Mohammed Rafi was born at Kotla Sultan Singh in Amritsar district in 1924. The account of his beginning is that he followed a wandering faqir around the village imitating his singing.
The family moved to Lahore. He trained under Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan and others, sang on All India Radio Lahore as a teenager, and went to Bombay in 1944.
He recorded thousands of songs over thirty-five years and was the dominant male playback voice of Hindi cinema for a generation. His range covered qawwali, bhajan, ghazal, patriotic songs and the light film love song, and he sang for actors whose speaking voices were entirely different from each other.
He stayed in India in 1947. A very large number of his contemporaries in the Lahore music world did not.
A village in Amritsar district produced the most recorded male singer in the history of Indian cinema and there is very little at Kotla Sultan Singh to say so.
He was born at Kotla Sultan Singh near Amritsar and learned, by his own account, from a fakir who sang in the street.
He recorded in a dozen languages besides Hindi and Urdu, including Punjabi, Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and English, which very few playback singers of that period attempted at all.
He recorded in Punjabi as well, including devotional material. That is a small part of the catalogue and it is the part Punjab claims.