Surinder Kaurਸੁਰਿੰਦਰ ਕੌਰ

Early life

Surinder Kaur was born on 25 November 1929 in Lahore, then the capital of undivided Punjab, into a family of eight children. Her elder sister Parkash Kaur, ten years her senior, was already showing musical promise, and together the two girls were placed under the tutelage of the classical masters Ustad Inayat Husain and Pandit Mani Parshad. The sisters mastered the intricacies of the Indian scale with a command that set them apart from their contemporaries.

In August 1943, at thirteen, Surinder gave her first live performance on Lahore Radio. The following year she and Parkash cut their first gramophone record for HMV, the duet "Maavan Te Teeyan Ral Baithiyaan". The record made them household names; soon no Punjabi wedding was complete without their songs spinning on hand-wound gramophones.

Partition and Bombay

The Partition of 1947 forced the family to leave Lahore for Delhi, and Surinder later moved to Bombay, the centre of the Indian film industry. Introduced by the music director Ghulam Haider, she began work as a playback singer. For the 1948 film Shaheed she recorded "Badnam Na Ho Jaye Mohabbat Ka Fasaana", a song that remains one of her most remembered Hindi film numbers.

But the film world never fully held her. Her heart lay in Punjabi folk and in live performance, and in 1952 she left Bombay and returned to Delhi. There she married Joginder Singh Sodhi, a lecturer in Punjabi literature at Delhi University. Sodhi became the guiding force of her career: he chose her lyrics, and the two collaborated on compositions. "He was the one who made me a star," she would later say.

The voice of Punjabi folk

Working with her husband, Surinder Kaur built a repertoire that defined Punjabi folk music for a generation. She sang the verses of contemporary poets, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Amrita Pritam, Mohan Singh, and Nand Lal Noorpuri, giving the world enduring songs like "Chan Kithe Guari Aai Raat", "Lathe Di Chadar", "Shonkan Mele Di", and "Gori Diyan Jhanjran Sarke-Sarke Jandiye Mutiare". Her wedding songs, especially "Suhe Ve Cheere Waleya" and "Kaala Doria", became inseparable from Punjabi marriage celebrations.

She also carried the Sufi tradition, singing the kafis of Bulleh Shah with a devotion that the qawwali legend Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan admired. He regarded her as a pioneer preserver of the Punjabi folk tradition. Her daughter Dolly Guleria followed her into music, and in 1995 the family released the album Surinder Kaur: Three Generations.

Honours and legacy

Recognition came in full measure: the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1984, an honorary doctorate from Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar in 2002, and the Padma Shri in 2006. By then she had been singing professionally for more than six decades, her career stretching from the hand-wound gramophone to the compact disc.

Surinder Kaur died on 14 June 2006 in New Jersey in the United States, at the age of seventy-six. The title she carried through life, the Nightingale of Punjab, had been earned many times over: she had taken the folk songs of village Punjab and made them the shared inheritance of Punjabis everywhere.