O.P.Nayyar

• Genre: Hindi
• Hometown: Lahore

About

This gifted composer created some of Bollywood's most memorable songs, but he was known as a stubborn renegade who refused to record Lata Mangeshkar and demanded high prices for his work. Nayyar was born in pre-Partition Lahore in 1926. Though he had little formal musical training, he often drew on the sounds of his native Punjab. After several false starts in Bollywood, 1954's Aar Paar for director Guru Dutt began a long and mutually beneficial collaboration which also spawned Mr. and Mrs. 55 and CID. Nayyar also took on a young singer named Asha Bhosle. Their partnership helped launch her career thanks to soundtracks for films like Naya Daur, Howrah Bridge and Ragini. But Nayyar's fortunes fell abruptly at the end of the 1950s when personality conflicts led to fewer jobs. From the '60s on Nayyar composed just a handful of soundtracks, though many of them were considered gems. In all those years, Nayyar famously never recorded Lata Mangehskar because he considered her "thread-like" voice too thin for his compositions.

- Sarah Bardeen