Suman Kalyanpur

Suman Kalyanpur (aka Suman Hemmady) (born 28 January 1937) is an Indian singer. She is one of the best-known and most respected playback singers in India. She succeeded in achieving recognition of her own during the years of Lata Mangeshkar's monopoly and sang under the baton of almost all the top composers of the period. 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 was a bit unfortunate as she never won the National Film Awards or Filmfare Award for singing but is still considered among the popular singers of her prime time. She has sung a total of 857 Hindi songs.