🇮🇳 Shreya Ghoshal

She was born in 1984 in Murshidabad district, West Bengal — coincidentally the same district that produced Arijit Singh — but grew up in Rawatbhata, a small atomic-energy township in Rajasthan where her father worked as an electrical engineer at the Rajasthan Atomic Power Station. Her mother was a literature graduate and a trained Bengali singer. Shreya began Hindustani classical training young, on her mother's insistence, and won her first national-level competition while still a schoolgirl.

The Sa Re Ga Ma Pa appearance of 2000 — and her subsequent victory in the season — would have been a footnote had Bhansali not happened to be watching. He called her family, met them, and asked Shreya to record demos for Devdas (2002) while she was still in school. She was sixteen when she recorded 'Bairi Piya', 'Silsila Yeh Chaahat Ka', 'Dola Re Dola', and 'Morey Piya'. She gave her board exams between recording sessions.

Devdas released in July 2002. The soundtrack was a phenomenon. She won the National Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer at eighteen — the youngest singer to win in that category. She won her first Filmfare Award the same year. The industry, accustomed to grooming new playback singers for years before allowing them lead-female songs, had not seen anything like her.

The two decades since have been a procession of signature songs across the Indian language map: 'Jadu Hai Nasha Hai' (Jism, 2003), 'Agar Tum Mil Jao' (Zeher, 2005), 'Bahara' (I Hate Luv Storys, 2010), 'Teri Meri' (Bodyguard, 2011), 'Sun Raha Hai Na Tu' (Aashiqui 2, 2013), 'Ghoomar' (Padmaavat, 2018), 'Param Sundari' (Mimi, 2021), 'Manike' (Thank God, 2022). She has sung in more than twenty Indian languages — Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Gujarati, Odia and many others.

She has won the National Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer four times, the second-highest count in the history of the award. She has won the Filmfare Award for Best Female Playback Singer multiple times. Madame Tussauds installed her wax figures in their London and other locations from 2017 onward — one of the few Indian playback singers so commemorated.

Her concert career runs parallel to her playback work and has, in some markets, surpassed it. She tours four continents annually, performs in prestigious international venues including Royal Albert Hall, and has been a fixture of Indian-diaspora cultural events from Toronto to Sydney for over a decade. She married Shiladitya Mukhopadhyaya, her childhood friend, in 2015. Their son Devyaan was born in 2021.

She has spoken publicly about the gendered economics of Indian playback singing — the long-standing gap between male and female playback fees, the pressure on female singers to retire early, the assumption that a woman who has had a child cannot return to the studio at her former voice. She has, in each case, walked her own counter-example. She continued recording in the years immediately after motherhood and negotiates her own fees through her own management.

She is, in 2026, the most accomplished female playback singer of the post-Lata Mangeshkar generation. She was awarded the Padma Shri in 2017. She continues to tour, record across languages, and mentor younger singers through her own foundation. The sixteen-year-old who sang 'Bairi Piya' under Sanjay Leela Bhansali's direction in a Mumbai studio in 2001 has, in the years since, become the voice through which a country has heard most of its great filmi love songs — and a generation of South Asian girls have, in classical-music classrooms from Kolkata to California, taken her name as the proof that the path is open.