Jagjit Singh

The chart puts four of his ten planets in earth signs, with two apiece in fire, air and water. Earth builds and keeps at it, and nothing else here is scarce. Singh sang ghazals, and the record says he brought the form to a wide audience.

The Sun sits at nineteen degrees of Aquarius with Venus near the start of the same sign, and Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus group across fourteen degrees of Taurus. Aquarius stands outside the arrangement it finds; Taurus will not be hurried off a note. For a singer who took a classical form to people who had not been listening to it, the detached Sun is the half that saw the gap and the Taurus group is the half that did the slow work of filling it.

Jupiter sits conjunct Saturn at half a degree, scale fused to the planet of limit, which is the pairing that lets somebody widen a thing without loosening it. Mars stands at a strained angle to both of them inside a third of a degree, so drive is pressed against the whole arrangement. The Moon is held at an awkward angle to Venus at a fifth. Neptune and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. In a singer widening a classical form, scale fused to limit is the pairing that lets it be opened up without being loosened.

He died in Mumbai on 10 October 2011, at seventy. Jupiter stood on its own birth degree that day within half a degree, so a Jupiter return closed as the life did, and it sat conjunct his natal Saturn within a degree as well. Uranus, which rules his Aquarius Sun, stood square his natal Moon at a ninth of a degree. The Moon that day was gibbous and ninety seven per cent lit, a phase that refines and questions and rarely calls anything finished. The Sun had reached Libra, which returned it to the element of his natal Aquarius.