Lata Mangeshkar turns 80
One of India's�best-known playback singers, Lata Mangeshkar, who has lent her voice to nearly 30,000 songs in over 20 Indian languages in a career spanning over six and a half decades, turns 80 on Monday (September 28). We at Galatta.com wish all the very best and happy birthday to this Bharath Ratna awardee, known for her quest for perfection and undying spirit.
Lata Mangeshkar was born in 1929 in Indore into a Maharashtrian Brahmin family. Her father Dinanath Mangeshkar was the owner of a theatre company and a reputed classical singer. He started giving Lata singing lessons�from the�time�she was�five and she also studied with renowned singers Aman Ali Khan Sahib and Amanat Khan. Even at a young age, she displayed a God-given musical gift and could master vocal exercises the first time.
Ironically, she made her entry into Bollywood at the wrong time,�during the 1940s, when bass singers with heavily nasal voices were in style. She was rejected from many projects because it was believed that her voice was too high-pitched and thin. The circumstances of her entry into films were no less inauspicious; her father died in 1942�and�the responsibility of earning�to support her family fell upon her. Between 1942 and 1948, she acted in as many as eight films in Hindi and Marathi to keep the home fires burning. She debuted as a playback singer in Marathi with Kiti Hasaal (1942) but, ironically, the song was edited out!
However, in 1948, she got her big break with Majboor (1948) and 1949 saw the release of four of her films: Mahal (1949), Dulari (1949), Barsaat (1949) and Andaz (1949); all of them became runaway hits with their songs reaching�heights of�great popularity. Her unusually high-pitched singing rendered the trend of heavily nasal voices of the day totally obsolete and, within a year, she had changed the face of playback singing forever.
Lata Mangeshkar has won numerous awards and honours including Padma Bhushan (1969), Padma Vibhushan (1999), Dada Saheb Phalke Award (1989), NTR National Award (1999), Bharat Ratna (2001), three National Film Awards and 12 Bengal Film Journalists' Association Awards. She has also won four Filmfare Best Female Playback Awards, after which she declared she should no longer be considered for Filmfare awards. She was awarded the Filmfare Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993.
