In the mid-1930s a broke teenager loitering by a Peshawar paint shop kept humming along to a neighbor's gramophone, teaching himself to sing by ear from the ghazals of composer Rafiq Ghaznavi. Ghulam Mustafa Durrani ran off to Lahore with 22 rupees, drifted through All India Radio in Delhi and Bombay, and in 1935 was spotted by filmmaker Sohrab Modi for a bit part as a court singer. His real break came in 1940: Ghaznavi, by then a Bombay music director, talked his old teacher's pupil into cutting Bahurani, one of Hindi cinema's earliest playback sides, on condition his name stayed off the label. Durrani's light, unhurried tenor — pointedly not K. L. Saigal's style — made him the era's top male voice through 1951, and its clearest heir, a young Mohammed Rafi, later called him his idol.
Durrani named the debt without hedging: "its music director was my Guru, Rafiq Ghaznavi," he told the outlet Cineplot, describing how the composer talked him into cutting Bahurani (1940) in secret on a Sunday night so no one at his day job at All India Radio would learn he'd moonlighted. The debt started years earlier: as a broke Peshawar teenager, Durrani taught himself to sing by imitating Ghaznavi's records overheard near a paint shop, then spent two years studying near him in Lahore before either man reached Bombay.
No known recording — Ghaznavi's 1930s ghazal sidesRafiq Ghaznavi
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1942
Duniya Mein Sab Jode JodeG. M. Durrani
listen forNo Ghaznavi vocal side from his 1930s Lahore-and-Bombay years has surfaced online, so the comparison runs one-sided: cue up Durrani's breakout solo, "Duniya Mein Sab Jode Jode" (Sharda, 1942), and listen for the plain, unhurried phrasing he built entirely by ear — no ornate taans, no Saigal-style gravity, just a light tenor riding the tune without strain. That unforced clarity, learned off a gramophone rather than in a gharana, is what a young Mohammed Rafi later treated as his own template.