| Rajkumari Dubey & Anil Biswas in Sa Re Ga Ma Classic. Host Sonu Nigam. Rajkumari was born in 1924. She never really had the opportunity to learn to sing, but was always supported by her family. She was just 10 years old when she recorded her first song for HMV in 1934 and she started her career as a stage artiste. Vijay Bhatt and Shankar Bhatt of Prakash Pictures spotted her during one of her shows. They liked her voice and persuaded her to discontinue acting on stage as it would spoil her voice (In those days, there were no mikes and you had to shout to be heard). So she quit theatre, and became an employee of Prakash Pictures as an actress and singer. Rajkumari's first film with them was a Hindi-Gujarati bilingual called Sansar Leela Nayi Duniya. She got important roles in films like Aankh Ka Tara and Turki Sher (1933). She was the heroine Bhakt Ke Bhagwan and Insaaf Ki Topi (1934). In those days she often acted opposite Zakaria Khan (late actor Amjad Khan's father, whose screen name was Jayant). She also used to sing for popular music director Lallubhai. She began getting fed up with having to watch on her figure and decided to stick to just singing as a career. After she quit Prakash Pictures, she began playback singing for actresses like Ratnamala, Shobhana Samarth, etc. and soon she became the First Female Playback Singer of Indian Cinema. She sang many Gujarati and Punjabi songs. Even though she was not trained to sing, she was very good at picking up what her ... |
