How does one capture a lifetime of music in a few words? Well, the un-Indian nightingale comes to mind. A title bestowed on her early on – when in a voice described as sweet as the nightingale, her rendition of a song on the Indian soldier after a bruising defeat at the hands of a neighbour moved the Prime Minister to tears. For a country humiliated, the song saw an outpouring of grief like none other. Lata Mangeshkar meant several things to people. To composers she was a singer whose unblemished voice could not strike an off-key note even if she willed it to. To young girls her voice was the holy grail whose pursuit began in infancy. She spawned a generation of imitators where the ability of a singer to hit high notes with clarity is worn as a badge of honour to this day.
Lata’s early struggle when money was hard to come by after her father’s death, mirrored the woes of a young country struggling to shake off its colonial yoke. The sheer drudgery of the early years stood in sharp contrast to the moods her songs evoked in a voice honed by years of training in Indian classical music. Her voice trailed people after a new country found its voice in freedom. From dawn to dusk, her voice accompanied the citizens of a new country as they went about their daily chores and defined the nation’s mood. As India Today wrote a few years ago, “It is the voice to which the roadside vendor in Delhi has transacted his business, the long-distance trucker has sped along the highway, the Army jawan in Ladakh has kept guard at his frontier bunker, or the glittering elite of Bombay have dined in luxury hotels.”
