Udit Narayan

Udit Narayan Jha is a Nepalese playback singer whose songs have been featured mainly in Nepali and Bollywood movies. Besides Nepali and Hindi, he has sung in many other languages including Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Garhwali, Sindhi, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Manipuri, Maithili and Bengali. He has won three National Film Awards and five Filmfare Awards. In 2001, Narayan was awarded the Prabal Gorkha Dakshin Bahu by the late King of Nepal Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev. In 2009, Narayan was awarded the Padma Shri and in 2016 he was awarded with the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India.

Udit Narayan Jha was born in Bhardah, Saptari in Nepal. His parents were Hare Krishna Jha from Saptari, Nepal and Bhuwaneshwari Devi from Bihar, India.

Narayan studied at P.B. School, Rajbiraj, Nepal where he finished his S.L.C. (class 10) and later obtained his intermediate degree from Ratna Rajya Laxmi Campus, Kathmandu.

He was one of the most prominent Bollywood singers throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. The king of playback & magical voice udit narayan is a bollywood leading playback singer of 1988 to 2005. He has been the on-screen singing voice for various Bollywood stars including Aditya Pancholi, Aamir Khan, Rahul Roy, Shahrukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Arjun Rampal, Hrithik Roshan, Ajay Devgan, Sunil Shetty, John Abraham, Abhishek Bachchan, Vivek Oberoi, Shahid Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Aftab Shivdasani, Ritesh Deshmukh, Sunny Deol, Bobby Deol, Sanjay Dutt, Sanjay Kapoor, Arbaaz Khan, Sohail Khan, Arshad Warsi, Anil Kapoor, Govinda, Jackie Shroff, Chandrachur Singh, Sharad Kapoor, Mukul Dev, Jimmy Shergill, Uday Chopra, Sharman Joshi, Emraan Hashmi, Tusshar Kapoor, Deepak Tijori, Aman Verma, Samir Soni, Faisal Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Karan Nath and Rahul Khanna. He has also sung with Bollywood actors Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna & Dev Anand. Most of his duets are with Alka Yagnik. He began his career in 1970 as a staff artist for a radio show called Radio Nepal, singing mostly popular Nepali folk songs in Nepali, Maithili, Nepal Bhasa, and Bhojpuri. After eight years, Narayan moved to Bombay on a musical scholarship from the Indian Embassy in Nepal to study classical music at Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan. In 1980, noted music director (composer) Rajesh Roshan asked him to playback sing for the Hindi film "Unees Bees". Narayan was given the opportunity to sing with the veteran singer Mohammed Rafi. Soon after, Narayan sang for a number of other movies, including Bade Dil Wala in 1983, where he sang a duet with legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar composed by legendary music director R D Burman. In the same year, Narayan sang with Kishore Kumar, the most prominent and successful Bollywood playback singer of the time, in the film Kehdo Pyar Hai. A significant milestone in his career occurred in 1988 when Anand-Milind gave him the opportunity to sing all the songs for the successful Bollywood movie Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak with Alka Yagnik which earned him a Filmfare Award. As many as 21 of his tracks feature in BBC's "Top 40 Bollywood Soundtracks of all time.He has sung more than 25,000 songs in over 36 languages.