Kumar Sanu

Kedarnath Bhattacharya was born in Calcutta in 1957, the son of a classical singer, and sang Kishore Kumar songs in restaurants and on stage through the early 1980s. He moved to Bombay in 1986, took the name Kumar Sanu at Kalyanji-Anandji's suggestion, and sang his first songs in Jadu Ki Shakti and Hero Hiralal (1988). Aashiqui, for Nadeem-Shravan, made him overnight: Ab Tere Bin, Saanson Ki Zaroorat Hai, Nazar Ke Samne, and the first of the five Filmfare Awards.

Saajan (1991), Deewana (1992), Baazigar (1993), 1942: A Love Story (1994) and DDLJ (1995) carried the sequence, with Nadeem-Shravan, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit, R.D. Burman and Anand-Milind writing for him; he sang for Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt and Govinda. He is said to have recorded twenty-eight songs in a single day in 1993. His pace slowed after the late 1990s as Sonu Nigam, Udit Narayan and then Arijit Singh took the leads; he has continued to record in Hindi and Bengali and to tour.

He received the Padma Shri in 2009 and has three sons, one of whom, Jaan Kumar Sanu, sings.

Kumar Sanu's voice is soft, breathy and nasal, placed well forward, with a slight tremble that reads as tenderness and an easy upper range. It is a voice made for the Nadeem-Shravan melody — long, swaying, built on a simple refrain — and for the cassette player: it sounded intimate at any volume. Critics heard too much Kishore in it; listeners heard the sound of their own 1990s.