Lata Mangeshkar, who died Sunday morning, was the most prominent singer of Hindi films for more than half a century. Epithets like ‘Nightingale of India’ fail to do justice to her range – from classical to folk, from traditional to western-influenced. On one hand, she recorded tens of thousands of songs, and on the other hand, her admirers included maestros like Bade Ghulam Ali Khan. Was she India’s greatest female singer of the twentieth century?

https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/music/lata-mangeshkar-dead-7717500/

Not taking away from her greatness, it should be acknowledged that the music scene in India is not a level-playing field. Film songs alone count as music for majority, leaving other genres – light classical, regional traditional, ghazal, and of course classical – to the margins. Gangubai Hangal and Kishori Amonkar or Usha Uthup and Pinaz Masani, therefore, are not even in contention when fans discuss who the greatest female singer of them all is. Even within this limited domain, there were others, from Shamshad Begum and Suraiya to Asha Bhosle and Suman Kalyanpur, who did not have the luck or the range or years in their favor.

Having said that, there is something about Lata Mangeshkar’s voice that came to define India’s post-independence identity. In 1963, after India was defeated in the war with China, her rendering of the patriotic song, ‘Aye Mere Watan ke Logon’, not only brought tears to prime minister Nehru’s eyes but also helped the whole nation in coming to terms with the grief: https://www.indiatoday.in/movies/celebrities/story/ae-mere-watan-ke-logon-how-lata-mangeshkar-s-voice-became-the-silver-lining-amid-war-clouds-1909180-2022-02-06 While her credentials in classical music were never in doubt, her work in popular culture could touch the hearts of millions, in India and abroad.

Also, for someone who made her debut in 1946, it is an astounding feat that she was still recording in 2010s, working thus through generations of composers – in 36 languages! Her duets with Mehdi Hassan of Pakistan were equally popular across the border and some of her Bollywood melodies made it to the soundtrack of some Hollywood films too (notably, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’).

Her demise, in either case, is the end of an era.

Read on:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542196/bio

https://www.business-standard.com/about/who-is-lata-mangeshkar

http://www.cinemasangeet.com/lata-mangeshkar/features/lata-is-she-the-greatest-indian-film-singer.html

https://www.quora.com/Is-Lata-Mangeshkar-the-greatest-female-singer-of-the-Indian-film-industry