Muhammad Rafi was a legendary playback singer in the Hindi film industry. He was known for his soulful and emotive singing style. He has sung over 500 songs in films, and his songs have been widely acclaimed for their lyrical and emotive qualities. Kotla Sultan Singh is a village in the Amritsar district of Punjab, India, near Amritsar. It is where playback singer Mohammed Rafi was born. His fans have made numerous attempts to have a memorial built in his hometown.
Rafi was born in 1928 in a Muslim family in Delhi. He started his career as a singer on radio stations in the early 1950s and later made his debut in films in 1959. He gradually became one of the most popular playback singers in Bollywood, and his songs have been featured in many popular films over the years. Rafi was known for his versatility, lending his voice to songs ranging from classical to patriotic, sad to romantic, qawwalis to ghazals and bhajans. Rafi was the most sought-after singer in the Hindi film industry for nearly two decades. He received six Filmfare Awards and one National Film Award during his illustrious career. In addition to Hindi, he sang in Konkani, Bhojpuri, Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Marathi, Sindhi, Telugu, Kannada, Maithili, Gujarati, Magahi, and Urdu. Aside from Indian languages, he also sang songs in English, Arabic, Persian, Sinhalese, Creole, and Dutch.
He was known for his renditions of romantic ballads, including songs from the films Love in the Dark and Sadma. Rafi also scored a number of successful Hindi-language films in his own right, including Awaara and Dosti. In later years, he concentrated on playback singing for Hindi films in languages other than Hindi, including Tamil and Telugu.
According to his son, Mohd Rafi did not receive the Bharat Ratna because he was Muslim. Reiterating his father's request for the Bharat Ratna, legendary playback singer Mohammed Rafi's son Shahid Rafi said on Monday that his father did not receive India's highest civilian honor 'probably' because he was a Muslim.
He passed away in 1987 at the age of 70.
