Faridpur and Sirajgunj, separated by five hours by road, are proximal to the rivers Padma and Brahmaputra, respectively. Near these cities were born two women six months apart from each other, one on the winter of 1930 in the wealthy home of Ghosh Roy Chowdhuris of Faridpur and the other in the lettered household of the Dasguptas of Sirajgunj in 1931. There was no immediate hint that at the same time about two and a half decades later, both of them will attain immortality. But that is what happened.
Cut to 1957. Uttam Kumar, and Ajoy Kar, a leading director of Bengali cinema decide to co-produce a part-adaption of Hollywood melodrama Random Harvest (1942), with Kar as director and Uttam as the male lead. They take the idea of trauma-induced memory loss, a haunting song sung next to a “low-hanging tree branch laden with blossoms” and two lost souls desperately trying to locate love in the foggy terrains of forgetful pasts.
The film was to be called Harano Sur (The Lost Tune, 1957) and that song, germane to the film’s plot, had to surpass memorable scores, already a staple in popular Bengali cinema. They urged their composer friend Hemanta Mukherjee. Days later was born the tour-de-force ‘Tumi je Amar’ – a tilting, heart-tugging, masterly melody, which embodied, in each turn of phrase and in each undulation of the tune, the enchantment of irredeemable love. It was lip-synced by the Sirajgunj-born Roma Dasgupta, who was better known as Suchitra Sen, and voiced by that other talent from Faridpur, who had blossomed as Geeta Dutt. They were past their days of struggle, but this film (and that song) marked their moment in the sun.
1957 was also the year of Pyaasa, one of the greatest soundtracks in all of cinema and the last alliance between Guru Dutt, Geeta, who by then had married the director, Sachin Dev Burman, and Sahir Ludhianvi. It was also the year of the aborted Bengali film Gouri, which Guru Dutt had bankrolled in Cinemascope with Geeta as the female lead. By that time, Geeta had dug her heels in Bombay. Undivided Bengal’s incendiary late-colonial years had unseated the Roy Chowdhuris from Faridpur. Having lost both wealth and status, they were on the move till they arrived in Bombay and found a small apartment in Dadar Colony in 1942.
Guru Dutt in Pyaasa. Credit: YouTube
A few years later, in her late teens and having serendipitously attracted the ears of composer Hanuman Prasad, Geeta, then Roy, took the momentous decision of giving her obvious talent the sheen of a profession. Soon, she comfortably sauntered between Hindi and Bangla, seemed to be unparalleled in her range and the modulation of her voice, and had developed that uncanny ability to encrypt the temperament of a song in her voice.
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At the dawn of her career, Geeta lengthened the ‘beet’ in ‘Mere Sundar Sapna Beet Gaya’ (Do Bhai, 1947) to hint at the passage of time. Her composer Sachin Dev Burman took note as did others. The fullness of her voice and the range of her talent was also the call of modernity – adaptable, lush, urbane and free from an overriding nasal mannerism. Shyam Pathak, Basant Prakash, Bipin-Babul, Sardul Khwatra, Roshan, Ghulam Mohammed and several other overlooked composers coaxed memorable songs out of Geeta.
Just two of them – Bulo C Rani in Jogan (1950) and Mukul Roy in Detective (1958) – give a hint of the same. Then, there were the familiar names – Chitragupta, C. Ramchandra, Jaidev, Anil Biswas, Salil Chowdhury, Naushad, Ravi, Madan Mohan, Pankaj Mullick. Most of all was towering trio – O.P. Nayyar, Sachin Dev Burman, Hemanta Kumar. The last two used her in Bengali too, as did Sudhin Dasgupta, Nachiketa Ghosh and Amal Mukherjee, among others. Then there was Kanu Roy, Geeta’s last composer.
No form, no texture, no scale, not even the occasional alto or even falsetto, seemed alien to Geeta. She could subtly separate the sensuousness of ‘Yeh Lo Main Haari Piyaa’ (Aar Paar, 1954) from the flirtation of ‘Tadbir Se Bigdi Hui’ (Baazi, 1951) or the silvery seduction of ‘Jata Kahaan Hai Deewane’ (CID, 1956).
Similarly, the sprightliness of ‘Jane Kaha Mera Jigar Gya Ji’ (Mr and Mrs ’55, 1955) never got confused with the joie de vivre of ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu’ (Howrah Bridge, 1958); nor did the lament in the dirge ‘Na Yeh Chand Hoga’ (Shart, 1954) get confused by the poignancy of the bhajan ‘Aaj Sajan Mohe Ang Lagalo’ (Pyaasa, 1957). For that matter who can imagine that the romantic voice of the waltzy ‘Hum Aapki Ankho Mein’ (Pyaasa, 1957) and that of childlike abandon in ‘Aankhon Mein Tum Ho’ (Half Ticket, 1962) are one and the same?
In Bengali this range continued with equal flourish. Harano Sur was the peak of course, while Prithibi Amare Chai (The World at Large, 1957) Indrani (The Egoist, 1958), Gali Theke Rajpoth (Rags to Riches, 1959), Hospital (1960), Sathihara (Nomadic Love, 1961) are some of the other much cherished ones. For a while it looked like she would become to Suchitra what Hemanta for much of that decade was to Uttam – an aural alter-ego.
Geeta sang hundreds of songs in the 1950s and early 1960s, a large share of them laced with her signature endowment of merging her voice to the texture of the composition, giving each song a trace of individuality, a continually differing sonic code as it were. But even by the standards of this range and variety, ‘Tumi Je Amar’ apart, at least three unsurpassable illustrations embody her genus more than any other: the drunken longing of ‘Na Jao Saiyan’ (Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam, 1962), the languid lullaby of ‘Nanhi Kali Sone Chali’ (Sujata, 1959) and that epic testament to the melancholia of separation ‘Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen Sitam’ (Kaagaz ke Phool, 1959).
The last one turned out to be an inadvertent valediction to her fame too. Her marriage to the mercurial Guru Dutt was falling apart by the end of 1957. Her considerable dedication ensured that for three or four more years, she had work. But then, unable to sort her priorities between a union gone awry, a profession that required unsteady hours, and three small children, she took refuge to abject alcoholism bordering on dipsomania. It was trap of fame or fortuity (or both) that had engulfed many industry stalwarts – K.L. Saigal, Pramathesh Barua, Ritwik Ghatak, Meena Kumari.
After initially losing out in every way, she started to recuperate from a state of total eclipse by the latter half of the 1960s, cutting new albums and briefly appearing in a Bengali film. But she never attained a state of full recovery. Legend has it that when she presented herself to record ‘Mujhe Jaan Na Kaho’ (Anubhav, 1971), her last film, she was sozzled to the point of tottering. But the moment Kanu Roy handed her the microphone, she sobered up, recording a demanding song with minimal sonic support, having only her voice to realise that dreamy ode to romance.
Clearly, she was out of sorts in life but when incited, she had lost none of her verve, her fibre, or her sense of tune and scale. Not just the three stunning songs from that film, her whole life seems to have echoed the poet Shelley’s iconic proclamation – the sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. She died having found, lost and partly recovered fame, beauty, adoration, love and loyalty, though not in that order. But all of it came and went when she was 41.
On this day, 50 years ago, she passed away, succumbing to cirrhosis of the liver. Sachin Ganguly, S.D. Burman’s secretary, had told Burman’s biographer Aniruddha Bhattacharya that ‘Geeta had a Mona Lisa smile’.
Many would no doubt argue that had she lived and avoided being waylaid by one of fame’s great dangers, she could have surpassed the celebrated sisters. But this writer firmly sides with the counter-belief that for talents of overwhelming felicity, one of the rewards of untimely mortality is the evasion of withering into insignificance. Geeta was one of them. But more importantly, Geeta Ghosh Roy Chowdhuri, born close to one of the world’s greatest rivers, which had no doubt lent her the natural and inexorable capacity to inundate her life with music, inherited the gift of agelessness too. Because rivers never age.
Sayandeb Chowdhury teaches at Ambedkar University, Delhi. He is author of Uttam Kumar: A Life in Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021).