Begum Akhtar

Akhtari Bai was born on 7 October 1914 in Faizabad, one of twin daughters of Mushtari and the lawyer Asghar Hussain, who later disowned the family. Her twin, Zohra, died in early childhood.

As a small girl she was drawn to the singing of Chandra Bai, a performer with a touring theatre company. Her family sent her to study with the sarangi master Imdad Khan of Patna and then with Ata Mohammad Khan of Patiala. In Calcutta she learned from Mohammad Khan and from Abdul Wahid Khan of the Kirana gharana, and finally became a disciple of Jhande Khan.

She first sang in public at about fifteen, at a concert for victims of the 1934 Bihar–Nepal earthquake, where Sarojini Naidu praised her. She recorded ghazals, dadras and thumris for the Megaphone company, and in the 1930s acted and sang in Calcutta films beginning with Ek Din Ka Badshah (King for a Day, 1933). In 1942 she sang in Mehboob Khan's Roti. She is credited variously as Akhtaribai Faizabadi, Akhtari and Begum Akhtar.

In 1945 she married the Lucknow barrister Ishtiaq Ahmed Abbasi and became Begum Akhtar. For about five years after her marriage she did not sing; in 1949 she returned to recording and to All India Radio in Lucknow, and from then on sang in concerts for the rest of her life. In 1958 she appeared in Satyajit Ray's Jalsaghar. She set many of the ghazals she sang to her own raga-based tunes and left some four hundred recorded songs. Her students included Shanti Hiranand, who later wrote Begum Akhtar: The Story of My Ammi, and Rita Ganguly.

She received the Padma Shri in 1968 and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1972. She fell ill after a concert near Thiruvananthapuram in 1974 and died in Ahmedabad on 30 October 1974. She is buried beside her mother at Pasand Bagh in Lucknow. The Padma Bhushan was conferred on her after her death, and India Post issued a stamp in her memory in 1994.

Her repertoire rested on raga: ghazals set in classical modes, and thumri and dadra in the Purab manner. Her student Rita Ganguly described a voice of about one octave that cracked at the top, a flaw she turned into her signature by shaping the music around it.