Lata Mangeshkar: The song-maker passes, the songs endure

Lata Mangeshkar was part of our boyhood, our early youth and of course our adulthood. Her songs shaped to a very large extent our understanding of music, the rich tapestry of melody that has always been the South Asian heritage. Be it her Urdu and Hindi songs or those mellifluous Bengali explorations of the heart, Lata was always with us.

One of my earliest memories of Lata's songs was her rendition of aayega aayega aane wala from the movie Mahal. My mother loved it and so did we. In my sixties, the song, when I tune in to it, transports me back to the days when, in bed with recurrent bouts of typhoid, I felt it touch me in a way nothing else would, or could. And as the years passed, with the radio playing songs from all across the subcontinent — India, Pakistan and a future Bangladesh — it was Lata whose dominance was a prime factor in our comprehension of melody. Towards the end of the 1960s, on the annual Binaca Geetmala programme of what then was the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation, milti hai zindago mein/mohabbat kabhi kabhi wafted along on the ether, to touch the depths of the soul in us.

But then, Lata always went deep into our souls, even in her projections of melodic sadness. In the song hai jiya roye, which again is a song I have listened to since the early 1960s, you detect the heart slowly shattering into pieces in a woman from whom love has taken flight. The song, in the deepening hours of the night, echoes through the streets and indeed through the world, to inform us that the heartbreak is in all of us. But if Lata sings of heartbreak, she can also be a voice of defiance in defence of love, a task she does remarkably well in the Mughal-e-Azam classic song pyar kia to darna kya. Lata's rendition and Madhubala's dance systematically diminish the man that is Emperor Akbar. What more can you want when rebellious love knows no frontiers?

In the 1950s, the actress Nimmi lipsed the soul-stirring tum na jaane kis jahan mein kho gaye from Lata. Add to that O aasman wale and what you have is a clear observation of the versatility which was Lata's forte. Passion was a sentiment she brought into powerful play in such songs as naino mein badra chhaye and lag ja gale ke phir/ye haseen raat ho na ho. Or move on to that inimitable number, ye sama sama hai ye pyar ka/kisi ke intezar ka. The sublimity of romance, whether in its tragic notes or gaiety of expression, led Lata Mangeshkar to newer shores of melody. In mera saaya saath ho ga/tu jahan jahan chale ga, love comes across as an inevitability in the same way that hum ne dekhi hae/un ankhon ki mehekti khushboo does. The invitation to the lover, drawing him closer to the beloved, is what Lata sings of in aaja piya tohe pyar duun. And then she moves a step further, holding out her arms for the lover to lose himself in. Think of baahon mein chale aao.

In the movie Guide, a liberated Waheeda Rehman breaks into the cheerful Lata rendition of kaanto se cheer ke ye anchal. And good cheer bursts through tu ne o rangeele kaisa jadoo kiya. The heights of romance, in all their ethereal quality, are perhaps best reached in that unforgettable Pakeeza song, mausam hae aashiqana/ae dil kaheen se un ko aise mein dhoond laa na. You almost feel the heart throb in the beautiful woman as through the intensity of her song she waits for her lover to make his way to her. At another end, in the movie Adalat, a broken Nargis calls forth our pity with the Lata number, un ko ye shikayat hae ke hum/kuchh nehi kaehte/apni to ye aadat hae/ke hum kuchh nehi kaehte.

Lata Mangeshkar's repertory extended seamlessly into the world of Bengali melody. Such songs as asharh srabon mane na to mon, sung by our mothers' generation, is a heritage we have kept alive in our times. That Lata's greatness is enduring is evidenced by latter-day artistes like Shreya Ghoshal and Anuradha Paudwal crooning her songs for a latter-day generation of music-obsessed young men and women. The song brishti brishti brishti, picturised on a young Aparna Sen, transports us back to our days of blossoming romance. In shaat bhai champa jago re we will our mothers to come alive, in that metaphorical sense, for they were in endless infatuation with this song.

The sense of wonder, and it has been there for decades, at listening to akash prodeep jole and prem ek bar eshechhilo nirobe, is what it was when initially Lata came to us over the radio with such coruscating music. Remember na jeyo na rojoni ekhono baki? Recall ja re urhe ja re pakhi? And nijhum shondhae? The list is unending. The bigger reality is that Lata's songs build a bridge between past and present, threading the way to the future. Guzra hua zamana aata nehi dobara/hafiz khuda tumhara pulls us back to the past and then comes level with our present.

The duets which Lata sang with such stalwarts as Mohammad Rafi, Hemant Kumar, Mukesh, Kishore Kumar, Talat Mahmood and others remain the epitome of high romance in not just melody but in the quotidian lives we lead, the lives to which we try adding a dash of soul-filling music and so giving them a little more of substance. Sit back, look out the window, and reflect on the stirrings in your heart which once such duets as aap ne yaad dilaya/to mujhe yaad aaya gave rise to.

Perhaps the time you serenaded the young woman next door with the Lata-Rafi number, tere husn ki kya taarif karun/kuch kaehte hue bhi darta huun will rekindle the old passions in you. The young woman went missing ages ago, which heartbreak makes you hear, across and beyond the ancient mountains, the strains of dekh liya maine/kismat ka tamasha dekh liya/ik aag lagi ik aag bujhi/ankhon ne meri kya dekh liya.

Poetry and music endure beyond time. Poets and song-makers delve deep into the souls of men and women across the generations, even centuries. Long after these individuals, having enriched our collective emotions, having added to our poetic and melodic sensibilities, pass on to the Great Beyond and into the region of starlight, we recite their verses and sing their songs. And thus does the landscape of heritage become expansive. Thus does legacy lengthen itself, to touch new frontiers.

Lata Mangeshkar, her tryst with Earth concluded, touches a new frontier through her passing. And we celebrate her in her songs, in the fullness of joy she transmitted to our homes and to our hearts since the very first day she sang in a beautiful land of veritable musical spirituality called India.