Shankar Jaikishan

Shankar Jaikishan (also known as S-J), were a popular and successful Indian composer duo of the Hindi film industry, working together from 1949 to 1971. They are considered to be among the greatest and first composer duo of the Hindi film industry. Later, Shankar continued to function as a Music Director alone, still giving music under the banner Shankar-Jaikishan, till 1986.

Shankar-Jaikishan, along with other artists, composed "everlasting" and "immortal melodies" in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Their best work was noted for being "raga-based and having both lilt and sonority".

S-J formed a core team with lyricists Shailendra (himself regarded as perhaps the greatest of his ilk) and Hasrat Jaipuri and with singers Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. SJ had two other lifelong companions who worked as their assistants: Dattaram Wadkar and Sebastian D'Souza, the former supervising their rhythm section and the latter writing musical notations for all SJ compositions (during SJ's musical sittings as can be seen in a number of photographs of such sessions) and then rehearsing all the musicians of the grand SJ orchestra according to SJ's compositions and directions. SJ also patronized the immensely talented singer Manna Dey, who sang his best songs with them and used Mukesh's silken voice as playback for Raj Kapoor. Among the directors, they worked most closely with Raj Kapoor and were considered the kingpins of his legendary banner RK Films.

They were commercial geniuses in addition to be wonderfully god-blessed in music. They led the Bollywood music in spite of tough competition from maestros like Naushad, C Ramchandra, Roshan, SD Burman, OP Nayyar, Salil Choudhury and Madan Mohan and remained on the top much to the chagrin of very highly talented music directors!

S-J worked with almost all singers of their time. They had a good working relationship with all of them and were masters in extracting the very best from every one of them. They were steady as a team with Hasrat Jaipuri and Shailendra as their lyricists; but after the demise of Shailendra, they worked with a host of other lyricists such as Indeevar, Gulshan Bawra, Gopaldas Neeraj, Verma Malik, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Vithhal Bhai Patel and Rajinder Krishan, to name a few.

S-J were the "house composers" for RK Films and were on their pay-roll till the end. Raj Kapoor used to maintain a music bank where he stored compositions of S-J. Even after the termination of the professional association between Shankar and Raj Kapoor (Jaikishan had died by then), the latter had used a number of S-J's earlier compositions (which were in his custody) for all his films though the credits were given officially to other composers, e.g., Laxmikant-Pyarelal (Bobby, Satyam Shivam Sundaram, Prem Rog) and Ravindra Jain (Ram Teri Ganga Maili). S-J also worked with other stars like Shammi Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar, Dev Anand, Sunil Dutt, Kishore Kumar, Manoj Kumar, Biswajeet, Joy Mukherjee, Dharmendra & Manoj Kumar. Beside them S-J combo worked above all of with Mohammed Rafi and secondly Mukesh, and produced numbers of hits and unmatchable gems. Mohammed Rafi was their favourite singer despite having good reputation with other playback singers of its time.

Most of S-J's films show Dattaram and Sebastian as their assistants. Dattaram handled the percussion section of the orchestra while Sebastian handled the rest. Dattaram met Shankar in a Gym when the latter was already working at Prithvi Theatre as a musician. After listening Shankar's Tabla at the Gym and being highly impressed by his virtuosity, Dattaram became his disciple and remained with S-J throughout. As recalled by Dattaram, Sebastian used to write the musical notations of S-J's compositions and also conducted the orchestra.