The unforgettable Lata Mangeshkar

The nightingale of Bollywood, who had been the voice of the subcontinent for decades. She was an icon for a generation that preceded us.

Lata Mangeshkar’s voice has mesmerised not only her Indian fans but Pakistan too.

On the day of her demise, I couldn’t help recall a memory of Lata Mangeshkar and my grandmother. Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, my grandmother’s memory was affected to an extent where she was not able to recognize her own children and grandchildren.

One day, when her illness was at its worst, Lata’s song from the 1980s was playing on the television. As a harmless jest, my uncle involuntarily asked my grandmother which song it was.

My grandmother, out of the blue and to our surprise, told us exactly what the song’s lyrics were and the movie in which the song was performed.

It still amazes me how unforgettable Lata’s voice was.

Not just the 70s and the 80s, even today, Pakistani weddings are almost incomplete without the inclusion of Lata Mangeshkar’s songs.

During the reign of Zia ul Haq, when VCRs and other Indian content was strictly banned by the state, VCRs of Lata’s songs were still being sold secretly. It is a measure of Lata Mangeshkar’s achievement that all tributes and any adjectives seem like a gross understatement.

It is hard to imagine any comparable artist, who so saturated the cultural, emotional and affective life of their nation. This is not just a statistical achievement. The tens of thousands of songs recorded in 18 languages, the total domination of playback singing for a half-century, the ability to define a whole genre of music, the innovations of tonality, pitch and modulation, would alone be formidable.

A great artist might give pitch-perfect expression to a variety of emotions. Lata Mangeshkar went further. Her songs became the totality of our emotions to the point where it was impossible to think of an effective life outside of her songs.

Be it love, heartache, betrayal, longing for the beloved, or expressing the trials and tribulations of being in love, Lata’s songs had all the ingredients that one needed to express his or her most inner feelings, and that is what makes her the unprecedented voice of the east, although some refer to her as the voice of the heart, which is also not untrue.

Lata Mangeshkar is no longer with us, but her songs and her musical prowess will forever live with us for generations and generations to come.