Usha Khanna

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Usha Khanna, who was born in the city of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh in India in 1942, was, and still is the only established female music director in Indian film industry. She was active for more than 3 decades, being highly successful in a male-dominant environment. She is still active making some music for some movies and television-serials, more than 40 years after her debut as music director in Dil Deke Dekho (1959).

Usha Khanna was born in a musical family, as her father, Manohar Khanna, was a lyricist and singer, but she had no formal education in music. Even though she did often take inspiration from Arabic music, which she liked. Usha claims that she has never lifted of any song directly, but that she has composed something along the lines.

O. P. Nayyar introduced Usha Khanna to meet S Mukerji, a powerful man in the Indian film industry at that time. She sang a song for Mukerji, and when he realised that she had composed the song on her own, he told her to compose two songs per day for one year. After a few months, Mukerji signed her as the composer for his movie Dil Deke Dekho as a music composer. After she started composing music for hindi movies, she had big problems establishing herself as a music director despite producing many hit songs.

Khanna often used the combination of Asha Bhosle, who referred to Usha Khanna as her daughter, and Mohammed Rafi. This trio produced many hit songs. Saawan Kumar was often the lyricist for Usha Khanna, and wrote most of his lyrics for songs composed by her. He directed and produced the lyrics for eleven movies she scored the music for. In 1979 K J Yesudas received Filmfare award for her song Dil ke tukde tukde in the film Dada.

The effort she had put in to establish her in the industry, made her know how difficult it was to break through, and made her often give the chance to new singers. She gave the chance to at that time more or less unknown singers such as Anupama Deshpande, Pankaj Udhas, Hemlata, Mohammed Aziz, Roopkumar Rathod, Shabbir Kumar and last but not least Sonu Nigam, who today are all now well known singers. Usha Khanna herself also sing a few song as a playback singer.

Many of Usha Khanna's songs are still very popular. An example is when the super hit music composer of today A. R. Rahman used Usha Khanna's Har Nazar Ke Sau Afsane from the movie Shabnam (1964) as inspiration for the song Latka Dikha Diya in the movie Hindustani (1996).

She was quite active as a composer until the mid-ninetees. Until now the last movie she has given music to was in 2003. The movie was Dil Pardesi Ho Gaya, produced and directed by her ex-husband Sawan Kumar who she was briefly married to.