Mohammed Rafi was born in 1924 in Kotla Sultan Singh, near Amritsar, and grew up in Lahore, where his elder brother had a barber's shop. He sang his first film song in a Punjabi film made in Lahore, and moved to Bombay in 1944.
Over the next thirty-five years he sang thousands of songs in Hindi and many other languages, devotional and romantic, comic and tragic, and became one of the most loved voices of Indian cinema. When Partition came, he chose to stay in India.
He died in Bombay in 1980, and enormous crowds followed his funeral.