Shamshad Begum

Born: 14 April 1919

Died: 23 April 2013

• She was an Indian singer who was one of the first playback singers in the Hindi film industry.
• She had a distinctive voice and was a versatile artist, singing over 6,000 songs in Hindi and Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil and Punjabi languages and of them 1287 songs were Hindi film songs.
• She worked with maestros including Naushad Ali, S. D. Burman, C. Ramchandra and O. P. Nayyar.
• Her songs from the 1940s to the early 1970s remain popular and continue to be remixed.
• She gradually became a recluse and devoted herself entirely to her grandchildren, to the point that the general public was unaware of whether she was alive or dead.
• In 2004, a controversy erupted in the media, when several publications wrongly reported that she had died a few years previously.
• Her family clarified in a press release that this was not so; and it later emerged that the Shamshad Begum who had died in 1998 was Saira Banu’s maternal grandmother.
• Her self-imposed seclusion is remarkable, because during all those decades away from the public eye, her old songs remained popular with the public and not a day passed without at least a couple of songs being played on Vividh Bharati and All India Radio.

click here for more details