Madan Mohan (music director)

Madan Mohan Kohli () (25 June 1924 - 14 July 1975), better known as Madan Mohan, was a famed Bollywood film music director of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He is particularly remembered for the ghazals he composed for the film industry, mainly using the voice of India's Melody Queen, Lata Mangeshkar and 'King Of Ghazals' Talat Mahmood and his favourite singer, Mohammed Rafi.

Background

Born on June 25, 1924, at Baghdad, Iraq, where his father Rai Bahadur Chunilal was working as an Accountant General with the Iraqi Police, Madan Mohan spent the first five years of his life in the Middle East. As a boy of two, Madan Mohan used to spend hours listening to gramophone records and cultivated the uncanny ability to recognize and pick up any record from a pile of hundreds. When his father had guests at home, he would ask Madan Mohan to pick a particular record from a pile and he could do so with unerring precision, leaving the visitors wonder struck as to how a tiny tot, unable to read or write, could accomplish this near impossible feat.

After Iraq won independence from Britain, Rai Bahadur Chunnilal migrated back to India. He took his family to his home town, Chakwal in Jhelum district of Punjab, now in Pakistan, and left them in the care of Madan Mohan's grandfather, Hakim Yograj- a famous doctor. Rai Bahadur Chunilal left for Mumbai for business opportunities and subsequently became a partner in the Bombay Talkies studio and then in the Filmistan studio.

Madan Mohan attended...
Read More