The king of Tragedy and the queen of Melody

Dilip Kumar notoriously never attended a musical session. A typical method actor, he would go to the studio for work and head home immediately thereafter. The strain of his roles would be too much to bear.

At the other end of the spectrum was Lata Mangeshkar. Another introvert, she would be confined to the boundaries of her sound studio and spend her free time at home. Between the two, they ruled Hindi cinema for a majority of the first 50 years after independence. Yet, like planets that never intrude in each other's orbits, they never ventured into the other's studio work.

This changed in the mid-1950s. It was for Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Musafir (1957) that the twain would meet.

The film was based on three short stories written by Ritwik Ghatak and Hrishikesh Mukherjee. For one song in the film, 'Laagi Naahi Chhoote Rama', Salil Chowdhury managed to coax Dilip Kumar to sing. The catch was that it would be a duet with Lata Mangeshkar.

The man who had taken on Saratchandra Chattopadhyay's epic tragedy just two years earlier with aplomb reportedly tried to wriggle his way out of this challenge.

Not that Dilip Kumar was incapable of singing. The actor was professionally trained in classical music and had wished to be a singing actor at a time when the quality was a necessity in the film industry; the arrival of playback singing put paid to that wish. For the role of a musician in Kohinoor (1960), he even learnt the basics of one of the more complex instruments in Hindustani music, the sitar.

In fact, it was Dilip Kumar who suggested the raga for the song to Salil Chowdhury. In the words of the music director, “Dilip himself handpicked the tune... Dilip had been practising this thumri for long hours on the sitar, I merely gave the tune an orchestral rounding.”

Even so, the challenge of standing alongside Mangeshkar was intimidating for him. Speaking of the event, Chowdhury would say in an interview: “Dilip even tried to shy away from the recording at the eleventh hour. We had to give him a peg of brandy before he ventured to stand up to Lata!”

Unbeknownst to Dilip Kumar and the music director, the songstress had her own axe to grind. In 1948, when Lata Mangeshkar was still a newcomer, she had heard Dilip Kumar make fun of her Urdu diction on a train journey. It stung her no end and spurred her to practise her diction for hours before every song. Her pronunciation soon improved to such an extent that the indomitable Jaddanbai, mother of Nargis and a famed singer in her own right, called Lata to praise her command of Urdu. Now, the songstress wished to take on Dilip Kumar on her home ground, singing.

For those who may not have heard Dilip Kumar sing, the song is a pleasant surprise. The actor's voice has a deep, rich timbre that add to the melancholic lyrics of the song. Against him, Lata Mangeshkar's fresh, sweet lilt echoes to pitch perfection.

But this perfect intonation hurt Dilip Kumar. Actors are notoriously vain, and no performer of Dilip Kumar's stature would have liked to be upstaged. Thorough professionals, they finished the song in immaculate style. However for the next 13 years, there was a frosty silence between them.

The next time they met was in 1970. Dilip Kumar was almost into semi-retirement and assured of his permanent position among the greats of Indian cinema. Lata Mangeshkar herself had reached the pinnacle and was heralded as the 'queen of melody'. Each comfortable in their zone, they finally found peace with the other.