Bestowed with the Padma Bhushan on Wednesday, a conversation with the reclusive Suman Kalyanpur, the voice that was often mistaken to be that of Lata Mangeshkar and gave the nation Antakshari staples such as Na na karte pyaar and Aaj kal tere mere pyar ke charche.
When ace composer SD Burman constructed one of his most delicate tunes for Majrooh Sultanpuri’s lyrics Na tum humein jaano, na hum tumhe jaano in the Waheeda Rehman-Dev Anand starrer murder mystery-cum-courtroom drama Baat Ek Raat Ki (1962), he wanted the expression of poetry in both male and the female voices. While Hemant Kumar sang for Anand, Lata Mangeshkar, many thought, had woven her magic once again with her thin voice, the flow, and the slightly shrill high pitch which became an aesthetic barometer of Indian female identity or the “righteous” heroine of the new India. However, the song that was a radio favourite for years to come, wasn’t sung by Mangeshkar. Burman was not speaking to Mangeshkar at the time due to an argument over a re-recording in 1958. So he asked a new voice – a reticent singer named Suman Kalyanpur. “When they heard the song, even many Lata acolytes had difficulty figuring that they were not listening to Lata while the song played in their houses,” senior music critic Raju Bharatan had once told this writer.

A few years later, it wasn’t really a surprise when the famous Doordarshan show Chhaya Geet attributed Kalyanji-Anandji’s popular tune, Na na karte pyar kisi se kar baithe, an Aantakshari staple, to Mangeshkar. No one batted an eyelid, except a 20-year-old girl named Charul Hemmady. She called up the Prasar Bharati office and requested them to ratify the error. The female singer was her mother Suman Kalyanpur. “No one believed me. It sounded exactly like Lataji,” says Hemmady. Aaj kal tere mere pyaar ke charche (Bramhachari, 1969), one of her more famous duets with Rafi, met the same fate. The songs still echo but somehow the face was often consigned to oblivion.

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