Jitendra Haripal

Early life and education

Haripal grew up in a poor, landless family for whom music was the chief inheritance. He left school early and had no formal training; his teacher was his father, Mandhata Haripal, himself a capable musician, because the family could not pay for lessons elsewhere.

Music career

He started singing for All India Radio in 1971 and was later graded there as a "Senior B High" artist. His repertoire covers folk music in several regional idioms, among them Sambalpuri, Kosli, Odia, Chhattisgarhi, Bhojpuri and Dhakia Bengali, and Wikipedia credits him with more than a thousand songs.

Music did not give him a steady living. He has spoken of supplementing his income with construction labour and other casual work, and of a cassette contract that ended when the company closed, after which his royalties stopped. In 2020 he told Odisha Bytes that folk artists like himself were losing platforms and income, and that he had to keep performing on stage during the COVID-19 pandemic to support his family.

In April 2015 he asked the state's culture secretary to protect the original character of folk songs and to act against video albums carrying vulgar lyrics.

Notable songs and albums

"Rangabati" is a Sambalpuri duet sung by Haripal and Krishna Patel, with lyrics by Mitrabhanu Gauntia. It was first recorded for All India Radio and was then re-recorded by the Kolkata label INRECO in 1976; a dispute over the authorship of the tune delayed the record, which Haripal says he won in court, and the 45 rpm disc came out in 1978–79. Sources differ on the composer: Wikipedia and a 2015 PTI report credit Prabhudatta Pradhan, while The Pioneer (2023) says Gauntia wrote both words and music.

The song became a fixture of wedding processions and immersion processions in the 1970s and 1980s. It was played on Odisha's tableau at the Republic Day parade in New Delhi in 2007 and has since been adapted into many Indian languages. In 2017 Haripal and Patel at first refused permission for Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy to perform it at the opening of the 22nd Asian Athletics Championships. After a meeting called by the Sambalpur collector, they issued a no-objection certificate on condition that the song be performed in its original form.

Awards and honours

Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik felicitated Haripal in 2007, the year "Rangabati" was played on the Republic Day tableau. In 2012 he was named brand ambassador of the Rourkela side Western Samurai in the Odisha Premier League T20. On 10 April 2015 Utkal University of Culture, Bhubaneswar, conferred honorary D.Litt. degrees on him and Krishna Patel.

The Government of India announced his Padma Shri on the eve of Republic Day in January 2017. He was the first of the people associated with "Rangabati" to receive the award; Krishna Patel received hers in 2023.

Personal life

Haripal lives in Sambalpur. His youngest son, Prabhat, is a percussionist, and his daughter-in-law Minu is a singer. In 2020 Odisha Bytes reported that the mud-walled family home at Station Para, which he shared with eleven relatives, had partly collapsed in heavy rain, and that he had asked for temporary shelter.

Because the ancestral house stood on government land, he was for years ineligible for housing schemes, and the family lived in rented accommodation in Jagannath Colony. In July 2026 the Sambalpur district administration gave him a work order for a house under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) 2.0, on a plot that had been transferred to his name after his wife's death earlier that year. The approval followed his appeal to Chief Minister Mohan Charan Majhi.