Affectionately known as India’s “Didi”, born in Indore, Madhya Pradesh on 28 September 1929, Lata Mangeshkar began learning music at the age of five from her father, Deenanath Mangeshkar.
After her father’s death, the family moved to Mumbai where she began singing for Marathi movies. Her big break came in 1949 with the release of a song titled ‘Aayega Aanewala’ for the movie ‘Mahal’. Over the next few decades, her voice was the soundtrack to hundreds of Bollywood songs that were lip-synced by Bollywood’s biggest heroines across generations from Nargis and Waheeda Rehman to Madhuri Dixit and Preity Zinta.
Her extraordinary career spanned more than half a century and she recorded approx. 50,000 songs in 36 languages which is even more than The Beatles and the Rolling Stones combined. She won four Filmfare awards, the Padma Vibhushan (1999) and the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest honour for civilians in 2001.
But did you know Lata Didi’s original name is Hema? She was renamed Lata based on a character ‘Latika’ from her father’s play, BhaawBandhan. Lata didi was born into a family of artists. Her father, Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar, was a classical singer and theatre actor, who discovered her singing talent.
Deenanath ran a theatre company that produced musical plays where Lata started acting by the age of five. Lata’s ability to sing Raag Puriya Dhanashree helped him discover her singing talent. Speaking to Stardust, she recalled, “It so happened that once my father asked his shagird (disciple) to practise a raag while he finished some work. I was playing nearby and suddenly a note of the raag that shagird was rendering, jarred. And the next minute, I was correcting him. When my father returned, he discovered a shagird in his own daughter.”
Lata’s father said to her mother, “We have a singer at home. We never knew it.” At five, Lata started working as an actress in her father’s Marathi musical plays, also known as ‘Sangeet Natak’. Lataji learned music from stalwarts like Aman Ali Khan Sahib and Amanat Khan, apart from her father. She recorded her first song in 1942 for the Marathi film, Kiti Hasaal; but it never saw the light of day, as it was edited from the film. The song was called Naachu Yaa Gade, Khelu Saari Mani. Although Natali Chaitraachi Navalaai is known as her Marathi song debut.
The oldest of five siblings–Meena, Asha, Usha and Hridaynath, Lata shouldered the financial responsibility of the family after her father’s death in 1942. When she first entered the film industry as a playback singer, she was rejected. At the time, singers like Noor Jehan and Shamshad Begum ruled the roost. She was told her voice was ‘too thin’ for the time, in comparison to the heavy-nasal voices that belted hits. Her major break came in 1949, with the song Aayega Aanewala from the film Mahal. She turned a sensation overnight with the song that not many can muster the courage to croon.
Her fame has hardly dimmed ever since.
