Suraiya

She was born in Lahore in 1929 and brought up in Bombay, where her uncle M. Zahoor was a film villain. She sang on children's radio, and as a twelve-year-old was given a role in Taj Mahal (1941); Naushad heard her and had her sing playback for Mehtab in Sharda (1942). She had no formal music training. Through the 1940s she acted and sang in a string of films — Tadbir, Phool, Anmol Ghadi (opposite Noor Jehan), Omar Khayyam — and K.L. Saigal, impressed, asked for her as his heroine in Tadbir, Omar Khayyam and Parwana.

In 1948–49 she had four of the biggest hits of the period in a row: Pyar Ki Jeet and Badi Behen for Husnlal-Bhagatram (Tere Nainon Ne Chori Kiya, Woh Paas Rahen Ya Door Rahen), Dillagi for Naushad (Tu Mera Chand Main Teri Chandni, Murliwale Murli Baja) and Dard. Crowds outside her Marine Drive flat needed police. Her romance with Dev Anand, her co-star in several films, ended when her grandmother forbade the marriage; neither of them spoke about it for decades.

Sohrab Modi's Mirza Ghalib (1954), with Ghulam Mohammed's score, gave her her finest work — Nehru told her she had brought Ghalib's ghazals to life — and the film won the President's Gold Medal. But the age of playback had arrived; she made a few more films, the last Rustam Sohrab in 1963, and withdrew entirely, living with her mother and grandmother in the same flat for forty years. She died in Mumbai in January 2004.

Suraiya's voice was a light, slightly husky soprano, untrained but naturally musical, with a conversational charm that suited the actress singing her own lines. She did not attempt the long classical phrase; what she had was expression — the ghazals of Mirza Ghalib are sung as if spoken — and a quality of youth and vulnerability that the camera and the microphone both caught.