Artist Aliases on MySwar

An underrated feature of MySwar is its documentation of the various names used to credit artists at various points in time in their careers. Many Hindi film artists have gone by different names during their careers due to one of the following reasons:

• Adoption of a screen name or dropping it
• Transition of a child artist to adulthood
• Name change due to a change in marital status
• Abbreviating names or expanding them
• Changes in the spelling of names, often driven by superstition or numerology, and at times by the indifference of the individuals responsible for printing names in the opening credits or music records.
• Adoption of aliases to evade income tax or to keep their day job employers in the dark about their film careers, or to work outside of exclusive contracts!

We have always attempted to document the names of cast and crew members as listed in the opening or closing credits of the films or their promotional material, and the names of music directors, lyricists, and singers as listed on the official music records, cassettes, CDs, or digital albums. There are, however, some misses on our part. Before we decided to go granular on artist names, we had standardized some artist names, like S.D. Burman and R.D. Burman, even though they had been credited differently at times, especially in the early stages of their careers. We will try to improve our documentation for these artists at some point in time in the future.

It should be noted that we have not documented, except in their biographies, the real names of artists who have used screen names throughout their careers. For example, searching for Sampooran Singh Kalra on MySwar will not lead you to Gulzar. I will try and write a separate post to list such artists [Updated on Aug 22, 2025 – Hindi Film Music Artists Known By Their Screen Names]. 

In each instance of artists with multiple names, we have chosen a Primary Name, usually the name they are most popularly known by or their full name, and tagged the remaining names as Secondary. The Primary and Secondary names of artists are tied together, so searching for any of them (either regular search or Advanced Search) will lead you to the same artist.

Here is the list of artists with multiple names, as documented on MySwar. To improve the noise-signal ratio, I have filtered out some instances where the only differences between artist names are trivial spelling variations. Additionally, I have included in this list only those artists who have received music director, lyricist, or singer credits (regardless of their main vocation).