Lata Mangeshkar

Lata was born in Indore in 1929, the eldest child of Deenanath Mangeshkar, a Marathi stage singer and theatre owner with a reputation as a classical vocalist, and Shevanti. Her father taught her music from the age of five, and she acted and sang in his plays as a child. He died in 1942, when she was thirteen, leaving the family without income; Master Vinayak, a family friend and filmmaker, took the children under his wing, and Lata began acting in small roles and singing in Marathi films to support her mother and four siblings — Meena, Asha, Usha and Hridaynath.

Her first Hindi film song was for Ghulam Haider, who believed in the thin, high voice that other producers found too weak beside the heavier Noor Jehan and Shamshad Begum style of the day. Majboor (1948) gave her a first hit, and Mahal (1949), with Khemchand Prakash's Aayega Aanewala, made her name — the record was issued without a singer's credit, and listeners wrote to the radio station to ask who she was. Within two years Naushad, Shankar-Jaikishan, S.D. Burman, C. Ramchandra and Anil Biswas were writing for her voice, and Andaz, Barsaat and Baiju Bawra fixed her as the voice of the new decade.

Through the 1950s and 1960s she sang for nearly every leading actress — Nargis, Madhubala, Meena Kumari, Nutan, Waheeda Rehman, Vyjayanthimala, Sadhana, Sharmila Tagore — and the composers built whole scores around her. Madan Mohan's ghazals, Salil Chowdhury's melodies, the Shankar-Jaikishan Raj Kapoor films, Roshan, Hemant Kumar, Jaidev: each had a side of her voice they drew out. In 1963, at the Republic Day gathering after the China war, she sang Pradeep's Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon in the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru, and the recording became a national piece in its own right.

She fought for singers' rights inside the industry — for royalties on records, a dispute that caused a long break with Mohammed Rafi in the early 1960s, and for the singer's name to appear on film credits and radio announcements. She stopped accepting Filmfare Awards after 1969 so that the award could go to newer singers. In the 1970s she sang Laxmikant-Pyarelal's long run of hits and R.D. Burman's more adventurous scores; in the 1980s and 1990s, well into her sixties, she was still the voice of Sridevi, Madhuri Dixit and Kajol — Ek Duuje Ke Liye, Maine Pyar Kiya, Hum Aapke Hain Koun, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Dil To Pagal Hai and Veer-Zaara, the last in 2004.

She recorded in more than thirty languages, with a large Marathi and Bengali output alongside the Hindi, and released devotional albums and private records across her career; the Meera bhajans with Hridaynath are among the most listened to. The Dadasaheb Phalke Award came in 1989, the Bharat Ratna in 2001. She never married and lived in the family home on Peddar Road in Bombay for most of her life. She died in February 2022, at ninety-two, and was cremated at Shivaji Park with full state honours.

The Lata voice is high, light and perfectly in tune, with almost no vibrato and no chest weight — a voice that sounded young for sixty years. What she added to it was diction and restraint: every word clear, every ornament placed where the composer wanted it, and feeling held just under the surface rather than pushed at the listener. That restraint is why she could sing a lullaby, a bhajan, a cabaret number and a ghazal in the same month without any of them sounding like the others, and why composers as different as Madan Mohan and R.D. Burman thought of her as the ideal instrument.