बेगम अख़्तर

Begum Akhtar — born Akhtari Bai Faizabadi — is the undisputed sovereign of Urdu ghazal and thumri in the twentieth century. No voice before or since has wielded sorrow so precisely: her music reaches inside the listener and rearranges something. She trained under the legendary ustads Imdad Khan's descendant Ata Muhammad Khan and later Jhande Khan of Patiala, but her real teacher was life itself — poverty, illegitimacy, a difficult marriage, years of silence — and everything she had endured became music.