Esther Victoria Abraham
Esther Victoria Abraham (30 December 1916 – 6 August 2006), better known by her stage name Pramila, was an Indian model, actress and first woman film producer in the Hindi film industry. She is also well known for winning the first Miss India pageant in 1947. Personal life Pramila was born in 1916 in Calcutta (now Kolkata) to a Baghdadi Jewish family. She was the daughter of Reuben Abraham, a Jewish businessman from Kolkata, by his second wife Matilda Isaac, a Jewish lady from Karachi. Pramila had three older half-siblings from her father's first marriage to a certain Leah, and six (or five) siblings from her own parents' marriage. 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