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An odd sort of question arose at the end of an evening with Lata Mangeshkar at a common friend’s house in London. Had I just met the most iconic Indian singer of all time, or had I just spent the evening with a little girl?
Just the wait for that evening was overwhelming. Mr Gaurisarya was a senior advisor to the management at the India Weekly newspaper in London where I worked briefly with the editorial. Lata Mangeshkar was staying at his place, he said, and would I like to come over one evening and meet her? And maybe write something in the paper?
He was polite to put that as a question. It only led to some days of fearful waiting that something may scuttle that promised meeting. Maybe he would change his mind, and of course, Lata Mangeshkar could have so much more to do with her evenings than chat with some local hack. For someone who had grown up with that voice from the heavens, the fear was perhaps inevitable but proved thankfully unnecessary.
She was in a simple off-white sari with a light print on it when, I should say, I beheld her. I bowed and folded my hands in a namaskar, and that seemed fulfilment enough. Here I was face to face with Lata Mangeshkar, and she had said namaskar right back to me with a smile. Gaurisarya seated us and followed up with a business-like ‘go ahead’.
That was almost an anti-climax. There were some pretty predictable questions to put to her, somewhat along the lines on which she had spoken previously. Her position as a singing star, how she trained, how such success came, the music directors, favourite films, favourite singers, that OP Nayyar question. Today brings another question: how I managed to lose a copy of that edition of India Weekly where the interview was published.
Classical
But speaking then as now as yet another Indian who is fond of croaking a little under delusions that it’s tuneful, or even irresistibly appealing, I do recall her response to yet another obvious question, that one about film music vs classical music. She should have yawned. Instead, she told me a remarkable little story.
As a youngster vigorously trained by her father she had performed a ‘chhota khayal’ in Raag Bhimpalasi. That had followed the usual pattern of vilambit, then into a madhya laya, with no doubt a treasure of intricate taans dotting it along the way. The audience, and among them some sharp critics, had been appreciative. She was on her way as a classically trained and classically performing singer.
Many years later, she said, she had sung just a three-minute composition in Raag Bhimpalasi. And that, she said, she found more beautiful than any of the more classically soaked compositions she had performed in Bhimpalasi. That was of course Madan Mohan’s composition ‘Nainon mein badra chhaye…’ She was of course not alone in having found those three minutes of that raag more memorable than many bandishes of that raag in the purely classical tradition.
And the doing of one, and then another. “it’s the same thing,” she said, in her disarmingly simple way. It’s the same 12 notes after all, and surely they don’t know, or care, whether they sit in a film song or in a classical bandish. And no doubt, she said, all her training in classical music had made her singing of compositions for Indian cinema possible. But she was suggesting almost that the best of music composed by the greats like Madan Mohan can make a raag more beautiful than the form in which it finds itself within the usual classical mould.
Stories
It was a long and leisurely chat, much of it not for the confines of a piece in India Weekly. With OP Nayyar, who alone never called on Lata, there was no quarrel, she said. And she loved Ella Fitzgerald, and she thought Mohammed Rafi a saintly man, and she thought the composers of the time artists of unparalleled genius. She had what I thought was a treasure of titbits and anecdotes to share.
And yet she spoke and looked like only a little girl describing some things she’d been up to. I had heard about her fondness for cars, and for cricket, and even a turn or two at gambling on the slot machines. But a minute with her told me what that was all about. Just a little girl’s toys for now and then. And don’t we all hear the child in her voice.
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