Hemant Kumar

Hemant was born in Varanasi in 1920 to a Bengali family and grew up in Calcutta. He left an engineering course at Jadavpur to sing, recorded his first Bengali songs in 1937 and his first Hindi song in 1940, and by the mid-1940s was established in Bengal both as a singer and as a composer for films and for the Indian People's Theatre Association, where he worked alongside Salil Chowdhury. His Rabindrasangeet recordings became, for many Bengalis, the standard way of hearing Tagore.

He came to Bombay in 1951 at the invitation of Filmistan and composed Anand Math (1952), whose Vande Mataram, sung by Lata, is still played on national occasions. Nagin (1954), with its been melody and Lata's songs, was one of the biggest hits of the decade and won him the Filmfare Award. As a singer he was the voice of Dev Anand in Jaal and House No. 44, of Guru Dutt in Pyaasa (Jaane Woh Kaise Log The) and of Pradeep Kumar and Biswajeet in his own productions.

From the early 1960s he produced films under his own banner — Bees Saal Baad (1962), Kohraa (1964), Anupama (1966), Khamoshi (1969) — and gave them scores built on atmosphere rather than noise: Beqarar Karke Humein, Zara Nazron Se Keh Do, Ya Dil Ki Suno, Tum Pukar Lo. He also gave Bengali cinema some of its finest film music, for Satyajit Ray among others, and composed in Marathi.

He was offered the Padma Shri in 1970 and the Padma Bhushan in 1987 and declined both. He kept singing on stage into his sixties and died in Calcutta in September 1989, a few days after returning from a concert in Dhaka, at sixty-nine.

Hemant Kumar's voice is a soft baritone of unusual depth and steadiness, used without ornament and almost without vibrato — a voice that seemed to come from a quiet room. He sang slightly behind the beat and let the melody do the work. Composers in Bombay used him when a song needed stillness or a shadow of melancholy: a night song, a boatman's song, a man alone. It is the voice of Bengali adhunik gaan transplanted to Hindi film, and nobody has sounded like him since.