Melody queen Lata Mangeshkar passes away, her music lives on in generations

The singer defined an entire epoch in Indian film music, influenced the contours that the big-screen heroine assumed.

Iconic, a word that is often bandied about way too casually, does not begin to sum up what Lata Mangeshkar was. She was, and is, India’s voice. Undisputed, untrammelled, unmatched, she held us in thrall for over seven decades. Does her passing, then, mark the end of an era? Well, time cannot imprison her. It loses meaning in the context of her peerless, transcendental singing career. It was never about how long, but how much, Lata Mangeshkar has mattered to us all – and that is beyond measure.   

Lata Mangeshkar will live forever because she is ingrained in our souls and beings in a way that few recording artistes have ever been anywhere in the world. She is in the air we breathe, the thoughts we have, the tunes we hum, and the emotions we feel. A singer of unparalleled brilliance, she not only defined an entire epoch in Indian film music, but also influenced the contours that the big-screen heroine assumed in the golden age of Hindi cinema – from the early 1950s to the late 1960s.

Her refined, mellifluous voice defined femininity and placed it within a free India’s evolving social register in which freedom and restraint went hand in hand. Music directors rarely thought of her as the voice of the vamp or the nautch girl (barring famously for Pakeezah’s Meena Kumari). It was leading ladies, virtuous and circumspect, that she primarily sang for. For his distinct brand of music, OP Nayyar, for one, never utilised Lata, opting for her younger sister Asha Bhosle instead.
 

That is not to say that Lata wasn’t versatile. Her perfect musicality not only enabled her to be emotionally resonant but it also allowed her to be anything that she needed to be – from the chaste to the coquettish, the innocent to the spicy. She sang pathos-tinged ditties, lively romantic numbers, delectable ghazals, devotion-dripping bhajans and semi-classical compositions with equal felicity. And she sang in virtually every Indian language.         

Lata was much more than the numerous awards and accolades that she accumulated over the years. Stamping herself on the collective consciousness of the nation, she changed playback singing forever with her technically flawless voice and her magical delivery of a range of emotions and the most exquisite of musical sleights.

She lent her voice to every major actress who graced Hindi cinema over a period of seven decades, from Nargis, Waheeda Rehman and Meena Kumari to Madhuri Dixit, Preity Zinta and Kareena Kapoor. She was the go-to singer for three generations of music directors, from Naushad, Vasant Desai, C Ramchandra, Sachin Dev Burman, Salil Chowdhury and Madan Mohan to Rahul Dev Burman (with whom she had as fruitful an association as her younger sister Asha Bhosle), Bappi Lahiri, Anu Malik, Anand-Milind, Jatin-Lalit and AR Rahman.

Lata’s phenomenal longevity is best illustrated by the fact that she sang for both Chitragupt and his sons, Anand and Milind. She also sang for Anu Malik and Rajesh Roshan and their respective fathers, Sardar Malik and Roshan. But with age catching up, she withdrew from active playback singing a decade and a half back. She never, however, went out of vogue because she was, and will always be, the gold standard.

Following the untimely death of her father, singer and actor Deenanath Mangeshkar, she was mentored in the mid-1940s by Master Vinayak and, after his demise, by Ghulam Haider. The latter gave Lata her first Hindi film song, Ab darne ki koi baat nahin, a duet with Mukesh in the film Majboor, starring Kishore Kumar and Nalini Jaywant. Haider also introduced the singer to film producer Sashadhar Mukherjee, who founded Filmistan.  

She recorded Uthaye ja unke sitam for Mehboob Khan’s Andaz (1949) under the baton of composer Naushad and followed it up with the career-defining Aayega aanewala aayega the same year for the Bombay Talkies film Mahal for which Naushad’s mentor, Khemchand Prakash, composed the music. Her ascent thereafter was quick and uninterrupted.

Hindi cinema’s first crop of female playback singers – the likes of Shamshad Begum, Zohrabai Ambalewali, Rajkumari, Amirbai Karnataki and Suraiya (herself a successful actress), whose styles were rooted in either the classical music gharanas or the kotha traditions – failed to keep up with Lata as she went from strength to strength with a voice that was thinner, softer and marked by a timbre and tone perfectly suited to the modernising recording studios in the 1960s.

Her breakthroughs in the late 1940s through the early 1950s rode on the fact that she firmly ensconced herself in the orbit of a slew of filmmaker-music director teams that were to dominate Hindi cinema for the next two to three decades.

Filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, Kamal Amrohi and BR Chopra, among many others, formed enduring creative partnerships with composers Shankar-Jaikishan, SD Burman, Salil Chowdhury, Roshan, and Madan Mohan. And Lata Mangeshkar quickly became an integral part of the musical universe they built.

She was the first choice when B R Chopra made his maiden film (Afsana), Raj Kapoor delivered his first major hit (Barsaat), Kamal Amrohi made his directorial debut (Mahal) and Bimal Roy mounted his first home production (Do Bigha Zamin). Their careers took off and Lata Mangeshkar, as able a musical ally that they could have hoped for, soared and took their films and Hindi cinema along with her.