Why Lata is an icon

Hindi film music can be classified into two eras — before Lata and after Lata, writes Chiranjiv Singh

Lata Mangeshkar is a part of our collective consciousness. Film music has been the dominant genre in the country ever since its creation in 1931, with the release of Alam Ara, the first sound film of India. It had seven songs. Of the over 70,000-odd Hindi film songs recorded since then, Lata has sung 5,400 in Hindi.

She has sung for films in other languages, and non-film songs too. That is a formidable number but the importance is not in numbers; it is in the matchless quality of her work. In her best work, between 1949 and 1957, her voice had an ethereal quality. Her diction was flawless. Whichever song she lent her voice to then became memorable.

When she came on the scene, film music had already reached its pinnacle with great singers like K L Saigal, Pankaj Mullick, Kanan Bala and Noor Jehan. Saigal had made Hindi film music a pan-Indian phenomenon, such was his popularity. Even the great D K Pattammal sang copies of his songs in Tamil. In Lata’s parental home, only Saigal’s songs were allowed to be played. Other film songs were frowned upon by her classically trained father, Dinanath Mangeshkar. Saigal and Noor Jehan were seminal influences on Lata early in her career. It took the young singer some time to find her true voice and come out of Noor Jehan’s influence.

The voice was God-given. But it was trained by the great composers of that era — Ghulam Haider, Anil Biswas, Khemchand Prakash, Naushad, Husn Lal Bhagatram and C Ramachandra. Her natural talent flourished under their care.

Singing actors

The Saigal era was the era of singing stars. The great singers apart, the rest were hardly passable. This led Pankaj Mullick, Anil Biswas, Saraswati Devi to introduce playback singing in 1935, unknown to each other, as Anil Biswas has said. This was a paradigm shift which changed film music forever. Lata arrived on the playback scene in 1946 against this background. The change was described by the great composer Anil Biswas thus: “Before Lata we had to compose keeping in view the limitations of the singer’s voice. Lata freed us from that. Now we could compose as we wanted, confident that Lata would deliver what we had composed.” Lata let the creativity of composers soar.

Lata’s father, Dinanath Mangeshkar, was a maestro of Natya Sangeet (theatre music). He was her first guru. He had his own drama company. When it flourished, the family enjoyed prosperity. When it failed, the family slid into poverty. Beset by creditors, he took to alcohol and died a broken man. Lata’s brother Hridayanath Mangeshkar, a talented singer, composer and writer in Marathi, has written movingly about that period in an autobiographical piece. The responsibility of looking after the joint family of nine fell on 13-year-old Lata. She acted in a few Marathi films in minor roles and also sang in them. Then she came to playback singing with the Hindi film Aap Ki Seva Mein in 1946.

Composer’s backing Ghulam Haider, doyen among composers, had earlier promoted Noor Jehan and Shamshad Begum. Lata was the third of his discoveries. He proceeded to record in her voice, despite objections from S Mukherjee, boss of Filmistan Studios, that her voice was too thin. Such was his stature among composers that his close friend Anil Biswas and Lahore-based composers Shyam Sundar, Husn Lal Bhagatram, Vinod, Allah Rakha Qureshi (Zakir Hussain’s father), Sardul Kwatra, Hans Raj Behal followed his lead and recorded songs in Hindi and Punjabi in her voice. The history of Hindi film music became ‘before Lata’ and ‘after Lata’ with that.

The scars of the struggling years remained. She brooked no competition that had the potential to jeopardise her financial security. She sang a large number of sub-par songs. Second was her craving for respectability, which she had seen under her father when his drama company was prosperous. She succeeded on both fronts. The award of Bharat Ratna came in due course.

Savarkar link

The Mangeshkar family held Savarkar in high regard, Hridayanath even using his Marathi coinages to replace words of Urdu and Persian-Arabic origin. Saffron politicians drew close to Lata in her later years. Respectability came with Sanskritisation, which Ambedkar had theorised about. The irony is that her best songs are in Urdu, a language that had made her an icon standing for the inclusive culture of this country. Ultimately, her talent, dedication, and hard work resulted in a matchless singing career spanning seven decades. No cultural appropriation by politicians could take that away.

People talk of her accuracy of pitch, her ability to traverse four octaves, and her unerring musicality. It is like trying to describe the beauty of a flower. The botanist counts pistils and stamens, the physicist describes refraction of light on the petals (as Sir C V Raman did), and the chemist talks of ketones and aldehydes in the fragrance. But what describes the beauty of the flower? Great art defies analysis. And Lata’s best is great art.

(The author is a former ambassador of India to UNESCO).