Lata Mangeshkar’s Unwavering Bollywood Melodies

As a child, the revered Indian singer Lata Mangeshkar wasn’t allowed to go to the movies much. Her father, a strict and tradition-bound musician and theatre-company owner, didn’t care for the medium of film, especially not its songs. He weaned Mangeshkar and her four younger siblings on a diet of classical music, like the kind he himself sang, and carefully nurtured their voices through singing lessons. His sudden death in 1942, when Mangeshkar was thirteen, threw the family into financial uncertainty. So when the film actor and director “Master” Vinayak Damodar Karnataki, a family friend, offered to give Mangeshkar a break in the movies, she accepted. She slogged through minor roles in Hindi- and Marathi-language films as both a singer and an actress. Strangers told her what dialogue to recite, shone bright lights upon her, and doused her with makeup. She found the charade exhausting, and soon she sought refuge in the recording studio.

Thus began Mangeshkar’s long career as what’s known as a playback singer, supplying her voice to film numbers so that performers could lip-synch her words onscreen. That voice, a thin and fluid instrument, could inhabit a variety of emotional registers, which musical directors demanded of her, whether the unbridled joy of “Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai” (“Today I Have the Desire to Live Once More”), from Vijay Anand’s “Guide” (1965), or the haunting melancholy of “Naina Barse Rimjhim” (“Tears Fall from the Eyes”), from Raj Khosla’s “Woh Kaun Thi?” (1964). She built a vast œuvre, reportedly singing thousands of songs that spanned regions and languages such as Bengali, Marathi, and Tamil. But it was in Hindi popular cinema, or Bollywood, where she made an incalculably deep impression. (Her younger sister Asha Bhosle, who is eighty-eight, became a playback singer of comparable stature.) Mangeskhar’s honors came both at home and abroad: India’s highest civilian award, the Bharat Ratna, in 2001; France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor, in 2007. Popular Hindi films underwent aesthetic shifts through the decades; the appetites of moviegoers often changed. But Mangeshkar, who died last Sunday from complications of COVID-19 at the age of ninety-two, remained a critical link to the industry’s past.

When I was growing up, in a Bengali immigrant household in the nineties, Mangeshkar’s music was ever present. It was her interpretation of the Madan Mohan-composed song “Dil Dhoondta Hai” (“The Heart Searches”), from the director Gulzar’s 1975 film “Mausam,” that captured my imagination early. In the song, a doctor (Sanjeev Kumar, with a singing voice provided by Bhupinder Singh) laments a lost love (Sharmila Tagore). Tagore, a fine actress who began her career under the art-house filmmaker Satyajit Ray, brings her charm to the occasion, appearing impish, even childlike, as she acts out the lyrics while the two roam the forest. But it is Mangeshkar’s silken voice that gently pierces the screen, imbuing Tagore’s flirtatious expressions with a fragile but visceral sense of longing. This, Mangeshkar knew, was the capability of a playback singer: to bring a dimension of feeling to characters that few of the most seasoned of actors could surface and that pages of dialogue could not convey.

“What kind of character is she? I think about that and also ask which actress I am singing for,” Mangeshkar once told the journalist Nasreen Munni Kabir. “When I first started singing, I didn’t pay much attention to this.” The beginnings of her career were beset with difficulties. She told Kabir that in the early days, she sometimes worked without pay, with producers who kept her money for themselves. She hewed to a punishing schedule, recording six songs per day and often getting by on three hours of sleep. Initially, she did not even receive proper credit for what many consider her breakout song, “Aayega Aanewala” (“He Who Is to Come Will Come”), from the 1949 film “Mahal,” which the soundtrack record attributed only to the name of the character, Kamini, played by the actress Madhubala. “Playback singers were once considered unimportant,” Mangeshkar said to Kabir. “Producers called them, paid them, they sang, they went. End of story.” But Mangeshkar battled for formal credit on subsequent films—and won. She refused to perform at the Hindi-language Filmfare Awards until a category was created to recognize playback singers, in 1959; she and one of her contemporaries, the vocalist Mohammed Rafi, came to loggerheads in the sixties when she insisted that playback singers receive royalties for their work.

Madhubala, who died two decades after the release of “Mahal” at the age of thirty-six, was just one of the younger stars Mangeshkar sang for and ultimately outlived. She provided the vocals for multiple generations of film families, singing the parts of mothers and, decades later, their daughters, such as the actress Tanuja and her child Kajol. Indeed, Mangeshkar’s catalogue in Hindi alone provides a history of the language’s popular cinema, and encapsulates the great diversity of the industry’s stylistic traditions. Listen to how convincingly she brings to life a romantic heroine’s inner torrents of feeling in the slow, meditative “Rajnigandha Phool Tumhare” (“Your Tuberose Flowers”), from Basu Chatterjee’s “Rajnigandha” (1974), in which a woman contemplates being in love. In Mangeshkar’s interpretation, the pangs of desire seem to overtake the character so completely that she sounds as if she’s collapsing into sobs. That voice was equally at home in the more upbeat “Aa Jaane Jaan” (“Come Here, My Dear”), an example of what is colloquially known as an “item number”—a suggestive interlude with a sometimes flimsy connection to a film’s larger plot—from R. K. Nayyar’s “Intaquam” (1969). Mangeshkar’s voice soaks each note in temptation.

As Mangeshkar grew in stature, urban legends about her talent began to proliferate. It was rumored that, when she was six years old, she lost consciousness mid-performance, then came to and resumed singing from the same point at which she’d left off. It was said that she recorded one of her most enduring songs—“Jab Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya” (“Why Fear When You Have Loved”), from the director K. Asif’s historical epic “Mughal-e-Azam” (1960)—in the unglamorous confines of a studio bathroom. How funny to picture Mangeshkar—sustaining her soft but commanding soprano as a Mughal Empire-era courtesan, defiantly declaring her love for a royal—mere feet away from a toilet. “How can people think such things?” Mangeshkar asked Kabir when presented with this anecdote. “The person who has written that has clearly never been inside a studio bathroom!” Even “Nightingale,” the sobriquet that many attached to her, and that numerous obituaries have emphasized, reveals a similar impulse: the only way to explain the alchemy of her singing, it seemed, was to insist that she wasn’t one of us.

She maintained humility. “All right, I can sing, but it’s nothing extraordinary,” she told Kabir. “Many sang better than me, but they didn’t get as much.” Her legacy had so many happy repercussions that it’s tempting to ignore its rougher spots. By the eighties, her honeyed voice had begun to wear. Detractors now called it screechy and shrill, and implied that she’d overstayed her welcome in the industry. I still remember the release, in 2004, of “Veer-Zaara,” the director Yash Chopra’s film about a romance between an Indian man and Pakistani woman. The film came out when I was twelve and was a major cultural event in my pocket of the South Asian diaspora. Its soundtrack was made up of previously unreleased compositions by Madan Mohan, a frequent collaborator of Mangeshkar’s, and she lent her voice to the majority of them. But some of my family members wondered why Mangeshkar hadn’t ceded the stage to a junior singer for, say, “Hum To Bhai Jaise Hain” (“I Am the Way I Am”), a young woman’s ode to her plucky individuality, and I’m afraid that I found their arguments persuasive. Back then, I saw Mangeshkar, who was by then in her seventies, as an illogical choice to render the character’s vibrant and youthful spirit.

Looking back now, knowing the fickle nature of cultural memory, I can appreciate how Mangeshkar’s inclusion on the soundtrack tethered “Veer-Zaara” to a rich legacy of Hindi cinema. In an interview near the end of her life, conducted last year by the veteran critic Subhash K. Jha, Mangeshkar spoke about her fears of erasure. “​​Nowadays, the young people’s attention span is very limited. They do not live in the past at all. It is the era of instant gratification,” she said. “I doubt my legacy will mean as much to future generations as to people like you.” Speaking for myself, at least, she couldn’t have been more wrong.