Odisha buried playback singer Pranab Kishore Patnaik
He was 88. With Akshaya Mohanty and Prafulla Kar he was the last of Odia film music's great trio.
Odisha buried playback singer Pranab Kishore Patnaik on Friday. A guard of honour was held at his BJB Nagar house in Bhubaneswar.
He died on 21 August, aged 88. He is survived by his wife, Kasturi Patnaik, and two sons. Governor Hari Babu Kambhampati, Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi and Leader of the Opposition Naveen Patnaik sent condolences.
Patnaik was born on 20 January 1938. His father, Lal Mohan Patnaik, had been Speaker of the Odisha Assembly. He started singing at five. His film debut was the 1958 Odia film Maa.
He trained in the Gwalior gharana under Guru Kunal Adinarayan, then with Odisha maestros Balakrushna Das, Pandit Bhubaneswar Mishra and Binod Bihari Srichandan. Over five decades he sang in more than 200 films. He worked in light music, classical, traditional forms and ghazals, and in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali and Assamese as well as Odia.
With Akshaya Mohanty and Prafulla Kar he made up the last great trio of Odia film music. Kar's Maajhire from Sesha Shrabana is still the song people name first. With Mohanty he cut Hai Se Harini Akhi for Jajabara in 1986. He also sang the boatmen's songs in Sesha Shrabana, Chilika Tirey and Chinha Achinha.
He shared the microphone with Vani Jairam, Hemlata, Usha Mangeshkar, Bhupinder Singh and S. Janaki. He won the Odisha State Film Award for Best Playback Singer seven times, including for Sindoora Bindu, Astaraga, Jhiati Sita Pari, Kanyadaan, Pratisodha Aparadha Nuhe and Asha. The state gave him the Jayadev Puraskar, its highest film honour. Later prizes included the Odisha Sangeet Natak Akademi Award (1997-98), the Prafulla Kar Award (2011), the Gangadhar Rath Award (2017) and the Balakrushna Das Memorial Award (2023). He had a long run at All India Radio.
A state hears itself in a handful of voices. For Odisha, Patnaik was one of those voices: Jagannath, Chilika, the Bhagabata, farmers, fisherfolk.
The New Indian Express called his death the end of a golden era, because Mohanty and Kar are already gone. That is a newspaper line, and it is also how a lot of Odia households will put it this weekend. The songs will outlast the argument about eras.
The tributes will move from the house to All India Radio archives and film reruns. The useful test is whether younger Odia singers still learn those boatmen songs the way he sang them, or only play the clips.