Mera sundar sapna beet gaya….That sundar sapna is Geeta Dutt’s imperishable vocal virtuosity derived from her brief but brilliant career as a ghost-voice which could drive ghosts up the wall with its eerily emotional expressions. Even when she was busy being airy in her songs there was a quality of eerie infinity in Geeta Dutt’s renditions. Take for example ‘Thandi hawa kali ghata’ from Mrs & Mrs 55. It’s a song that Madhubala moved her pretty lips to. It’s a song about feeling good and breezy about life.
And yet Geeta Dutt—God bless her luminous larynx!—infused that heaviness of existence under the blithe surface.
The same is true of the immortal ‘Jaane kya tune kahi’, one of the myriad gems of heightened expression that she sang for her husband , the filmmaking genius Guru Dutt. ‘Jaane kya tune’ is a number which conveys the coquettishness and lyricism of a woman who knows the full power and impact of her femininity. And with Waheeda Rehman to convey Geeta Dutt’s expressions on screen, could the tune go wrong?
In expressing those feminine qualities, Geeta Dutt never faltered. Her full-blown fulsome and flamboyant expression of female sexuality has seldom been equaled by any singer not even Asha Bhosle.
The composers and poets of this collection seem to have conspired to make sure Geeta Dutt emerges supremely seductive on every track she sang. Her first truly successful song was for the melodic maestro Sachin Dev Burman in Do Bhai in 1947. The year when India was divided into two, Geeta Dutt sang ‘Mera sundar sapna beet gaya’, a song that split hearts into two and made the singer a force to record with.
The hits flowed smoothly, and in a row. In 1950, Geeta Dutt got a chance to display her versatility in ample measures in two antithetical mooded films Jogan and Baazi . After doing the sober and sublime Meera Bhajans ‘Ae ri main to prem diwani’ and ‘Ghunghat ke pat khol’ for Kidar Sharma’s Jogan, she quickly and fluently slipped into the smoothly sensuous paces of ‘Tadbeer se bigdi hui taqdeer bana le’ in the film Baazi.
Between Jogan and Baazi, Geeta Dutt covered the whole gamut of emotions associated with the love song. Baazi introduced Hindi listeners to the floor-show style of playback singing where the singer’s seductive throat reached down from the platform to caress the soul of the listeners who are down there in the audience with their hands raised up expectantly at the diva up there on stage.
Geeta Dutt was never-ever anything less than a diva. Whether seducing her reluctant soul-mate in ‘Na jao saiyyan chuda ke baiyyan’ or acting seductively coy before her beloved in ‘Mujhe jaan na kaho meri jaan’, the singer goes from one form of courtship to another without losing sight of the sublime undercurrents that constantly flow in a Geeta Dutt track.
Her best was of course reserved for her husband Guru Dutt’s cinema. And what a glorious gallery of ganas she created for Guru Dutt! From the tryst with sobriety in ‘Hum aapki aankhon mein’ in Pyaasa to the far-flung foray into flirtation in ‘Jaane kahan mera jigar gaya ji’ in Mr & Mrs 55 (both duets with Mohd Rafi) Geeta Dutt unplugged the vaults of her talent at will, and let her come-hither vocals flow into the tides of of the tunes created by composers who knew their jobs only too well.
From O.P. Nayyar’s crisp and coltish ‘Mera naam chin chin choo’ (one of the most re-mixed tracks in contemporary times) to Kanu Roy’s ‘Koi chupke sa aake’ , you can’t but love what Geeta Dutt does to create a world where pain dissolves into passion and where singing is more than a fleeting passion.
The songs of Geeta Dutt aren’t about art or craft, but both. She simply soothens your senses with her sensuous throat. She invites you into a kingdom of illimitable sensations, both intimate and distant. Here is a singer who knew how to create a world of teeming emotions in a song without crowding the lyrics or their emotions.
