Remembering Lata Mangeshkar through vignettes of old interviews by her and those around her during her journey to become the Nightingale of Bollywood.
The world lost an unfathomable talent and a gifted voice on Sunday, early morning. As they say, there was nobody like her, and perhaps, there would not be anybody like her. The legendary singer, who suffered multiple organ failure, died at the age of 92. Born in 1929 as Hema Mangeshkar, she was the eldest daughter of Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar, a Marathi and Konkani musician and his wife Shevanti. Her other siblings are Meena Khadikar, Asha Bhosle, Usha Mangeshkar, and Hridaynath Mangeshkar.
As many as 700 songs over 35 years: Lata Mangeshkar’s voice resonated across the world and even enthralled generations of maestros from both classical and popular music. However, if we are to look back at where she began, Lata Mangeshkar did not have it easy.
After losing her father at the age of 13, Lata struggled to learn to make ends meet. During her early days in Mumbai, she started to take lessons in Indian classical music from Ustad Aman Ali Khan. After his demise, Ghulam Haider, who heard the voice of young Lata, introduced her to music producer Shashadhar Mukherjee. “Extremely thin voice,” said Shashadhar Mukherjee, on hearing Lata Mangeshkar’s voice. But Haider knew that Mukherjee would be proved wrong soon.
Bengal was her place of love and contemporary singers, Kishore Kumar and Hemanta Mukherjee were like her own brothers. However, rumours were rife about Lata and Hemanta's close relationship.
Another close friend of was cricket administrator Raj Singh Dungarpur. In an earlier interview, Dungarpur revealed how Lata Mangeshkar would not even touch her favourite dessert, ice cream, to take care of her throat. She was a perfectionist, who would want to be extra careful with her meals, to tend to her throat. It was said, that her close relationship with Dungarpur made Mangeshkar a crazy fan of cricket.
Gifting the industry with soulful music for over five decades, music was Lata Mangeshkar’s God all her life. In a 2017 interview with a Bengali daily, Lata mentioned three artists, whose lip-sync with her songs, were most fine -- Meena Kumari, Nutan and Madhuri Dixit.
All the three actresses hailed from a music background, hence making it easier for them to synch in coordination. “Nutan sang in movies while Madhuri, has the voice of singing in shows. So that’s an advantage. This is the reason, Madhuri’s lip-sync to ‘Didi tera dewar deewana’ left the audience in awe,” she said during the interview.
Having dominated playback singing for decades, Indian cinema's nightingale Lata Mangeshkar now passes into eternity.