Kuldeep Manak was born in 1951 in the village of Jalal, in Bathinda district of Indian Punjab, into a family of hereditary musicians. His gift announced itself early, and by the 1970s his name was inseparable from one form above all: the kali — a hard-driving, declamatory song that compresses an episode of Punjabi legend into a few blazing minutes.
The kali and the qisse
The kali did not begin with Manak, but he became its definitive voice. Its raw material is the qissa tradition — Heer-Ranjha, Mirza-Sahiban, Sassi-Punnun, the deeds of warriors and lovers — sung in a high, taut, full-throated style over the tumbi and dholki. In Manak's throat the form had both power and precision: he could ride a line's rhythm like a horse at full gallop and still land every syllable of the story.
His landmark records of the 1970s — above all the album Tere Tille Ton (1976), its title song looking up at the hilltop shrine of the jogi from the Heer legend — were made in partnership with the lyricist Hardev Dilgir, known as Dev Tharike Wala, who wrote hundreds of songs for him. Singer and writer together effectively set the canon of the modern kali.
Legacy
Manak died in Ludhiana on 30 November 2011. His influence is hard to overstate: the generation that built modern Punjabi popular music — in Punjab and across the diaspora — cites him constantly, samples him, and still measures itself against him. When later artists sing of the greats, his name is usually in the first line. The kali's swagger, its pride in the old stories, and its insistence that folk music can hit as hard as anything modern — that is his bequest.