Kattassery Joseph Yesudas (Malayalam: കാട്ടശ്ശേരി ജോസഫ് യേശുദാസ്; born 10 January 1940) is an Indian classical musician and playback singer.He is considered to be one of the greatest singers India have ever seen.
Yesudas sings Indian classical, devotional, and popular
music. He has recorded more than 50,000 songs in many languages including
Malayalam, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi,
Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tulu, Malay, Russian, Arabic, Latin and English during a
career spanning five decades.[2][3] He has performed in most Indian languages
except Assamese, Konkani and Kashmiri.[4][5] He also composed a number of
Malayalam film songs in the 1970s and 1980s.[1] He is fondly called Gana Gandharvan
(English: The Celestial Singer). He has won the National Award for the Best
Male Playback Singer seven times, the most by any Indian singer, and the State
Award for the Best Playback Singer more than thirty times by the Governments of
Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and West
Bengal. In 2002, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the
Government of India for his contributions towards the arts.
