For seven decades, she gave voice to the nation’s burgeoning film industry — and fought for better pay for the singers who powered it.
Lata Mangeshkar, the Indian playback singer who loaned her coy, girlish voice to the heroines of Indian film for more than seven decades and became one of Bollywood’s most powerful figures in the process, died Sunday in Mumbai. The singer,92, had been hospitalized since early January with Covid-19. Indian cinema is so intertwined with its music — just watch any classic Bollywood film — that a film can be a hit or a bomb depending solely on the catchiness of its songs. So directors chased Mangeshkar to breathe life into their Busby Berkeley-esque song-and-dance numbers with her impossible high notes and emotive delivery. The singer, whose voice could stretch an impressive four octaves (for comparison, Mariah Carey’s range is five), is believed to have recorded thousands of songs in more than 30 languages from Hindi to Urdu to Tamil to Bengali, as well as her native Marathi. Upon news of Mangeshkar’s death, the actress Kajol, who lip-synced to Mangeshkar’s mellifluous voice in the film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, shared a tweet that suggested just how prolific the singer’s career was. “If we play her songs one by one,” the actress wrote, “we could hear her for a month and never hear the same song again.” Mangeshkar’s death was also met with the announcement of a national two-day mourning, and her star-studded state funeral in Mumbai on Sunday drew political and Bollywood royalty, from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to beloved film star Shah Rukh Khan.
