82 The Economist February 12th 2022
Obituary Lata Mangeshkar
Thesceneisthegardenofa palaceinAllahabadwherea young
woman, ghostly in the twilight, is singing on a swing. Inside,
in the grand ballroom, the owner of the palace sees a chandelier
swaying in time to the song. The haunting beauty of this voice
draws him out into the garden, but as he approaches the young
woman disappears. All that is left is the empty swing and the song,
“Aayega Aanewala”, “He will come, he who is to come”: The world is at rest, but lovers are restless
In the stillness, footsteps are approaching,
As if someone is passing through my soul.
Or is it only my heart beating?The young woman in “Mahal” (The Palace), made in 1949, was
the great actress Madhubala, then still a teenager. But she was not
the one singing. In trademark Bollywood fashion she lipsynched
the words to a song recorded by a short, slightly dumpy, barefoot
girl in a sweltering studio with the fans turned off, because they
made too much noise. For “Aayega Aanewala” she crept towards
the microphone from 20 feet away, mimicking the echoes of the
song. The combination of her passionate voice with the elegant
beauty of Madhubala was a peak of Bollywood’s art.
Her name, mentioned only as the song drew wide acclaim, was
Lata Mangeshkar. She came from Indore in central India, the
daughter of a touring theatre producer. From “Mahal” on, over sev
en decades of playback singing, her fame grew exponentially. She
performed for every Indian prime minister, sang for actresses
from Madhubala to Kajol, did duets with all the famous actors and
built a catalogue of more than 5,000 songs, half of them solos. Di
rectors fought to have her in their films, and she sang in more than
a thousand. Inevitably, her voice also became the soundtrack of
newly independent India. Through pasystems in malls and fac
tories, from radios in chai stalls and barbers’ stands, out of thewindows of idling, hooting cars, at funerals and weddings, her
songs wove India together. She seemed to be always there, de
scribing love’s joy and pain, famously as the defiant courtesan
Anarkali in “Pyar Kiya to Darna Kya” (“Why Fear to be in Love?”)
from the film “Mughal e Azam”, “The Emperor of the Moghuls”:
Why fear to be in love?
I’ve loved, not stolen anything.
Why hide and sigh?She could never have imagined fame on such a scale. It meant
that she could support her mother and her siblings and, later, get a
secondhand Mercedes, indulge her love of Test cricket, buy dia
monds and take holidays in Las Vegas, where she played the slots
all night. But when, at five, she had begun to sing in her father’s
productions, she feigned headaches to avoid his stern teaching.
And when he died and she, at 13, took up acting to support the fam
ily, she could not bear to be in front of the camera. It did not love
her, with her plumpness and her eyebrows, which one director
told her were “too broad”. Nor could she bear to be directed what to
say. By contrast to be an unseen playback singer, freely adding
high emotions to the drama, felt exactly right.
Not that it was always easy. Her voice at first struck many as too
high and thin, when the vogue was for a gutsier sound. With prac
tice she made it fuller, improved the vital coloratura and devel
oped her own honeyed way of singing, which others quickly cop
ied. Languages other than Hindi or her native Marathi (she sang in
dozens), were tricky, but she worked hard to perfect them. Prac
tise, practise, was her mantra; and then get tough. She fought dog
gedly for playback singers to share in the royalties given to com
posers, as well as for higher fees for herself. There were frosty
spells in that dispute when she refused to work with Mohammed
Rafi, the playback partner with whom she sang 450 duets, and the
director Raj Kapoor, whom she usually counted as a friend.
Nor did she stay behind the scenes for long. By the 1970s she
was touring the world, bringing Bollywood’s music to the West
and to proper concert halls. In 1974 she sang at the Royal Albert
Hall, the first Indian to do so. Her early training had been classical,
including playing sitar and composing, but she was confident that
Bollywood’s music could stand beside the older kind. Her father
would never have agreed, but now both she and her sister Asha
Bhosle were playback superstars.
She also featured in most concerts the song she had sung in
1963 in front of Jawaharlal Nehru, then prime minister. India had
just lost a border war with China, and her song, “Aye Mere Watan
ke Logon” (“Ye People of my Land”) was for the martyrs. When the great Himalayas were wounded and our freedom in danger,
They fought until their last breath and fell to the ground...
Some were Sikh, Jaat or Marathi; some Gurkha or Madrasi,
But each man who died there was an Indian.... As she sang Nehru cried, and afterwards he thanked her.
Her ardent, simple patriotism made some think that she be
longed in politics, and in 1999 she was appointed to the Rajya Sab
ha, the upper house of parliament. She did not go much and did
not take any mp’s perks, which included a free phone and cooking
gas connection. What did she know about politics? Her world was
music, and it was wide enough to contain Mozart, Beethoven,
Chopin, the Beatles and Nat King Cole. Music was her god and her
husband too, for she never married.
In a way (though Pakistan embraced her, too) she was also mar
ried to her country. She was everyone’s “Didi”, sister, and divya, di
vine. When she died, of covid, people wept in the streets. Flags
flew at halfmast, and there were two days of national mourning.
At her funeral Narendra Modi himself laid flowers on her coffin.
Her last song had been a tribute to him and to the Indian army.
All that was left was the empty swing. The swing, and the
songs; the pain and the joy.nIndia’s nightingaleThe country’s most celebrated playback singer died
on February 6th, aged 92