Madhubala (मधुबाला) combines the Sanskrit madhu (honey) and bala (young girl). Madhubala (1933-1969) — born Mumtaz Jehan Begum Dehlavi — was the legendary Hindi cinema actress called "the Venus of the Indian screen." *Her performance as Anarkali in Mughal-e-Azam (1960) — the highest-grossing Indian film of its era — remains among the most iconic in Bollywood history. Died at 36 from a congenital heart defect. Subject of countless biographies and the 2017 series Madhubala*.
Featured on a 2008 Indian postage stamp.
Madhubala does not currently appear in the US Social Security Administration's top 1,000 girls' names, so we don't publish a US rank or birth count for it. That says nothing about the name's standing elsewhere in the world — only that it sits outside the ranked US data we rely on.
In Pythagorean numerology the letters of Madhubala reduce to 9, The Giver. This is a traditional interpretive system, not a factual claim about the name.