disco-based score, and Karz remains a cult album even in the millennium!

Quite simply, they don't make them like Laxmikant (and Pyarelal) anymore. 

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