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Suraiya

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Suraiya

The young Raj Kapoor used to teasingly call her `kallu’ when the two started out by doing children’s radio programmes for AIR. When she entered films with bit roles, Naushad had to make the barely-into-her-teens girl stand on a stool to enable her to reach the mike to playback for the much older Mehtaab, in Sharda.

Few would have predicted that this dark, plain girl, neither a classic beauty nor endowed with training in classical music, would one day become the country’s most enduring female singing superstar — Suraiya.

Indeed, this diamond in the rough of the early 40s shone by the close of the decade. Famous for her personal predilection for glittering diamonds, she had acquired a professional singing repertoire of shimmering gems too. Her honey-rich voice in songs like `Woh paas rahe ya door rahe’, ‘Tere naino ne chori kiya’, `Tu mera chaand main teri chaandni’ and the rare classical number, `Manmor hua matwala’, created hysteria. A famous fan is Dharmendra, who remembers walking miles to see Suraiya’s Dillagi 40 times! This exotic songbird had numerous lesser-known fans too, who thronged the seaface outside her Marine Drive residence every day just to catch a glimpse of her Cadillac.

There was more to Suraiya than just her songs. Gradually she picked up the rudiments of acting too. After all she had had a long apprenticeship, from playing opposite dancer Mumtaaz Ali, in the Devika Rani -Jairaj starrer Hamari Baat, to holding her own as the second lead against Noorjehan (Anmol Ghadi) and Munnawar Sultana (Dard). Yet her reign at the top was brief. In the ’48-’49 phase, with her trio of hits, Pyar Ki Jeet, Badi Behan and Dillagi, she became the highest paid female star who regularly broke hearts and records.

However, most of her 50s films flopped till she made a short-lived comeback with Sohrab Modi’s Mirza Ghalib, in which she made vivid, the role of the married Ghalib’s lover. Along with an emotionally fluid performance where her expressions of love, expectation and hurt just seemed to merge into one another, the queen of cadence also recorded what is still regarded by many as the definitive Ghalib. No less a personality than Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru praised her saying, `Tumne Mirza Ghalib ki rooh ko zinda kar diya,’ (You have brought Mirza Ghalib to life).

After ,Mirza Ghallb, Suraiya retreated into a fantasy world surrounded by her family who still called her ‘baby’ and who led her to believe that the tourist crowds at Marine Drive had in fact come to see her. While at the top, Suraiya had had the power to bestow her favours on a young Gregory Peck look- alike, Dev Anand, and to do seven films with him without a single hit. Their love story was the stuff legends are made of but Suraiya’s strict grandmother put her foot down hard and threw Dev’s ring into the sea. Suraiya too was not ready to give up her position and the wedding bells failed to ring out.

Suraiya lived in her apartment on Marine Drive in Mumbai until her death in 2004 at age 75.

Singing Stars