It is customary for radio announcers to say ‘Divya swar Lataji ka hain’ when you tune in to Vividh Bharati in the mornings. The songs are a few decades old, and yet they are fresh as morning dew. The listener accepts the 'divya' (divine) characterisation as a fact. Such was the power of Lata Mangeshkar.
In retrospect, that a voice as thin as hers could rule the world of film music is in itself a miracle. When she first came into the scene in the 1940s, the dominant voice type was far more robust and earthy. Early in her career, she was rejected by a mainstream film producer for this thinness of timbre.
However, Master Ghulam Haider, music director of the film, predicted that the very same producers would line up and ‘beg her’ to sing for them. That proved prophetic. Ghulam Haider gave her a Pahadi raga-based composition, ‘Dil mera toda, o mujhe kahin ka na chhoda,’ in the film Majboor not long afterwards, and it became a resounding hit.
Lata’s early life was full of tribulations. She was born into music. Her father, the great Pandit Dinanath Mangeshkar, was an acclaimed stage actor and singer of Marathi natya sangeet. He passed away suddenly, leaving Lata, then just 13, in charge of four younger siblings. The years that followed were hard on her, but she fought all odds with grit.
Lata was a child prodigy. Her father learned about her precocity when, at the age of eight or nine, he caught her correcting a raga Puriya Dhanashree phrase being attempted by one of his students. He had not even started teaching her formally!
He then trained her for a few years. She took to music with great enthusiasm and even performed on stage. Her father’s untimely death put her at a crossroads. On stage, in those days, female roles were performed by men, and filmdom was taboo for women. Lata was thus on the way to becoming a classical singer.
But destiny had other plans, and her path veered towards films. She initially did some work in Marathi films. Her entry into Hindi films took more time. By the mid-1940s, she had sung for films like Aapki Sewa Mein, Badi Maa and Jeevan Yatra. With her sweet voice, she had caught the attention of big producers and stalwarts in the music industry.
The watershed year in her career was 1949, with the runaway success of her song ‘Aayega aanewala’ under the music direction of Khemchand Prakash for Mahal. In just a few years, she had become a rage. Ghulam Haider’s words had come true.
The 1950s were a golden era for Lata, not just in quality but also in quantity. She had acquired a veritable Midas touch by then. She had picked up the nuances of playback singing from great music directors like Anil Biswas, C Ramchandra, Husnlal-Bhagatram, Shyam Sunder, and Sajjad Hussain. She was unerringly in tune, had a great sense of rhythm, fantastic breath-control and a mastery over the microphone.
Lata was an intensely private person, and took controversies, both personal and professional, in her stride. Allegations that she sabotaged the careers of potential competitors were rife. She had personal spats with music directors and singers, and her fight over royalties with Mohammad Rafi (with whom she has sung some of the finest duets in filmdom) is well known. Her Guinness record, which claimed that she had recorded 25,000 songs, was contentious. That number is demonstrably off the mark, and is best treated as hyperbole. Music historians put the number at about 7,000.
Hindi film songs remained the mainstay of her work. Songs like ‘Aa jaa re pardesi’ and ‘Nainaa barse rimjhim rimjhim’ are unparalleled in their beauty. Lata also had a natural penchant for devotional songs. Bhajans such as ‘Allah tero naam’ and ‘Ai maalik tere bande hum’ are among her best numbers.
Lata sang extensively for non-film albums---Meera bhajans, Marathi devotionals and so on. She recorded in 36 languages, most notably in Marathi and Bengali. She sang two songs for the Kannada film Sangolli Rayanna (1967). She truly was the Voice of India.
Lata’s departure will create a void that can never be filled, for there has never been a singer like her, nor will there ever be one. That ‘divya swar’ will echo in our hearts and souls forever.
(The author, based in Bengaluru, is a member of RMIM, a worldwide club of vintage music lovers).
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