Pramila

Origins and early life

Pramila was born Esther Victoria Abraham in Calcutta on 30 December 1916, to Reuben Abraham and Matilda Isaac, a Baghdadi Jewish family — the community of Iraqi Jews that had settled in Calcutta and Bombay in the nineteenth century and gave early Indian cinema a striking number of its actresses, because Hindu and Muslim women of the time were kept from the screen.

Work and career

She was educated at a Jewish school in Calcutta and taught there briefly before going to Bombay in 1935, where she took the screen name Pramila. This fiche states plainly that she converted to Islam in 1939 on marrying the actor Syed Hasan Ali Zaidi, known as Kumar, and that she was nonetheless buried, at her own wish, in the Jewish cemetery of Bombay in 2006 — a life lived across two religions and stated here as she lived it.

She appeared in some thirty films from 1935, including Ulti Ganga, Bijli, Basant and Jungle King, doing her own stunts and riding, and in 1942 founded Silver Productions, becoming one of the first women in India to produce films; she made sixteen of them. In 1947, in the year of independence, she won the first Miss India contest. Her son Haidar Ali became an actor and screenwriter; her daughter Naqi Jahan was Miss India in 1967, so that mother and daughter both held the title.

This fiche notes plainly the hardest passage of her life: at Partition her husband went to Pakistan, and Pramila stayed in India with the children, was arrested and briefly jailed under suspicion of espionage, and was cleared. She died in Bombay on 6 August 2006, at eighty-nine, the last living link to the Jewish actresses who built the first Indian film industry.