Esther Victoria Abraham (30 December 1916 – 6 August 2006), was born in 1916 in Calcutta to a comservative migrant Baghdadi Jewish family.She was the daughter of Reuben Abraham, a Jewish businessman from Kolkata and Matilda Isaac, a Jewish woman from Karachi. Esther was the fourth in a family of ten children, according to most sources. In this period, the Baghdadi Jewish community in India was the hub of the Judeo-Arabic-speaking Baghdadi Jewish trading diaspora in Asia. Esther is better known by her stage name Pramila, was an Indian actress, model and beauty pageant titleholder. Before entering cinema, Pramila earned a degree from the University of Cambridge and worked as a schoolteacher. She entered the entertainment industry as a dancer for a Parsi movie theater company; she danced during the fifteen-minute pause while the projectionist changed the reel projector.  She then worked as a stunt actress, including in 1942's Basant, one of her most popular films. She is the first woman film producer in the Hindi film industry. She is also well known for winning the first Miss India pageant in 1947.

 

Pramila was married twice. At the age of seventeen, she married Maniklal Dangi, a Hindu Marwadi gentleman. The marriage lasted less than one year, but it produced a son. In 1939, aged 22, Pramila married again, becoming the second wife of her second husband. This was the small-time actor Syed Hasan Ali Zaidi, a practicing Shia Muslim whose stage name was "Kumar." Among Zaidi's more noticeable roles was that of the sculptor in Mughal-e-Azam.

 

Pramila had to abandon Judaism and convert to Islam in order to marry Zaidi, and this happened when anti-semitism was at its height in Europe. Pramila and Zaidi had four children together. In 1963, shortly after the release of Mughal-i Azam, Zaidi chose to leave Pramila and her children and move to Pakistan. Pramila remained in India, where she acted in some more films, and also produced a few films.  Pramila's youngest son, Haidar Ali, has pursued a career in films and television. He acted in the TV serial Nukkad and more recently, the song Khwaja Mere Khwaja in the film Jodhaa Akbar (2008) was picturized with him playing the main singer. Pramila's daughter Naqi Jahan was crowned Eve's Weekly Miss India in 1967, making them the only mother-daughter pair to have won the Miss India title.