Kishore Kumar once sang both halves of a love duet himself
When Lata Mangeshkar was out of town and a duet had to be recorded, Kishore Kumar simply sang the woman's part too. The yodelling playback singer from Khandwa won eight Filmfare awards for Best Male Playback Singer, more than anyone, and bowed daily to portraits of his heroes.
He was born Abhas Kumar Ganguly on 4 August 1929 in Khandwa, then in the Central Provinces and now in Madhya Pradesh, into a Bengali Brahmin family. His father, Kunjalal, had come to town as personal lawyer to the local Gokhale family, and his mother, Gouri Devi, came from wealthy Bengali stock. He was the youngest of four. His eldest brother, Ashok Kumar, became a Hindi film star while Kishore was still a boy, and another brother, Anoop, followed him into cinema.
Family trips to Bombay drew him in. Renamed Kishore Kumar, he started as a chorus singer at Bombay Talkies, the studio where Ashok worked, and the composer Khemchand Prakash gave him a song in Ziddi (1948). Offers kept arriving even though he was not particularly committed to films, and he moved to Bombay in 1949. At first he copied the singer K. L. Saigal before developing a voice of his own. He revered Rabindranath Tagore and the Hollywood entertainer Danny Kaye, and kept pictures of all three men at home. Late in life he honoured the playback singer Ahmed Rushdi by performing his songs at the Royal Albert Hall.
Yodelling, picked up from Jimmie Rodgers and Tex Morton, became his signature. So did his gift for voices: for Half Ticket, the composer Salil Chowdhury wanted a duet with Lata Mangeshkar, but she was away, so Kumar recorded both parts. On screen the number is performed by the actor Pran and by Kumar himself in drag. Ashok Kumar put his brother's success down to a voice that struck the microphone at exactly its most sensitive point.
He sang in Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Malayalam, Urdu and several other languages, and his Bengali non-film albums are treasured. He collected 8 Filmfare wins from 28 nominations. He died on 13 October 1987. Madhya Pradesh created a Kishore Kumar Award in 1997, and in 2012 his last, never-released song fetched about 15.6 lakh rupees at auction in New Delhi.
Source: Kishore Kumar
