My ten favourite Geeta Dutt songs

Updated (links): 26 Nov 2022

Yaad karoge yaad karoge, ek din humko yaad karoge (you will remember, one day you will remember me). I wonder if Geeta Dutt ever realised how prophetic these words from her first big hit album (Do Bhai, 1947) would prove to be. She’s left such a wealth of lovely songs, sung in that rich, fluid, and incredibly beautiful voice of hers, that it is hard not to remember her, every time you think of songs of yore. She started her playback career at the age of sixteen when she sang two lines in a song for the movie Bhakta Prahlad (1946). Success came just a year later, with Mera sundar sapna beet gaya (Do Bhai, 1947). The rest, as they say, is history. Geeta Dutt was soon one of Hindi film’s leading singers, and ruled the Hindi song-waves through the 40s and 50s. She lent her lovely voice to an incredibly wide range of songs and sang everything from ballads to bhajans, club songs to ghazals, sad songs to frothy, fun numbers…

Gaban (1966)

Have you ever watched a film with an impending sense of doom, heart thumping, waiting to see how the hero makes a bad situation worse? And this when it’s not even a thriller? That pretty much sums up how I felt watching this film! All I knew before was that it was based on Munshi Premchand’s story of the same name, and that it starred my favourite onscreen couple (Sunil Dutt and Sadhana). The film’s title meant that there was to be an embezzlement (gaban = embezzlement), and knowing that it was based on Premchand’s writing made me suspect the worst. As it turns out, it is a lovely film. But if I’d known just how bad things were going to get, I could’ve stopped expecting the worst and relaxed enough to enjoy the film! So for those of you who prefer to be forewarned, here goes…