A tribute to old Hindi film music. Songs of the 30s through the 60s.

Best duets

Best songs of 1940: Wrap Up 3

November 16, 2025

The Award for the Best Duet of 1940 goes to? If you look at the broad statistics in my Overview Post on the best songs of 1940, you would see out of total 351 songs in the year, whose singers are identified, the ratio of male solos, female solos and duets are 1:1.47:1.19. This may […]

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Female bonding and their duets

March 8, 2024

Commemorating the International Women’s Day with female duets Men may not be from Mars nor women from Venus, but there is a fundamental difference in the way the two genders bond with each other. In semi-urban settings at a party, the two genders automatically segregate, each forming their own group. We generally ascribe it to […]

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Best songs of 1943: Wrap Up 3

More balapan ke sathi-Dheere dheere aa re baadal

October 19, 2022

And the award for the best duet goes to? There is something about duets which make them exceptional. If you take a re-look at my Overview Post, six out of the eight ‘Special Songs’ are duets. There are just so many varieties in them. For example, the titles of Bhojan ke nazaarein hain and Main […]

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Best songs of 1944: Wrap Up 3

September 17, 2021

And the Award for the Best Duet goes to? In my list of 81 MEMORABLE SONGS in the Overview Post on the best songs of 1944, I counted 17 duets. This is quite a small number, but as we have seen in the reviews of other years, duets always punch above their weight. There is […]

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Ravi’s best duets for Rafi

August 20, 2019

In my last post I covered Ravi’s best solo songs for Rafi. He composed about 250 songs for Rafi, including duets. It is a huge number in absolute as well as relative terms. Only two, Laxmikant-Pyarelal and Shankar-Jaikishan, have undisputedly composed more Rafi songs than him, as can be expected. Chitragupta is in the same […]

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Duets of OP Nayyar: Part 2

December 3, 2017

Guest article by Ravindra Kelkar (Of the 223 total duets composed by OP Nayyar, the most conspicuous are male-female duets in which the male voice is Rafi and the female voice, either Geeta Dutt or Shamshad Begum or Asha Bhosle. These are 119 in number, and were the subject matter of Ravindra Kelkar’s last post […]

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Duets of OP Nayyar: Part 1

November 23, 2017

Guest article by Ravindra Kelkar (SoY readers would recall that Ravindra Kelkar has been making valuable contributions on OP Nayyar through his guest articles and, thus, filling up a gap in SoY. He has contributed three articles so far: ‘Three distinct phases of OP Nayyar’; OP Nayyar-Geeta Dutt: A peerless combination’; and OP Nayyar’s influence […]

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Best songs of 1948: Wrap Up 3

November 12, 2017

And the Songs of Yore Award for the Best Duet goes to? As per the long-term average, female solos outnumber male solos by a big margin, with duets somewhere in between. The same is true for the year 1948. My list of 114/115 MEMORABLE SONGS in the Overview post has the following break-up: Male […]

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Asymmetric Duets

August 21, 2017

Guest article by Subodh Agrawal (I have often mentioned that duets, though far less in number than solo songs, present a fascinating variety of music. One variety is on account of the lesser known female singers getting a chance to sing with major playback singers like Rafi and Mukesh, and we are richer for that […]

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Shankar Jaikishan’s duets (2)

May 16, 2017

In the first part of Shankar-Jaikishan’s duets, I covered the songs in which either Mukesh or Rafi sang with a female singer. They being the predominant singers, one would think that that post would cover most of the famous duets composed by them. But SJ were hugely talented and diversified, and played a key role […]

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