Cineplot Music

Lata – Suraiya Duets

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Back to Legends – Suraiya | Back to Legends – Lata Mangeshkar
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Suraiya and Lata

Lata and Suraiya sang five duets together. Details are provided below :-

Three of these duets were composed by Husnlal Bhagtaram, which shouldn’t come as a surprise because Suraiya was one of their favorite vocalists.

Lata on Suraiya

“My eyes mist over when I remember Suraiya ji’s stardom. Oh-ho-ho ho! Kya naam tha unka. I used to just gaze at her long sleek car. I remembered her car’s number by heart. Humlog sochte thay kitne bade artiste hain. People say Suraiya ji’s death is a big loss to the film industry. But who went to see her when she was alive?”

I’ll miss Suraiya ji as a singer and a co-artiste. But more than that I’ll miss her laughter and warmth. We didn’t meet that often….but whenever we did Suraiya ji was great fun. I remember she’d go home after her shootings and then come for recordings. How simply dressed she used to be, in a light-colored salwar-kameez often with a blue dupatta when I met her after a long gap in 1983 when Noorjehan visited India , I saw Suraiya ji in a dark -colored sari with lots of ornaments….I suddenly remembered her simple appearances at out recordings….She would get down from her trademark car and join us. She had a very endearing habit. She would laugh ostensibly for no reason at all, sometimes in the middle of a take, God knows why. Even I’d join her. Once when we were singing a chorus song a third singer got annoyed by this habit of Suraiyaji’s and said, `Jab dekho hansti rehti hai. Mera gana disturb kar diya.’ But I loved her laughter.”

“Suraiya ji sang mostly her own songs on screen. She hardly did playback singing for others. In my opinion she was a very refined actress. Truly gifted…Her acting was subtle and sensitive. She always looked dignified and cultured. She was incapable of seeming faltu on screen. I remember seeing her singing a locomotive song during my childhood in a film called Station Master . All us kids had gone with our mother. For weeks and months after I’d do that train song at home with a toy train on a string.”

“In our heydays she’d be busy with her shooting all day long….I’d be busy in the recording rooms whereas she was in and out of sets….I gave up acting during my childhood. Mujhe acting ke naam pe ghabrahat si hoti thi. Suraiya was slightly older than me…I think I met her for the first time when we had to sing a duet . After that whenever we’d run into each other she was affectionate. I remember meeting her once during her heydays as an actress. When she told me she was cutting down on her acting assignments I told her not to do so. But she said she was tired of acting. `Man nahin karta hai.’

” I think she felt like a misfit after a point. At the dinner at Yusuf Saab(Dilip Kumar)’s home in honor of Noorjehan, Suraiya ji hugged me so tight . `Kitne dinon ke baad main aapko dekh rahin hoon. Kitna naam ho gaya hai aapka. Bahut khushi hai mujhe.’ She was really fond of me. I can’t claim to have been close friends with her. But whenever we met she was really warm, though mischiefmakers, the Narad Muni’s of our industry, tried to spoil our relationship. I remember they spread the rumour , `Suraiya gave Lata something to eat which has spoilt her voice.’

When press persons asked me about this I was aghast , `Suraiyaji ke baarey mein aisa kaise soch sakte hain?’ She was a star in her own right. And because she was an actress she felt no sense of rivalry with me or I with her…Come to think of it even the full-fledged professional singers of those times treated me like their own child. I was really annoyed when people tried to spoil my relations with Suraiya. Agar Lata ka galaa achcha tha to kissine galaa dabaane ki nahin sochi.

Even the hostility with singer Vani Jairam in the 1970s happened because she had been poisoned against me. Initially Vani used to come home. She was told that I said, `Agar Vani gayegi to main nahin gaaongi’. Why on earth would I say such a thing? On the contrary during an interview in London I singled out Vani Jairam as one of the promising voices. Suraiya, Vani Jairam or Runa Laila… the rivalry was attributable to dirty politics.”

“Thank God no one could spoil things between me and Suraiya ji. The last time we met was a few years ago at an awards function where I got the lifetime achievement award. Suraiya ji gave me the award.”

“I believe she died a lonely death. That really saddened me. But that’s life. There’s the story of a politician who had so many visitors his doorstep used to be strewn with chappals and shoes. Once he was out of power all the footwear disappeared. Yeh duniya ki reet hai. But everyone isn’t like that. Yusuf Saab(Dilip Kumar) regularly visits those colleagues who are no longer in the limelight. But such people are in a minority. Koi nahin milta koi nahin yaad karta.” – Subhash K Jha

Suraiya on Lata

… And Suraiya’s viewpoint should count if only because, in spite of being a contemporary singing star, she never projected herself as a Lata rival. She should therefore be acceptable as a neutral observer of the singing scene, for did she not come up with the quote to end all quotes when she said: “Noorjehan was born great, Lata achieved greatness, I had singing greatness thrust upon me.”

When did Suraiya first sense that she was no match for Lata? “It was,” reveals Suraiya, “while recording a duet with Lata for Wadia Movietone’s ‘Balam’, scored by Husnalal Bhagatram with whom I had a musical affinity since this composing duo had just given me two great silver-jubilee hits in ‘Pya ki Jeet’ and ‘Badi Behan’. Lata, so close to Husnalal, had also sung with distinction in ‘Badi Behan’, only there had been no Lata-Suraiya duet in that film. There was one now in ‘Balam’, what were its words….” Suraiya thinks for a moment and says : “Got it, it ran something like this, pick up the words as I hum: O O O pardesi musafir kise karta hai ishare. It was composed in the basic style that Husnalal knew I could take in my stride, but the moment Lata sang her first notes, I could only stand there spellbound. As i missed my cue, both Husnalal and Bhagatram had to assure me that things would work out quite okay between Lata and me in the final take. But I had the savvy to know that those were words being uttered merely to encourage me, I could see then and there that I did not have even a fraction of the vocal talent Lata so effortlessly displayed in her opening notes of O O O pardesi musafir kise karta hai ishare.”

So I asked Suraiya now to forget all about what Husnalal taught her and concentrate on what he taught Lata. Since Suraiya had sung fairly extensively for Lata’s moulder Anil Biswas, too, she was in a position to make a fair assessment, all the more so as she candidly conceded that Lata was highways ahead of her as a singer. “When you sing under masters like Khurshid Anwar, Shyam Sunder, Anil Biswas, Sajjad Hussain and Naushad, you get to know a few things,” noted Suraiya. “Like no matter what Lata might say about Ghulam Haider having spotted her, the one who really made Lata was Husnalal. No doubt Naushad took a lot of pains on Lata. But you had to see the way Husnlal worked on her. A very pleasant man was Husnalal and a very pleasant teacher. I should know, since he got so much out of me, a non-singer. I’ve sung with Lata, I’ve sung with Noorjehan, without having an iota of their talent, so you can imagine what a great teacher Husnalal must have been to have trained Lata the way he did,” pointed out Suraiya.

At this point, Suraiya returned to the theme of the duets she sang with Lata. “There was this duet composed for Lata and me by Naushad in Kardar’s ‘Diwana’; here let me hum it for you, it ran something like this: Mere chand mere laal tum jiyo hazaaron saal. You know the kind of perfectionist Naushad Saab was in the recording room, so Mere chaand mere laal was yet another duet that demonstrated to me how far behind I was, how far ahead Lata was destined to forge.”

“But let us get back to Husnalal-Bhagatram. How memory returns in a flash! I recall yet another duet with Lata for Husnalal-Bhagatram. It was in ‘Sanam’, I forgot it momentarily only because I remember from ‘Sanam’ only my Dev! Yes, my ‘Sanam’ duet with Lata, as tuned by Husnalal-Bhagatram, went something like this: Bedard shikari bedard shikari sun baat hamari arre bedard shikari. This one, I think, was recorded before my Mere chaand mere laal Naushad duet with Lata in ‘Diwana’, it was a duet that brought home to me the fact that Lata was Lata, Suraiya was not Lata, nowhere near her in fact. It was a duet in which I sensed afresh how evocatively Husnalal worked on Lata,” conculded Suraiya – (Source – Lata Mangeshkar by Raju Bharatan)

Listen!

Listen to Suraiya’s and Lata’s first duet O~ pardesi musafir (and in my opinion their best duet) from Balam (1949). Music by Husnlal Bhagatram.

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