Darshan Joshi

Feb 08, 2022

Lata Mangeshkar: A voice that reshaped India’s popular culture

On the morning of February 6, 2022, when Mangeshkar died at Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital, India not only lost one of its most prolific singers, but also a musician who transformed the craft of film singing and became a benchmark for successive generations to emulate. She was admitted on January 8 due to pneumonia induced by a Covid-19 infection. She initially responded to treatment, doctors said, but her condition deteriorated in the first week of February, and she was put on ventilator support again.

In 1965, when Marathi film legend and later Dadasaheb Phalke award recipient Bhalji Pendharkar wanted to make a movie on the urban-rural conflict amid the rapid transformation of a tumultuous decade, he turned to Lata Mangeshkar to compose the background score. The job not only required musical genius but also a keen understanding of the scores of Marathi dialects spoken across Maharashtra.

By then, Mangeshkar – already a movie playback singing sensation in many Indian languages – had composed music for three Marathi films. It was Pendharkar’s film Saadhi Maansa (Simple Folk) – her fourth – that would become a landmark. Two of its songs – Airanichya deva tula and Malachya malyamandhi – became all-time classics in Maharashtrian households and won innumerable awards.

If you saw the movie, though, you will be forgiven for not knowing that Mangeshkar composed its music. After Ram Ram Pavhna, her first film as composer in 1960, Mangeshkar preferred the relative anonymity of a male pseudonym. So, it was Anand Ghan (literally, a cloud of joy) that gave music to Saadhi Maansa and won the state’s best music and best song awards for that year, not Lata Mangeshkar. Anand Ghan’s identity later became a popular question in school quizzes.