Suresh Wadkar

He was born in Kolhapur in 1955 and grew up in Bombay, training from the age of eight under Pandit Jialal Vasant and taking the Prabhakar degree in music. After the 1976 competition, Jaidev's Gaman (1978) and Ravindra Jain's Paheli gave him his first songs; Laxmikant-Pyarelal's Prem Rog (1982, Meri Kismat Mein Tu Nahin Shayad), Khayyam's Chandni (Lagi Aaj Sawan Ki) and Ravindra Jain's Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) made him a leading voice of the decade's gentler films.

Through the 1990s he sang for Rajshri's Hum Aapke Hain Koun and Henna, for R.D. Burman and for Marathi cinema, where he is a major figure; he has recorded extensively in devotional music, including a well-known Sai Baba repertoire, and runs the Ajivasan music academy in Mumbai, which also teaches online. He received the Padma Shri in 2020.

Suresh Wadkar's voice is warm, smooth and classically grounded, with an unforced sweetness in the middle register and a Marathi natya-sangeet clarity of diction. It is not a loud voice and was never used for the action hero; where a song needed devotion, restraint or a touch of the classical, composers of the 1980s turned to him.