K. Rani

K Rani(4 September 1942 – 13 July 2018) was an Indian playback singer who worked mostly in the South Indian film industry. Her family migrated from Kanpur to South India. Her father, Kishan Singh Kishan Singh also known as Kishan Singh Khinwara i >> Read More... was a railway master and owing to his profession his family had to move frequently. Due to the frequent moving, young Rani got accustomed to different languages and learned many of them. She began singing at a very young age and first sang on stage at the age of 5 or 6. Eventually, at one of her shows, Rani was scouted by music composer C. R. Subburaman who saw her potential as an artist and introduced her as a playback singer.

Rani worked on her first films, the Telugu Roopavathi and Tamil Mohana Sundaram and Singari when she was just eight years old. Since then, she has worked in various films and has rendered her voice to about 500 films belonging to different languages. She has sung songs in Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Hindi, Bengali, Sinhalese, and Uzbek, and sang the national anthem of Sri Lanka. She’s also the first Indian female singer to sing in Sinhalese and Uzbek. She also got an opportunity to perform for former president Sarvepalli Radhakrishna and K. Kamaraj who bestowed her with the title Innisai rani. Other notable films she worked in include Batasari, Jayasimha, Dharmadevata, Devdasu, and Lava Kusa. She debuted in the Sri Lankan film industry with the movie Sujatha in 1953.