रतन बाई

Rattan Bai was an Indian actress and singer of early Hindi cinema, active mainly through the 1930s and into the mid-1940s. She made her acting debut in the New Theatres (Calcutta) production Yahudi Ki Ladki (1933), and after a dispute during Karwan-e-Hayat (1935) moved to Bombay, where her performance in Bharat Ki Beti (1935) became a major commercial success. Over the following years she worked with studios including Kolhapur Cinetone and the Imperial Film Company, appearing in Bhikharan (1935), Sarla (1936), Dhanwan (1937), and Usne Kya Socha (1937), before becoming an independent freelancer by 1938. In 1942 she also produced the film Saheli, in which she co-starred opposite Pahadi Sanyal, and appeared in Ujala, Lajwanti, and Malan the same year; her later credits include Dharm and Shri Krishn Arjun Yuddha (both 1945). She also composed and sang bhajans, which she shared among friends for Maha Shivaratri celebrations, and appeared in one Marathi film, Swarajyachya Seemewar, playing the mother of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj.

Rattan Bai was the mother of actress Shobhna Samarth, making her the grandmother of actresses Nutan and Tanuja and the great-grandmother of Kajol, Tanishaa Mukerji, and Mohnish Bahl. She died on 1 January 1986. Sources disagree on her birth year — English Wikipedia gives 15 July 1890, while some other archives (Cinemaazi, Wikidata) give 12 June 1912 in Patna — and it is unclear whether every film credited to her across sources belongs to a single individual, since "Rattan Bai" was also used as a stage name by other performers of the period.