Shamshad Begum

She was born in Amritsar in 1919 into a Muslim family with no music in it, and sang at school and at weddings until, at thirteen, the composer Ghulam Haider heard her and recorded her for the Jenophone label; the records sold well and she sang on Radio Lahore and then All India Radio Peshawar and Lahore. She married a Hindu lawyer, Ganpat Lal Batto, in 1934 against both families' wishes, and kept singing. Her first film songs were for Ghulam Haider in Lahore in the late 1930s, including Khazanchi (1941), whose Punjabi-flavoured score changed the sound of Hindi film music.

She came to Bombay with Haider in 1944, and Mehboob Khan and Naushad made her their principal voice: Anmol Ghadi, Shahjehan, Mela, Andaz, Babul, Deedar, Mother India. Naushad's Kajra Mohabbat Wala (Kismat, 1968) came late in her career; before it there had been Mere Piya Gaye Rangoon for C. Ramchandra, Kabhi Aar Kabhi Paar and Leke Pehla Pehla Pyar for O.P. Nayyar, Saiyan Dil Mein Aana Re for S.D. Burman, and Teri Mehfil Mein Qismat Aazma Kar in Mughal-e-Azam with Lata.

By the mid-1950s the fashion had moved to Lata and Asha and her assignments thinned; she sang into the 1960s, retired after her husband's death in 1955 had already made her withdraw from public life, and lived quietly with her daughter in Bombay for decades, refusing interviews and photographs so successfully that for years people assumed she had died.

She was rediscovered by the press in the 2000s, received the Padma Bhushan in 2009, and died in Mumbai in April 2013, nine days after her ninety-fourth birthday.

Shamshad Begum's voice was a full, bright, nasal soprano with enormous carrying power — composers said she needed no microphone — and a natural swing that came from Punjabi folk. She sang with a smile in the tone, which is why her songs lent themselves to the festive scene, the village dance and, decades later, to the remix. The style belonged to an era before the microphone made intimacy fashionable, and she was candid that she never tried to change it.