So who really composed 'Mile sur mera tumhara'?

A fresh controversy has erupted over the credit for composing 'Mile Sur Mera Tumhara', the national integration song that was immortalised by singing as well as national icons in the late eighties.

Late classical vocalist Pandit Bhimsen Joshi's son Jayant took to Facebook on Monday after watching an interview on a Marathi channel where well-known Marathi music composer Ashok Patki claimed he had composed the tune.

"I saw this interview where Ashok Patki has blatantly lied. The tune for 'Mile Sur Mera Tumhara' was composed by my father," Jayant wrote on Facebook. He later narrated the entire saga of the birth of the song that used to air on Doordarshan and was quite popular with the masses in those times.

"I was playing the harmonium, accompanying my father. He used the base 'Jo bhaje hari ko sada' and kept humming the tune. It was composed right before my eyes," he wrote, and wondered how Patki claimed he had given a cassette to all singers. "There was no cassette whatsoever. This is too much," he added. Jayant then went on to offer more information in his post.

"(Late PM) Rajiv Gandhi wanted a national integration song. (Actress) Tanuja's brother Jaydeep Samarth, who was (working) in Ogilvy (& Mather), (late Marathi poet) Vasant Bapat and Ogilvy's creative director Suresh Malik had come to our house with the proposal. Piyush Pandey knows this. Malik told my father that the tune should be based on Bhairavi because this raag is pretty popular across India. That was all the brief that he had. We still have the paper from Ogilvy on which the song was written," he said in the post.
"Patki was the arranger's assistant. This is pure mischief from him. Vaidyanathan and Louis Banks, too, know this. Because they composed tunes for (parts in) other languages, and music arrangements," he concluded.

You can read the full post in Marathi here:

About 'Mile Sur Mera Tumhara'

'Mile Sur Mera Tumhara' was one of the first of its kind as a national integration music video, conceptualised by Lok Seva Sanchar Parishad and promoted on Doordarshan in 1988. The video was directed by Kailash Surendranath and featured icons like - Sharmila Tagore, Kamal Haasan, Lata Mangeshkar, Mallika Sarabhai, Shabana Azmi among several others.

Listen to the song here: