Born Geeta Ghosh Roy Chowdhuri in 1930 in Faridpur, East Bengal, she was twelve when her family resettled in Bombay, and not yet sixteen when the music director Hanuman Prasad, passing beneath her flat in Dadar, heard her singing to herself on the balcony and cast her in Bhakt Prahlad (1946). A year later, S.D. Burman's "Mera Sundar Sapna Beet Gaya" made her, at 17, the era's top playback voice. She married the director Guru Dutt in 1953, sang the aching centerpieces of his films, and after his 1964 suicide drank herself toward the cirrhosis that killed her in 1972, aged 41. Critics tried placing her in a lineage - K.L. Saigal, the Bengali singers before her - but her biographers converge instead: she trained herself, and, as one wrote, "made no efforts to adapt her style of singing to the established icons" of her day.

the sound in question

1959

Waqt Ne Kiya Kya Haseen SitamGeeta Dutt