Lata Mangeshkar in Her Own Voice

Long ago, when the video revolution had just broken out and every chemist shop turned into a library that stocked video cassettes, when it was possible to hire a VCR or a VCP for 24 hours and entire buildings would see ten films in a day squished together in one suburban living room, a film called Lata Mangeshkar in Her Own Voice made it to the circulating library in Dadar to which I belong. It was directed by Nasreen Munni Kabir and for the first time I realised that if Lata Mangeshkar had been an actress, she would have been an excellent one, perfect at timing. There is a scene in the film in which she tells us how her father would line the children up when they had been naughty and simply look at them. Then he would let them go. In that one scene, the singer who has won the Bharat Ratna and the Dadasaheb Phalke award, plays the role of father and of errant children, switching effortlessly and wordlessly from one to the other. This scene is reproduced in the book at hand but it has half the impact because you don’t see the micro-expressions crossing the face of the diva in white.

But it is a valuable book nonetheless since Kabir goes out of her way to check whether Lata Mangeshkar was called Hema ever (she was not; her father had named her Hridaya but the name did not stick) or whether she was born in Indore (she was; in Sikh mohalla) or whether she fainted in her childhood while singing a raga and when revived, continued to sing from exactly the same point (she didn’t). Nor was the haunting refrain of ”˜Aayega Aanewaala’ from Kamal Amrohi’s Mahal recorded in a toilet, the diva says with some disgust.

Kabir stays away from the difficult areas. She does not ask about Lata Mangeshkar’s personal life. She does not ask about the famous Mangeshkar monopoly and their driving away of such singing stars as Runa Laila. She does not ask about the vocal cords operation the diva is said to have had. She does not ask why the old lady is still singing though her voice is now sometimes painful on the ears. She stays on safe terrain but by doing so she elicits much detail. The latter half of the book is filled with what other people say about Lata Mangeshkar. It gets boring after a bit, since encomium follows encomium, each person trying to outdo the next in praise. Where’s the film? We want the film released again.