Nagendra

Nagendra and his brother Rajan, were very famous music composers for films in Kannada and Telugu since the 1950s. Nagendra was born in 1935, and Rajan was born in 1933. The duo composed music for more than 375 movies, about 200 of them being in Kannada and the rest in various other languages like Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Tulu, and Sinhala. Nagendra was born in Mysore, Karnataka. Nagendra learned how to play the Jal Tarang, while Rajan learned how to play the Violin.

Nagendra got his matriculation done under H. R. Padmanabha Shastri, who was most famous for his talkie movies at the time. In 1951, Nagendra joined P. Kalinga Rao after his matriculation, who was then a famous radio artiste. After gaining exposure to the movie industry, he got the opportunity to sing for the movie ‘ Srinivasa Kalyana Click to look into! >> Read More... ’ along with the singer Ameer Bai. Their major break was when they became independent music directors and worked for the movie ‘Sowbhagya Lakshmi’ in 1952.

They became very successful after this for decades altogether with works like Chanchalakumari, Rajakumari, Mutthaide Bhagya, etc. They were awarded the State Award for Best Music Director for the movies Eradu Kanasu Click to look into! >> Read More... (1973-74), Parasangada Gendethimma (1978-79), and Panthulamma (1979). They also won the Nandi Best Music Award for the Telugu movie Panthulamma. Nagendra, being the younger of the two, used to dictate lyrics to the singers along with the tunes, and his brother, Rajan used to compose and set notations for the orchestra.

Their songs were sung by famous singers like S. S. Janaki, S. P. Balasubramanyam, late Kishore Kumar Kishore Kumar is an Indian playback singer, who ha >> Read More... , Jesudas, and many more. Nagendra died of a stroke in Bangalore on 4th November 2000 after giving Kannada cinema some of its most memorable hits. In their active years, both Nagendra and Rajan set up a niche for themselves for around four decades. Rajan now resides in Bangalore and continues to work with his son, R. Ananth Kumar.