Kavita Krishnamurthy

Kavita Krishnamurthy, also referred to as Kavita Subramaniam, is an Indian film playback singer.Trained in classical music, Kavita Krishnamurthy has recorded more than 18,000 songs in 16 languages in a career span of 30 years.Working with almost all the music composers including Laxmikant–Pyarelal, Naushad, S H Bihari, Kaifi Azmi, Anjan, O P Nayyar, Khayyam, Hemant Kumar, Ravinder Jain, Bappi Lahiri, Sameer, Anand Bakshi, Javid Akthar, Anu Malik, R. D. Burman, Hamsalekha, Zubeen Garg and A. R. Rahman.She is also the recipient of four Filmfare Best Female Playback Singer Awards, including three consecutive awards in the period 1994–1996, and the Padmashri which she received in 2005.In 1999, she married violinist L. Subramaniam and residing in Bengaluru. Kavita was born Sharada in a Tamil Iyer family in New Delhi, India to T.S. Krishnamurthy, an employee of the Education Ministry.She began her music training at the insistence of her aunt, Protimma Bhattacharya who enrolled her with Suruma Basu, who taught her Rabindra Sangeet.She began her formal training in Hindustani classical music under Balram Puri, a classical singer.At the young age of eight, Kavita won a gold medal at a music competition.She won many medals participating in the Inter-Ministry Classical Competition in New Delhi in the mid 1960s.

During her college days at St. Xavier College, Mumbai, she got an opportunity to record a song in the Bengali film Shriman Prithviraj in 1971 with singer Lata Mangeshkar as co-singer under the auspices of the music composer and singer Hemant Kumar. Although the young Sharada aspired to work in Indian Foreign Services, she moved to Bombay when she was 14 to try her luck as a playback singer in the Hindi film industry. She is an alumnus of St. Xavier's College, Bombay from where she did her BA Honors Economics. She was very active in the St. Xavier's Music Group during her college days. During the annual college festival (Malhar), she met Ranu Mukherjee, the daughter of Hemant Kumar. Ranu took the initiative of reintroducing Kavita to her father.[5] He was impressed by her grounding in music, so he began using her as a singer during his live performances. In one such performance, playback singer Manna Dey spotted her and employed her to sing advertisement jingles. Through her aunt's strong contacts, she met Jaya Chakravarthy, the mother of actress Hema Malini,[5] who later took the initiative of introducing Kavita to the music director Laxmikant (one of the composer duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal) in late 1976.