Lata Mangeshkar: a voice built on practice

A child who learnt by listening

Lata Mangeshkar was born in Indore on 28 September 1929. Her father, Deenanath Mangeshkar, was a classical singer and a Marathi theatre actor who also ran a drama company and taught music to students. Lata was the eldest of five children, and all of her younger siblings, including Asha Bhosle, grew up to work in music.

Her first classroom was the house itself. In a 2003 interview with The Tribune, she said she copied the lessons her father gave his students, singing them for the household staff from the kitchen. She also said she was too shy for a long time to sing in front of her father.

When she was about five, her father left a student to practise on his own. Lata heard him singing a composition wrongly, went in, and sang it the right way for him. When her father came to know, he woke her early the next morning, put a tanpura in her hands, and began teaching her properly. She sang with him on stage for the first time in 1938.

“I consider my father my true guru.”

— Lata Mangeshkar, via WION

Supporting a family at 13

In 1942 her father died of heart disease. Lata was 13. She later said that she suddenly became the breadwinner of the family, and the money she earned helped pay for her brothers and sisters to study. A family friend, the film-maker Master Vinayak, helped the family and brought her into Marathi films, where she took small acting roles to earn a living. She did not enjoy acting. What she wanted was to sing.

The first song she recorded for a film, 'Kiti Hasaal' in 1942, was dropped from the final cut. Through Master Vinayak she also began formal lessons in Hindustani classical music with Ustad Aman Ali Khan after the family moved to Bombay. Around 1943 to 1944, during a film shoot in Kolhapur, the famous singer Noor Jahan heard her sing a classical piece, praised her, and told her to keep practising.

Rejection, then a break

Getting work was not easy. In the late 1940s many people felt her voice was too thin for the leading heroines of the time, and she gave trials to many music directors. One film producer turned her down for exactly this reason.

The composer Ghulam Haider believed in her. She remembered standing with him at an empty Malad railway station while he hummed a tune he had made, and he asked her to sing it. He gave her songs in the film Majboor in 1948, and she called him her godfather in music. A year later, 'Aayega Aanewala' from the film Mahal became a huge hit, and composers across the industry began calling her.

She also worked on her language. She told The Tribune that she learnt Urdu diction, and with the composer Naushad she went on to sing one hit after another.

Seven decades of songs

Studio work in those years was hard. Songs were recorded live with big orchestras, sometimes close to a hundred musicians plus a chorus. If even one person made a mistake, everyone had to sing the whole song again. Lata said she would spend long hours in studios, often without food.

On 27 January 1963, months after the war with China, she sang 'Aye Mere Watan Ke Logo' in Delhi in front of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The song, written for soldiers who died in that war, is reported to have moved the audience, including Nehru, to tears. In 1974 she became the first Indian to perform at the Royal Albert Hall in London. That same year, Guinness World Records listed her as the most recorded artist.

She sang in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and many other languages, and even composed music for Marathi films. She received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989 and the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honour, in 2001. She was only the second singer to receive it, after M. S. Subbulakshmi.

Lata Mangeshkar passed away in Mumbai on 6 February 2022, at the age of 92, after a month of treatment in hospital. The country observed two days of national mourning.

The skills and habits that made the difference

Ear training came first. Long before she had formal lessons, she had learnt full compositions by listening carefully and copying them. That is why, at about five, she could hear that a grown student was singing the wrong notes.

She had a strong classical base. Lessons with her father, and later with Ustad Aman Ali Khan, gave her the raga training on which her film career was built.

She paid attention to words, not just notes. When she needed better Urdu pronunciation for Hindi film songs, she worked on it until it became a strength.

And she was patient with hard work. Repeating an entire song because of one mistake, through long and hungry studio days, was a normal part of her early working life.