Pandit Sureshbabu Mane

Sureshbabu Mane was born in Bombay in 1902 as Abdul Rehman, the eldest child of the Kirana master Abdul Karim Khan and Tarabai Mane. Tarabai was a daughter of Sardar Maruti Rao Mane; Abdul Karim Khan had taught her music at the Baroda court, and when her family opposed the marriage the couple left the state for Bombay. Of their five children, three became professional musicians: Sureshbabu himself, Hirabai Barodekar and Saraswati Rane.

His first training came from his father; he studied afterwards with Abdul Wahid Khan. Alongside concert work he sang and acted on the Marathi stage, appearing in his sister Hirabai's theatre company in plays such as Sanyasa-kallol and Subhadra, and later in Prabhat films including Amrit Manthan (1934), Chandrasena (1935) and Rajput Ramani (1936). He composed film music for Savitri (1936), Devyani and Sach Hai (1939), and played tabla and harmonium. He died at Pune on 15 February 1953. Since 1992 his disciple Prabha Atre has held an annual festival in Mumbai in his and Hirabai's memory, the Sureshbabu–Hirabai Smruti Sangeet Samaroh.

He sang khayal, thumri, Marathi natya sangeet and bhajan. Prabha Atre, who studied with him, wrote that his music came through intuition and imagination rather than labour, that his phrases were rounded and ornamented through kan and khatka, and that singing which sounded simple and easy was in fact extremely hard to imitate. He was among the few musicians in Maharashtra of his generation drawn to the Punjabi manner of thumri. Only a few of his recordings survive.