If ever Shamshad Begum had a mentor, it was Master Ghulam Haider. Gori chali piya ke desh (with Zohrabai Ambalewali) Her hero? Motilal, older by more than 20 years.Ģ. The film was the ‘adult’ debut of Nargis, born Fatima Rashid, and already famous as child actor Baby Rani. It was a triumph of sorts – Shamshad came, sang, and conquered. He also gave in to her father’s demands that she not be photographed, that he provide her with a house and car – all of which, Mehboob Khan fulfilled. It was Mehboob Khan who coaxed her into moving. Already a well-known name in her hometown, Lahore, then the hub of the film industry, she didn’t want to move to Bombay. If it hadn’t been for Mehboob Khan, the Hindi film industry would never have known Shamshad Begum. There are some unusual finds here - like GM Durrani, for instance, or Motilal. Here, in chronological order, are 15 songs, with 15 different co-artistes - both men, and women. Otherwise, the plethora of choices that confronted me when it came to Shamshad-Rafi, Shamshad-Geeta, Shamshad-Lata, or Shamshad-Asha duets were more than enough to fill a dozen posts by themselves. In my previous post, I winnowed the list down by sticking to one song per composer this time, I’m sticking to one song per co-artiste. She seems to have sung duets with *every* male singer of the era, and while she sang the most number of duets with Mohammed Rafi, she has also sung with every other female singer spanning two decades from Zohrabai Ambalewali and Amirbai Karnataki to Noorjehan, Suraiyya, Lata, Asha, Geeta, Rajkumari… the list goes on. This is the same issue that cropped up when I was listing her duets. I listed 15 of them in my previous post on Shamshad but I had many, many more. It was also interesting to note that she seemed to have sung for every music director of note, and many who were relatively unknown. Until, research threw up the interesting fact that she had sung the most number of songs for C Ramchandra, and not Nayyar Saab. Like many others, I’d also brought into the story that OP Nayyar and Naushad were the two music directors who used her voice the most. When I first began to research the songs of Shamshad Begum in order to do a post, I reckoned it would be very easy – after all, I knew her popular songs and since I had grown up listening to her, most of her songs were at least familiar to my ears.
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