Like most legends, Lata Mangeshkar did not have an easy beginning to her career. Her father was an actor-singer, but in her own words, she “was often confined to the roles of the sister of the hero or the heroine”. The chance she got after her father’s demise for a Marathi song got scrapped. It seemed like it was not meant to be, but how wrong was she? And how glad are we?
Over the course of my career as a journalist, I have had the good fortune of meeting Lata several times. Lata liked to sing the way she wanted to. She enjoyed the back-and-forth of playback singing when male and female singers sang together and responded to each other’s cues. She did not enjoy that technology made it possible for these tracks to be sung separately. She sang during an era when songs had to be sung many dozens of times in their totality before they could be okayed. “One song of Majboor, ‘Dil Mera Toda’, was okayed after 32 takes,” she told this writer.
“Today you take one line here; you take the asthayee separately, the aalap later, and you do not remain in the same mood. Honestly, there were great music directors in the past,” she said so during an interaction about Veer Zaara.
The haunting Mahal (1949) song, ‘Aayega Aanewala’ proved to be the ‘Apna Time Aayega’ for her, resonating as it did with her mentor Ghulam Haider’s words, “One day, all composers will come and fall at her feet and ask her to sing for her!” This was said by him when he heard that a leading producer had rejected her voice for being “too thin”. Lata grew to a stature from where she rejected many songs, like of the cabaret variety, for instance. Her sister, Asha Bhosle, was a beneficiary, but she would have none of this talk. “Asha is versatile and can sing anything. It should never be said that I gave cabaret songs to her,” she would say, keen to ensure Asha got her due.
Mahal was a hit, and yet, Lata’s name did not feature on the album. The credit was given to Kamini, the character Madhubala played, as the filmmakers did not want the audience to know that there was a playback singer involved. When the song came out though, everyone could see Madhubala hadn’t sung it, and HMV got flooded with letters demanding the name of the singer.
Lata never really got any awards in the beginning but today a whole auditorium can scarcely hold them. “I requested Raj Kapoor to add my name in the titles and that’s how my first credit happened. I think it was for Barsaat,” she told this writer. From then on, she was keen that singers and songwriters get due credit, even if she had to fight with Mohammed Rafi and eventually stop singing with him after he supposedly called her ‘maharani’. Today, there’s little doubt she’s very much a maharani.
Following the success of her contributions in Barsaat (1949) and her aalap in Raag Bhairavi, Kapoor realised the power of Lata’s voice and ensured that she would sing an aalap in each of his films. For Awara (1950), he cancelled what he called a ‘popatiya song’ and added an aalap to ‘Ghar Aaya Mera Pardesi’. Her recording for this song was completed at 3am and the entire team sat on the road and had their dinner, and then, Lata left. Where her career has taken her since is household talk across the country now. She departs now, a maharani, a fierce nightingale. Sayonara, legend. Tere bina jiya laage na!
(The author is a journalist, historian and filmmaker. He has been writing on cinema and music since 1987)
