Esther Victoria Abraham, better known by her stage name Pramila, was born in Kolkata, India, to a Baghdadi Jewish family on December 30, 1916. Winner of the first ever Miss India beauty pageant and a Bollywood star, she had an impressive career, working both as an actress and later as a pioneering woman in film production. 

The daughter of Reuben Abraham, a Jewish businessman from Kolkata, and Matilda Isaac, a Jewish woman from Karachi, Pramila 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.  

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.  

Pramila was also the first major woman film producer in India. In 1939, she married her second husband, Syed Hasan Ali Zaidi, an actor whose stage name was Kumar. Kumar was, a practicing Shia Muslim, and Pramila converted to Islam in order to marry him. The two frequently collaborated. With Silver Films, Kumar's production company, she worked as an actress and producer, producing sixteen films. Beginning in the mid-1940s, she and Kumar started at least three other production companies. Pramila acted in nearly all of her own productions, as well as in films beyond the Silver Films company. In 1947, at age 33, she won the first Miss India beauty pageant. 

Pramila died on August 6, 2006, at age 90.