Zohrabai Ambalewali

Contralto; one of the most recorded voices of the early 1940s (1918-1990)

Zohrabai Ambalewali came from Ambala and had a deep, square, classically-trained contralto - a voice with weight in it, nothing like the light high sound that became the standard a few years later. In the early 1940s she was among the most recorded and best paid women in the industry, and her records from Rattan (1944), scored by Naushad, are the ones still played. She rejoins Naushad here for a single song, the opening Uran Khatole Pe Ud Jaoon, and she sings it with Shamshad Begum - which makes that one track worth more attention than it usually gets. Both women had the same kind of voice, both were at the top of the profession in 1946, and both were effectively finished within about five years by the same thing: a change of taste towards a lighter, higher, more ornamented delivery. Zohrabai had largely stopped recording by the early 1950s. It is a career ended by fashion rather than by any failure in it, and the duet that opens this film is one of the last places you can hear the older sound doubled. Sources disagree on her death date: the encyclopaedia and Wikidata give 21 February 1990, and one retrospective gives 1 January.