- Lived:
- 28 September 1929, Indore → Bombay (Mumbai), where the life and the work both happened, for eight decades
- Field:
- playback singing — the Hindi film song above all, with recordings across dozens of Indian languages
- The Big Idea:
- For roughly sixty years she was the singing voice of very nearly every Hindi film heroine — the most familiar sound in India — and she used that position to force a reluctant industry to print singers' names on records and, eventually, to share the money the songs earned.
- In their words:
- she kept the creed short all her life — the song belongs to the character on the screen, and the singer's job is to disappear into it (her constant refrain in interviews; her exact words are kept to a minimum here for copyright).
- If you remember one thing:
- A thirteen-year-old who became her family's breadwinner in 1942 became the voice of the republic itself — and then, at the height of her fame, risked all of it to insist that the people who make the music deserve a share of what it earns.