India’s Melody Queen, who also composed music for Marathi films and was a producer as well, and had the distinction of being conferred with the highest civilian honours of India and France, passed away on Sunday morning at the Breach Candy Hospital in Mumbai, where she had been admitted because of Covid-related complications on January 11.
Lata Mangeshkar, India’s most loved singer who had once moved Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to tears, leaves behind a teary-eyed nation of admirers who grew up listening to her immutable voice give wings to the words of poets and the screen careers of legions of heroines.
Lata Didi, as she was known among her family and followers, was 92 and is survived by her siblings – playback singer and composer Meena Khadilkar, popular singer and restaurateur Asha Bhosale, singer Usha Mangeshkar, and music director Hridayanath Mangeshkar.
She was 92 and perhaps the most revered and well-known artist who inspired generations of artistes in the sub-continent for almost a century. She contracted Covid and was admitted to Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital last month after suffering from severe symptoms of pneumonia. It would be ludicrous to say that Mangeshkar was brilliant, amid other adjectives of commendation.
Simply because she was Lata Mangeshkar. She has been a moniker for excellence. And will continue to be so for decades to come. She leaves India, not just with her vast oeuvre but a sense of pride amid gentle shades of patriotism, the kind we felt when we saw her draped in the tricolour for the first time, crooning Mile sur mera tumhara, toh sur bane hamara…
She never married, but was close to the late Raj Singh Dungarpur, the aristocratic former cricketer and President of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) from 1996 to 1999.
One of India’s most loved voices, Lata Mangeshkar was the recipient of three National Film Awards, seven Filmfare awards, and of course, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989. She was conferred the Bharat Ratna in 2001, becoming the second singer after M.S. Subbulakshmi to be so honoured, and the French awarded her the Officer of the Legion of Honour.
In 1974, Lata Mangeshkar became the first Indian to perform at the Royal Albert Hall, London. She had indeed come a long, long way since the time when the first song that she recorded for a film – ‘Kiti Hasaal’ in 1942 – was dropped in the final cut.
Born in what was then the princely state of Indore on September 28, 1929, to the classical singer, Marathi theatre actor and writer of musical plays Deenanath Mangeshkar and his wife Shevanti (Shudhamati), Lata Mangeshkar was originally named Hema by her parents, but they later changed it to Lata after the character Latika from one of her father’s musical plays.
She received her first lesson in music from her father, and at the age of five, she started working as an actor in his musical plays — ‘sangeet natak‘ — in Marathi. Her family had adopted the surname ‘Mangeshkar’ to identify with their native town Mangeshi in Goa.
When she was merely 13, Mangeshkar’s father died of a heart disease, after which, her career as an actor and singer started. She was helped by Master Vinayak (real name: Vinayak Damodar Karnataki), the owner of Navyug Chitrapat movie company. She recorded her first Hindi song, ‘Mata Ek Sapoot Ki Duniya Badal De Tu‘ for the Marathi feature Gajaabhaau, which was released in 1943.
Two years later, in 1945, she moved to Mumbai with Master Vinayak’s company. There, she would take lessons in Hindustani classical music from Ustad Aman Ali Khan of Bhendi Bazaar Gharana. When Vinayak died in 1948, music director Ghulam Haider mentored her as a singer, and even introduced her to producer Sashadhar Mukherjee, who dismissed her voice and called it “too thin”. This irked Haider, who is said to have prophesied that one day, film producers and directors would “fall at [her] feet” and “beg her” to sing for them.
In 1974, the Guinness Book of Records listed Lata Mangeshkar as the most recorded artiste in human history, stating that she had recorded “not less than 25,000 solo, duet and chorus-backed songs in 20 Indian languages” between 1948 and 1974. The claim was contested by her long-time rival, Mohammad Rafi, who claimed to have sung around 28,000 songs.
