Chitra Singh (born Chitra Shome) is a famous ghazal singer who along with her late husband Jagjit Singh, is credited with popularising ghazal singing outside a “mehfil”. Her career took off alongside Jagjit with the launch of “The Unforgetables” in 1978. During her career, languages she has sung in are Hindi, Punjabi and Bengali.
She was born into a Bengali family which had strong interest in music. However, she was not trained formally in music. She learned most of it from listening to her mother’s music teacher. Her mother, Krishna Roy, was a great classical singer. She moved to Mumbai to become a playback singer but wasn’t successful. She met ghazal singer Jagjit Singh in Mumbai in the latter part of the sixties and they got married in 1967. The duo began their career singing jingles. They went on to work on ghazal albums like “Main Aur Merii Tanahayee”, “A Sound Affair”, “Echoes” and “Sajada”; and on devotional albums like “Krishna”, “Chirag”, “Hey Ram” and “Shabads”.
As an extremely popular Bengali singer, some of Chitra’s songs are “Ki Dile Amai Tumi?”, “Bujhini To Ami” and “Duti Mon Ar Nei Dujonar”. Few of her famous renditions in Hindi include “Yeh Tera Ghar, Yeh Mera Ghar”, “Tum Aao To Sahi”, “Woh Nahin Milta Mujhe”, “Saare Badan Ka Khoon”, and “Mitti Da Bawa”.
She has lived through a number of tragedies. She lost her husband to a stroke in 2011. Prior to that, her daughter from her first marriage, Monica, committed suicide in 2009. The worst was the death of her only child with Jagjit, Vivek, in a car accident in 1990. She gave up singing after the incident.
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