A few years ago, I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner where one other person was present. This man, who was quite young, was a singer and after dinner performed for about an hour. He sang without music and, given that there wasn’t much of an audience, with feeling and enthusiasm.

After he finished he spoke about his life and his work and how he wanted to find work in Bollywood. He was living as a paying guest, which means someone who rents a room in an apartment.

He was Kailash Kher, and when he became popular with his first hit, Allah ke banday, neither I nor his host that night was surprised. Because Bollywood is so dominant as a cultural presence in our lives, we feel close to its singers, especially the older ones.

Kishore Kumar was eccentric in a wonderful way. His screen character was often unscripted and he would take off as he might otherwise in life. I suspect much of his role in the great movie Padosan was improvised as the camera rolled.

Kishore was wary of Bollywood’s producers, who would lie and delay payments, trying to make them as close to release as possible. This is because if the film flopped, they could ‘put up their hands’ (haath ooper kar dena), as we say in India, and claim that they had lost too much money to be able to pay. If the film worked, there was no problem. So producers would share their risk with the performers but not, naturally, the profit.

Often, to get the singer or actor into the studio, promises were made (‘I will pay you today for sure’) and then broken. Kishore had an assistant, I think it was his driver, who would have to be given the money. Mid-way through his performance, Kishore would check with that man, who would signal if the money had not been paid. If it hadn’t, Kishore would walk out in style. But ‘walk’ isn’t the appropriate word here. Once he had to do somersaults on the ground to act out a scene. As the assistant signalled in the negative, he continued somersaulting as he left the set and into his car. Another time he was singing and walked out of the set still singing and into his car, still singing, and waving at the crew as he departed.

With all his lunacy, he was an outstanding singer. Manna Dey was classically trained and he sang the Sholay duet Yeh dosti with Kishore in 1974. He says he was so awestruck by how effortlessly Kishore began the song that he gawped at him and almost missed his cue.

Kishore sang his first song in 1948, when he was 19, for Dev Anand’s Ziddi. He told Lata Mangeshkar later: “We happened to be on the same local train. You got off and I got off. You got into a tanga, so did I. You stopped at Bombay Talkies Studios, and so did I. You thought I was following you.”

He did follow her, and they sang some of Bollywood’s greatest songs together.

Kishore was the voice of the 1970s and 80s. He had a lighter touch than Mohammad Rafi, and his voice was able to communicate modernity better. I accept that this is subjective, but I point to the fact that most ‘remixes’ that have appeal today feature Kishore rather than Rafi. This might also be because R D Burman often chose Kishore over Rafi, and by the time R D peaked, in the 70s, Rafi was already in decline (he died in 1980).

The man who used Rafi best was, I think, Bollywood’s greatest composer, O P Nayyar. My favourite Rafi songs are Pukarta chala hoon main (Mere Sanam, 1965), and Tumne mujhe dekha, though the latter is an R D Burman song from 1966’s Teesri Manzil.

There is something old-fashioned and charming about Rafi and his voice. His songs belong to an idyllic world. I also think Rafi invests his songs with more emotion than Kishore.

The third singer of their time was Mukesh, who sang most of Raj Kapoor’s songs. When he died in 1976, my mother wept and I couldn’t understand why at the time. Raj Kapoor said he had lost his voice, and that now seems a little theatrical. I have never liked Mukesh’s voice.

For fifty years, the only two female voices in Bollywood were the sisters Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar. So dominant have they been that Lata recounted how in 1955, she signed an autograph for a little boy who turned out to be R D Burman. A few years later, in 1961, he directed her in his first movie Chhote Nawab. He was 22 years old. Lata says that when she heard the opening bars of the song (Ghar aaja ghir aaye badra saanwariya) she knew he was special.

R D Burman died in 1994 and Lata sang for years after that.

Both sisters were classically trained, and I prefer Asha. A Pakistani writer once called her the more versatile of the sisters and I agree.

O P Nayyar never used Lata. This is thought to be because of some sort of pettiness but I think it might have been because he thought she sang too high.

These were singers from what is called the Golden era of Bollywood, which ended in the 1980s (Kishore died in 1987), and a new batch of singers and actors appeared after that.

Udit Narayan was popular in the 1990s as Shah Rukh Khan rose, but has been forgotten now and is voice is considered old-fashioned.

Bollywood has fallen in love with what it calls ‘Sufi’ music. This means anything that sounds like a Nusrat song.

Rahat Fateh Ali Khan is used by many composers, including Vishal Bharadwaj, for such songs, but I do not think he has control.

Sonu Nigam came to Bollywood to act. After that didn’t work out, he turned to singing. A composer in Bangalore who works for South Indian movies said to me that the reason so many Bollywood singers (who would be singing words they didn’t understand) were used in Tamil and Telugu movies was that southern singers all had the same sort of voice. This was in the style of the singer S P Balasubramaniam. This composer told me, and I was startled, that the best singer around was Sonu Nigam.

It seems to me, and I could be wrong, that music is less important to the success of a Bollywood movie now than before. One indication of that is how little money is spent on a song. The richness of a full orchestra is never heard in our music any longer and, most times, it’s just a couple of people on a keyboard synthesiser and drums.

I wonder what happened to all those violinists who had work 30 years ago.

Kailash lives in a large bungalow now, but Bollywood’s singers are actually paid very little money by producers. It isn’t more than a token Rs500 or Rs1,000 per song, and sometimes it isn’t even that.

This is because the producers expect that the singers will make their money from performances. Most of them do, and Kailash is rarely home, because he is constantly touring the world for his stage shows.

This scheme works only if the film’s music is a hit and for that to happen the composer and lyricist, both of whom are paid more than the singer, should have also done a good job.

The music directors Shankar Ehsaan Loy do not charge the producer a single rupee. Instead, they are given the rights to the music, and they make their money entirely out of mobile phone downloads. Indians love having Bollywood songs as their ringing tones and as background music for the person calling.

This activity, because it is conducted through mobile phone operators, has affected piracy and music is much more likely to be licensed these days, which is a great thing.

Singers do not get any of this money and sometimes they are also denied the stage. Sukhwinder Singh was the man who actually sang Jai Ho in Slumdog Millionaire, but A R Rahman did not take him along at the Oscars and decided to sing on stage himself, and that was petty of him.

Kailash married last year and his wife just had a son, capping off his success. He is quite wealthy now and of course very famous. But he hasn’t changed much and every so often he telephones and asks me to come over. “I will sing for you,” he says.

The columnist is writing a book on the changing world of servants in India, to be published by Random House. Email: aakar.patel@gmail .com