Kavita Krishnamurthy

Kavita Krishnamurthy
Kavita Subramaniam, 2008
Background information
Birth name	Sharada Krishnamurthy
Also known as	Kavita Subramaniam Kavita Krishnamurthy
Born	(1958-01-25) January 25, 1958 (age 58)
Origin	New Delhi, India
Genres	Playback singing, fusion, pop
Occupation(s)	Playback singer, fusion artiste
Years active	1978–present

Kavita Krishnamurthy is an Indian film playback singer. Trained in classical music, she has sung a wide range of classical-based songs. In her career, she has worked with a variety of music composers, including Laxmikant–Pyarelal, R. D. Burman, Hamsalekha 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.

Kavita was born Sharada Krishnamurthy in a Tamil Iyer family in New Delhi, India to T.S. Krishnamurthy, an employee of Education Ministry. She began her music training with her aunt, Bhattacharya, 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.

At the age of nine, she got an opportunity to record a Tagore song in Bengali with Lata Mangeshkar under the auspices of the music composer and singer Hemant Kumar. Although the young Sharada aspired to work with 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. 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, who later took the initiative of introducing Kavita to the music director Laxmikant (one of the composer duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal) in late 1976.