Lata Mangeshkar recorded in more than thirty-six languages
Lata Mangeshkar (1929–2022), India’s defining playback voice, sang primarily in Hindustani, Bengali, and Marathi yet logged songs in over thirty-six Indian languages plus a few foreign ones. She recorded barefoot out of studio reverence and famously avoided replaying her own takes. Bharat Ratna in 2001 capped a Dadasaheb Phalke Award from 1989.
She was born in Indore, then capital of a princely state in British India, and first named Hema; her parents renamed her after Latika, a character in one of her father's plays. Deenanath Mangeshkar was a classical singer and stage actor who took his surname from his ancestral village of Mangeshi in Goa; his mother belonged to Goa's Devadasi community of temple artists. Lata's Gujarati mother came from Thalner, and her grandmother taught her Gujarati folk songs.
Her father gave her first music lessons, and she was acting in his musical plays by five. She reportedly quit school on day one because she could not bring her sister Asha along. The eldest of five, she grew up with Meena, Asha, Usha and Hridaynath, all of whom became singers or musicians. When heart disease killed her father in 1942, she was thirteen, and the film producer Master Vinayak, a family friend, helped launch her as singer and actress.
Over eight decades she sang in more than thirty-six Indian languages, mostly Hindustani, Bengali and Marathi, earning titles such as Queen of Melody. She took off her shoes to record, treating the studio as a temple, and never played back her released songs, saying she would only hear mistakes. Guinness once listed her as history's most recorded artist until her sister Asha Bhosle overtook her.
No Indian playback singer had appeared at London's Royal Albert Hall before her concert there in 1974. She collected three National Film Awards and four Filmfare playback trophies before declining more, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1989 and the Bharat Ratna in 2001, only the second singer so honoured, and France made her an officer of the Legion of Honour in 2009.
Source: Lata Mangeshkar
