Money talks, and she sang

In many ways, Suraiya — with her liquid voice, self-assured poise and soft yet unshakable resolve — was the feminist icon that Bollywood in the 1940s never knew it needed. And, in many ways, it still doesn’t know.

She sings like a nightingale and carries firmness otherwise reserved for baritones. She stands tall, walking into boardrooms asking for paycheques fatter than those of her male counterparts.

This is the 1940s, and India — the woman, the goddess — is first tasting freedom, while her male handlers work to build a structure where women only feel the aftershocks of perceived liberty.

Suraiya, defiant as ever, commands the screen with a melody so graceful it demands — not begs for — its worth.

The highest paid of her time, Suraiya is her own playback singer, a rarity even decades later in the 2020s. What does it mean for a woman to sing her own song, literally, in an era when women are often dubbed both on screen and in life?

In an industry directed, lit, shot, scored — and sanctioned — by men, Suraiya’s dual presence as both voice and face feels like a quiet storm. In that sense, the inconspicuous feminism of the doe-eyed siren becomes equal parts reclamation and rebellion — mustered in the honey of grace that marries the ridges and wounds of her raw, enchanting vocals.

She is best remembered today as the tawaif, Moti Begum, in Mirza Ghalib (1954) — a role not performed, but inhabited. Not a mask to put on, but layers of human guise unravelling. Her portrayal — lauded by not one but two Prime Ministers — will carry her voice across generations.

Educated, talented and astute Suraiya endures the quiet societal exile reserved for actresses of the time (the silver screen was not perceived to be a ‘moral’ profession for women back in the day). But her celebration of her implied ouster is what makes her, her.

The tawaif, in many ways, is the first free woman in modern India — though her freedom comes sans recognition. With her puritanical veil torn, she picks up the book, the instrument, and in the process, the culture. Society, however, binds her to the margins.

Suraiya inherits that defiance — but not the silence.

Her knowledge is not erased. Her power is not bartered in shadows. It walks through studio gates in the open sun.

Suraiya is not the tawaif. Suraiya is Suraiya. She is what the tawaif should have been allowed to become — a name to the grace.

It is now 2004, and Suraiya — not long before her final bow — lives alone in a Marine Drive flat. Her songs play softly somewhere in the distance — they never stop being hers.

She once had to turn down Dev Anand, and now, decades later, keeps his letters locked in a drawer. There is a kind of love that chooses solitude, a kind of fame that leaves quietly, a kind of woman who refuses to be rewritten.

That woman is Suraiya.

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