At the beginning of the 20th century, nice Indian girls did not sing in public. Female musical performances were restricted to tawaifs, of a slightly sulfurous reputation, during soirées frequented by cultivated male patrons. If the tawaif wound up getting married, the husband almost invariably required his bride to abandon her art. Men, on the other hand, had for centuries been honored as musicians, patronized by padishahs and maharajas. Their craft was handed down from father to son, and still is today.
But things were changing when Lata Mangeshkar came into the world, in Indore, in 1929. Her father, an acclaimed musician, taught his then six-year old daughter to sing a small part in a play he had written for the lively and progressive Maratha theater. The father and the public recognized that the child had a remarkable voice. When, eight years later, her father died suddenly, the voice of the shy adolescent became the family’s sole source of income.
There were indeed opportunities to earn money. At first the recording industry gave the young singer an outlet for her talents. This paid modestly, and her name was not even printed on the vinyl disks. Later she got acting parts, but she didn’t enjoy the hub-bub of the movie-set, which distracted her from her music. Finally she settled into the role of playback singer, ie, she sang for lip-synching actresses. Though some western films were made in this way (eg, Audrey Hepburn was dubbed for the musical numbers in My Fair Lady) India uniquely provided playback singers a route to stardom. In 1949, she sang for four movies, and her career took off. By the 1960s she was one of India’s most successful singers. At the end of her long life—she died last year at age 92—she had recorded over 2,000 songs.

Musical biographies can be frustrating because the music itself is missing. Biographer Yatindra Mishra does a workman-like job explaining what made Lata Mangeshkar a success. Besides having an inborn sweetness of voice, she worked hard to master a rich repertory of ragas. Although she had no formal education, she applied herself to study Urdu and Sanskrit poetry, in order to be able to convincingly express the lofty and sentimental phrases of her songs. Because she was asked to sing in Hindi, Urdu, Marathi and Konkani (and later in Bengali and Tamil), she painstakingly practiced elocution, so as to have no trace of an incongruous accent. All this required tremendous dedication.
Lata Mangeshkar also introduced a new musical repertory to the movie business. Trained by her father and her early entourage to sing classical Indian music, she inspired composers to use more sophisticated ragas in films, while previous singers and composers had restricted themselves to lighter tunes. She also worked with some of the most famous poets. In part through her efforts, the film music of the 50s and 60s enjoyed a golden age. She satisfied the aspirations of the Indian middle class to enjoy culture previously patronized by courts and temples.
Her success, too, depended on her character. Hard as nails when it came to business negotiations, she knew how to win friends among the older generation of Bollywood stars, enlisting their help with her fledgling career. She lamented the departure of some of her mentors to Pakistan, at partition, hoping, vainly as it turned out, that they would all remain a happy band of brothers and sisters.
The craft of this great singer is well summarized in a couplet by Sahir Ludianawi quoted here by Mishra:
جو تار سے نکلے ھے وہ دھن سب نے سنی ھے
تو ساز پہ گزری ھے وہ کس دل کو پاتا ھے
The song of the fiddle, everyone hears,
but what heart knows the instrument’s struggles?
Mishra narrates a series of encounters with the diva, as when one visits a distinguished, older relative and returns each time with a precious snippet of information. She celebrates her subject, her life and art through anecdotes designed to beguile her devoted fans. Half of the book consists of interviews. This part is the most fun to read as Lata Mangeshkar rattles off her favorite songs, her favorite poets, and where she shows off the contrasts of her personality: modest but steely, unpretentious but erudite.
This translation into English by Pande reads well. The only drawback is the frequent use of Hindi snippets of songs or lines of poetry without translation. The reader may use Google translate in order to get the gist of these, but they will miss the content, unless they look these songs up using Youtube. A few footnotes could have helped make the book more educational for the wider, global audience of readers.
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