Biography

Suman Kalyanpur (born Suman Hemmady; 28 January 1937) is an Indian playback singer. One of the best-known and most respected playback singers in India. Many people believe that she could not reach the stature and position which her talent really warranted, in spite of having all the mandatory characteristics required to make a mark in the field of playback singing like great knowledge of classical music, a melodious voice and a wide range. Her voice was often mistaken to be that of Lata Mangeshkar. Suman Kalyanpur's career started in 1954 and was very popular singer in the 1960s and 1970s. She recorded songs for movies in several languages besides Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kannada, Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Bengali, Oriya and Punjabi. She is considered among the popular singers of her prime time and golden era of Hindi film music, along with Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh, Geeta Dutt, Asha Bhosle, Hemant Kumar, Talat Mahmood, Kishore Kumar, Manna Dey, Mahendra Kapoor and Shamshad Begum. She has sung a total of 857 Hindi songs. Description above from the Wikipedia article Suman Kalyanpur, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.