The veteran stage, radio and TV actor Mahmood Ali retired from Radio Pakistan as a staff artiste way back in 1985 but the timbre of his voice is still familiar to the ears of millions of radio listeners. His dusky, friendly and wrinkled sixty-nine years old visage is held in affection by thousands of TV viewers for the mild characters he portrays on the tube.

1985 was also the years he was awarded the pride of Performances for a career that spanned 37 years on the radio. Starting humbly, Mahmood Ali rose to be a much sought after radio artiste of great veracity.

Mahmood Ali began as a copyist at the Broadcasting house, and as such his official work ended at 5 p.m. But every day, he would be on hand to help with rehearsals of the weekly 9 p.m. radio play, Studio Number 9 and do other producer and artistes just because he

wanted to contribute to the successful broadcast of the programme. It didn’t matter when he went to his lonely home and his much more lonely bed. He had no family at that time. His mother had not been able to come to Pakistan when he migrated. And he would later get married, much later, and raise a family of four children, two boys, and two girls.

As a time went on, his involvement began to spread to other activities. If an engineer was absent, he would take over and record programmes. In drama he began with bit roles in children’s programmes, and later got parts to play in regular radio plays. Mahmood Ali’s life has been a marathon.
Syed Mahmood Ali was born in 1928 in Hyderabad Deccan.

His father died when Mahmood was only five. “It’s a miracle that I was able to matriculate. For that I have my mother’s resolve to thank.” But after that he had to fend for himself. He tried to join the Indian Navy.

Initial test he had passed in Hyderabad, but in Bombay, in final fitness test, because of a bad foot –result of a football fracture “they failed me.” But the recruiting officer was appointed a ‘civilian clerk’ in 1994.

He served there still till 1946, and as the war had ended in the pacific theater in September 1945, and the Bombay recruiting office was being wound up, he joined All India Radio with help from Anwar Behzad, then an announcer in Bombay.

Next was the year of Pakistan’s birth. Its announcement was attended with uncertainly among All India Radio’s Muslim artistes and employee. “So when the option forms came, we opted for Pakistan.

If I remember correctly, I think it was the frontier Mail that brought me and my colleagues to Lahore at an hour after midnight in July 1947.” At the railway station “Ahmad Bokhari, formerly Director General, A I R, received us with two army trucks to carry us and our belongings.” They were all housed in Government College Lahore’s servant quarters.

The bad news was that all their baggage had been looted when the train before theirs but which they had booked it was set upon at Bhatinda. Soon they were joined by more AIR Muslim employees from Delhi.

Luck now, Agra and their stations. There followed a years of joblessness, and their food would come from a langar set up by the generous Mr Bokhari, commonly known as Patras, which was his pseudonym.

On 14th August, 1948, the setting up of Karachi Radio station was announced. “I had no fare, so I role the whole way to Karachi sitting on the footboard of the train.” Liaquat Ali Khan inaugurated the transmitter.

Its broadcast could not be heard beyond Malir, but it was just a beginning. The building, planned to serve till 1958, is still functioning as a broadcast station, though much of the equipment that was added in the next few years went to the new capital, Islamabad, in 1959.

Though he was not destined to become an artiste for a long time, Mahmood Ali’s love for radio play manifested itself in other channels. He was given the duties of the house Librarian, perhaps because he was the copyist. He would lovingly prepare manuscripts of all plays, copy them laboriously and preserve them for reference.

“There were three almirahs of the size filled with my work, all arranged alphabetically.” He said, pointing at a large sized one standing in a corner of the room where, I was interviewing him in the Broadcasting house.

It must be held to his credit that even though he had retired from this organization eleven years, ago, he could use the present incumbent’s office, perhaps a former colleagues, for two hours as if it were his own.

Among the famous scribes, copies of whose work he remembers to have preserved, are such worthies as Saleem Ahmed, Chiragh Hasan Hasrat, Ahmed Bashir, Ashfaq Ahmed, Bano Qudsia and Saadat Hasan Manto. Mahmood Ali remembers Manto as a genuinely rare talent.

Manto was once told that a script was required for a play to be broadcast that very evening. With a thoughtful look upon his face, he set the Urdu typewriter before him, and lo and behold, not much later a new Manto play was in our hands.

Typically, Mahmood likes to talk of the old days. Once in 1949, when the broadcasting house was in the intelligence school premises, he heard altercating voices coming from the Tent canteen.

Coming out to investigate, he found a breaded elderly man scolding the canteen waiter. Asked as to what he wanted, he said, “I want to meet Zulfiqar Ali Bohkari.” Now, ZAB, Patras’ younger brother was broadcasting world’s living legend.

He was in those days Director General, Radio Pakistan. People didn’t mention his name without the appendages ‘sahib’, ‘janab’, or ‘Mr.’ so, a bit sternly, Mahmood asked him as to whom he himself might be. “Hasrat Mohani,” came the answer.

“Through I had never met or seen the great man, I certainly knew him by reputation. So off I flew, as it were, to the top man on the premises, Zafar Hussain, and in great agnation, cried out the great news.

In short, we took advantage of Hasrat Sahib’s coming by asking him for a ghazal. He rose to the occasion nobly and then and there composed a poem, the first verse of which was:

“Hasrat-e-yar ko yaran-e-watan bhool gaye Murgh-e-beemar ko murghan-e-chaman bhool gaye.” With his usual bedding and lota by him, Hasrat said he had made a stopover in Karachi to meet ‘old friends’ on his way to performing haj.

Once he began to perform for the voice box programmes, Mahmood Ali must have played roles in hundreds, perhaps thousands of plays in individual plays and serials, in Dekhta Chala Gaya, the ten-minute weekly eveningwear started in the midfifties, and immortalized by S.M Saleem, Mahmood played Mirza Jee, a person who appeared occasionally.

In Muft ka Jhagra too, another ten-minute serial for which serial for which Arshe Muneer will be remembered by all who had the good fortune to hear the programme, he would appear infrequently.

But in Hamid Mian Ke Haan, a Sunday morning fifteen minute family drama, Mahmood had a regular role as Ehsaan, Hamid Main’s younger brother. This programme started in 1950, and is the longest surviving:

it is till on every Friday morning but has been rechristened as Hamid Manzil. Of the Radio producers, Mahmood selects Shamusuddin Butt, Farooq Jehan Taimuri, Agha Nasir, Hamid Zaman and Rafi Peerzada as outstanding. “Shamsuddin Butt was not only a good administration, a distinguished producer, but also well read in the plays written around the world.

He had done a three-year degree course in drama from Michigan University. Though he had been there on a government scholarship, his services were not employed when PTV was set up. His friends asked him to advance his claim, but he declined, saying that his sense of personal honour didn’t permit him to do so.” Mahmood learnt a lot of his dramatic art from Butt.

Mahmood’s span of performing life is now more than 45 years long. He finds it rather difficult to recall, off the cuff, as it were, the names of plays and programmes he was a part of typically; like the rest of us, if at all he is able to remember details, they are more about the distant past than nearer times.

He says somewhat apologetically that there are fifty-two weeks in years, and he was in plays and serials almost every week from the mid-fifties to the mid-eighties at the broadcasting house, and had started appearing in TV plays much before he retired from the radio. His career on television, too, spans about three decades.

He can’t be expected to remember details. Mahmood Ali was among the cast that performed in the first ever serials of PTV --- Laila Majnu, a satire produced by Kunwar Aftab. Mahmood says he has appeared in approximately twenty serials. They include Zer, Zabar, Pesh and Shehzori, in which he played Shakeel’s father.

Ta’beer had him playing the role of Bahadur Shah Zafar. In Intezar Farmaiye, he plays a ‘mirasi’, who has become a nawab, and speaks only in s singsong tone. In Imtiaz Ali Taj’s Cacha Chhackan, produced by Zia Mohyeddin at the Rawalpindi station, he played the title role.

Bajya’s Shama gave him the role of the son the uncle of the nawab. In Ana he was Shakeel’s secretary. And he played Roohi Bano’s father in Kiran Kahani. Mahmood Ali says he must have appeared in about a hundred individual TV plays.

He has worked on the stage and in Films, too. He was in Khawaja Moinuddin’s in 1950 play Zawaal-e-Hyderabad. The plays were inaugurated by Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, and the entire earnings of the venture Khawaja Moin donated for the establishment of Bahadur Yar Jung School in Sharafabad.

In 1952 Khawaja sahib presented Lal Qilay se Lalukhet. “This story of migration became very popular.” Wadi-e-Kashmir was performed in 1954. it was performed at Katrak hall for 48 continuous shows and had to be stopped because of Indian protests.

Amey Minwala, then thirteen, was introduced as a dancer. In the Phenomenally successful Taleem-e-Balighan (1956). Mahmood Ali played the traditional barber. “In later productions I played the maulvi sahib and Qazi Wajid took over the barber’s role.”

Mahmood’s films show him as character actor. But his roles have usually been of character trying to bring some semblance of reason in the life around them. Among the more well-known of his over-a-score films are Chiragh Jalta Raha, Do Raha Aisa Bhi Hota Hai, Lori and Banjaran.

Mahmood Ali may have tried his hand at different media, and barring films, he may have achieved success in all, but the radio remains his first and strongest love. And what a love affairs it has been!