Udit Narayan Jha Biography

Udit Narayan Jha is a Nepalese playback singer whose songs have been featured mainly in Kaliwood and Bollywood movies. Besides Hindi, he has sung in many other languages including Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri Kannada, Tulu, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Garhwali, Sindhi, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Meitei and Bengali.

Udit Narayan Jha is a Nepalese playback singer whose songs have been featured mainly in Kaliwood and Bollywood movies. Besides Hindi, he has sung in many other languages including Nepali, Maithili, Bhojpuri Kannada, Tulu, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Garhwali, Sindhi, Punjabi, Odia, Assamese, Meitei and Bengali. He has won three National Film Awards and five Filmfare Awards. Udit Narayan Jha was awarded the Padma Shri in 2009 and in 2016 he was awarded with the Padma Bhushan by the Government of India.[1] He was also awarded the Prabal Gorkha Dakshin Bahu by the late King of Nepal Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev in 2001,

Udit Naraya Jha studied at Jageshwar High School, Kunauli, Supaul, Bihar, India where he finished his Madhyamik (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. He has been the on-screen singing voice for various Bollywood stars. He has also sung with Bollywood actors Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna and Dev Anand. Most of his duets are with Alka Yagnik. He began his career in 1970 as a Maithili folk singer (staff artist) for Radio Nepal, singing mostly popular folk songs in Nepali and Maithili. Gradually, he started singing Nepali Modern songs. After eight years, Narayan moved to Bombay on a musical scholarship for Nepalese 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 another singer was Suresh Wadkar and Music composed by Bappi Lahiri. 

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 30,000 songs in over 36 languages.