Lata’s Gone But . . . Aayega Aanewala

(2nd of two pieces on Lata Mageshkar, 28 September 1929 – 6 February 2022)

The nation will take its time to come to grips with the phenomenon that was Lata Mangeshkar.  One article or social media post after another has rehearsed the facts and occasional exaggerations that point to her astounding popularity.  As I noted in the previous post, she is sometimes credited with having sung 50,000 songs, and that too in as many as 36 languages; accolades were heaped upon her, not least of them the Bharat Ratna, and the sobriquets with which she was showered include ‘Melody Queen’ and ‘Nightingale of India’.  School children of my generation grew up learning that Sarojini Naidu was the Nightingale of India, but it is surely a sign of our times that the feisty Naidu, who was a highly accomplished poet and yet led the raid at the Dharsana Salt Works during the Salt Satyagraha and made world news, has had to make way for someone who has ruled the airwaves.

Mahatma Gandhi With Mahadev Desai and Sarojini Naidu on their way to Buckingham Palace, London,
to meet the King-Emperor, 1931.

Lata monopolized the national imagination.  In time to come, as film studies becomes more established in India as a discipline and distance permits a more nuanced and critical outlook on the legacy of Lata, we will doubtless derive a better understanding of how she became supremely ascendant as a playback singer, her place in the film industry, the interplay of gender and caste in shaping the contours of her life, and the circumstances that conspired to make her the heartthrob of the nation.  Luck played a part, too:  it was rather fortuitous for Lata that, with the partition of India, the inimitable Noorjehan left for Pakistan and so created an opening for her, even if it be argued that she would nevertheless have found her footing in the industry.  When her popularity is ascribed to her ‘golden voice’, little if anything has been said:  she was not the only gifted female singer of her generation, her own sister Asha Bhosle being a case in point, as can also be said of Suraiya who as a leading actress also had the distinction of singing for herself.  One can at best refine the point and suggest that Lata’s voice was supremely expressive, or that—as Javed Akhtar has put it—her pronunciation even in Urdu was flawless or that her sur was perfect.

The nation has in most cultures been conceived as feminine and I suspect that we can begin to have a better conception of the extraordinary place of Lata in the life of the nation when we imagine how she not only embodied the nation but sang the nation.  The near conjuncture between 1947, the independence of India, and 1949 when Lata’s arrival on the national stage became inescapably clear cannot be missed.  1949 was, the film historians remind us, the breakthrough year, the annus mirabilis of her life that left everyone else reeling.  Naushad had four films that year but the one with Lata, Andaz, scored handsomely over the others, and Shankar Jaikishan made their acclaimed debut with Lata’s voice in Barsaat.  This would have been nearly enough to send everyone packing, but Lata topped it with one of the songs with which her name is indelibly linked, ‘Aayega aanewala’, from the film Mahal directed by Kamal Amrohi.  Some call it her ‘signature song’; it is surely among her best and critically important, not just because it launched her, but also owing to its place in the repertoire of songs that illustrate what I have described as singing the nation.

Still from film Andaz (1949).

‘Aayega aanewala’ will appear to many as an odd choice to understand the interface between Lata and the idea of the nation.  That honor surely belongs, most will proclaim, to ‘Ae mere vatan ke logo’, a tribute to the soldiers who died during the Sino-Indian War of 1962.  The story has been told ad nauseam of how her rendition of the song before Jawaharlal Nehru on Republic Day, 1963, sent him into tears.  But in one very important way, this song should be viewed as anomalous in the context of my argument:  it was specially written for the occasion by Kavi Pradeep and is not attached to any film. What is distinctive about the culture of the Hindi film, and Lata embodied this ethos perhaps better than any other playback singer, is that the Hindi film performs the nation itself—and nowhere more so than in the songs.  This is to say that the song bears the burden of some of the most characteristic aspects of the nation—what may be called values, norms, and mores, but also the culture’s literary tropes, reigning metaphors, and expressive devices.

Let us consider briefly two instances from the song, Aayega aanewala.  The film Mahal is commonly described as a gothic horror film, but the plot need not be understood to comprehend the force of my argument.  It is a romantic song—about longing, the anticipation with which one awaits a lover, the thumping sound of one’s heartbeat, hoping that the one who must come, will come (aayega aayega aanewala).  And then we encounter these lines: ‘bhatakhti hui jawaani manzil ko dhoondti hai /maaji bagair nayya sahil ko dhoondti hai / kya jaane dil ki kashti kab tak lage kinaare’.  ‘A restless (and desolate) youth looks for her destination’, Lata sings, ‘much as a boat without a boatman is looking for the shore; who knows when the boat, or heart, will dock at the banks of the river (kinaare)’.  The listless heart as a boat that is knocked around in the sea is a stock metaphor in Sanskrit love poetry, but the entire series of metaphors—the boatman, the boat, the river, the shore—proliferates in the bhakti literature of India and is unquestionably one of the more distinctive features of Indian literary traditions.  To be sure, Lata is neither the lyricist nor the music composer; but, as most recognize, the singer over time becomes de facto the author of the song.  What is emphatically clear is that Lata, whose command over the classical music repertoire was just as formidable, sang with full awareness of how the metaphors drew upon Indian traditions.

If Lata sang the nation, ‘Aayega aanewala’ furnishes a yet more dramatic illustration of this phenomenon, one which also points to what I have previously described as the near conjuncture of 1947 and 1949, just as it suggests that Lata’s hold over the national imaginary had to do in some measure with both the Hindi film’s own construction of the virginal purity of (Hindu) women and of the nation itself.  One of the most peculiar aspects of broadsheets or nationalist prints that circulated widely in the 1930s is the frequent depiction of martyrs as moths (parwaane) that have fallen at the feet of Bharat Mata (see image below).  Oddly enough, or perhaps not so, the song takes recourse to the same metaphor: ‘deepak bagair kaise parwaane jal rahe hain, / koi nahin chalata, aur teer chal rahe hain’ (‘How is it that moths are burning though there is no flame, / No one shoots the arrows, yet I feel the sting of their pain’).  My point is not that there is any direct correspondence between the prints and the song.  That is far from being the case, and indeed in ‘Dukhi Mata’ (fig. 1) the flame is lit but the moths have been devoured in its flame.  Yet, as we know, shaheeds (Bhagat Singh among them, recognized here in this print by his trilby) are amar (immortal): truly do they burn (jal rahe hain). This literacy device suggests the proximity of the song to the nation embodied as Bharat Mata.

Dukhi Mata (‘Sad Mother’), c. 1930. Collection: V. Lal.

As a coda, let me add a provocation, or, in terms more familiar to the Hindi film song aficionados, spice up Lata with a bit of Asha. A good portion of the urban middle class in India has shown that it has little use for the ‘Father of the Nation’.  As long as Lata, who was the undeclared Mother to the Nation, was there, India was never quite orphaned.  Now, Lata’s gone, but . . . perhaps aayega aanewala. 

First published in OPEN Magazine on February 11, 2022, as ‘Singing the Nation’, print & online.

Our Very Own ‘Nightingale’: Lata ‘Didi’ and her Enduring Popularity

(First of two pieces on Lata Mangeshkar)

Vinay Lal

There has never been any question that Lata Mangeshkar, who passed on at the age of 92 on February 6 in Mumbai, was the most popular singer in India.  There have been endless number of affirmations of her popularity, but just why she may have been so popular, to which I shall turn in the second half of this essay, has been much less frequently explored.  Lata certainly never had any equal among female playback singers, though it is sometimes argued that her sister, Asha Bhosle, held her own for at least a period of time, and among male playback singers Muhammad Rafi alone quite possibly rivaled her in popularity. If Lata was the ‘Melody Queen’, he was the ‘Melody King’.  But Lata had the advantage over Rafi Sahib, who was a mere 55 years old at the time of his death, of longevity.  Asha has a large following, to be sure, and many claim that she was more versatile than her older sister. Apart from the question of whether Lata was deservedly more popular than Asha, this ‘debate’ is unlikely to be ever resolved and is best left to those who are avid about their partisanship and who have the time and inclination to press their passionate conviction upon others. 

As a testament to Lata’s popularity, many in the media have since her passing four days ago mentioned her apparently unrivaled repertoire of songs.  Some say that she sang in thirty-six languages, while others are content to mention ‘only’ around 15-20 languages.  Considering that most people cannot sing well in one language, unless they have had some training, a handful of languages would be enough to point to her extraordinary gifts. The huge commentary in the established media and the even greater outpouring of thoughts and sentiments on social media have all coalesced around the staggering number of songs Lata is thought to have sung.  Some have mentioned as many as 25,000, or 30,000, and as far back as 2004 the BBC, in introducing an article by Yash Chopra on the occasion of Lata’s 75^th birthday, mentioned ‘50,000 songs’.  The obituary in the New York Times speaks casually of ‘tens of thousands of songs’ that Lata reportedly sang.  Indians have long clamored to get into the Guinness Book of Records for one record or another, and to many Indians it was a matter of pride that the Guinness Book acknowledged her as early as 1974 as ‘the most recorded artist in music history’, though the claim was disputed by Muhammad Rafi.  Just how this dispute was handled is a long story, but in 2011 the Guinness Book acknowledged Asha Bhosle for holding the world record for the largest number of ‘single studio recordings’.  Neither sister holds the record today, that honor having passed on in 2016 to Pulapaka Susheela Mohan who is a veteran playback singer in Telugu films, though she also sings in other languages including Tamil. 

Considering that India is a country obsessed with records and also renowned as a powerhouse of statistics, and that Indian film music aficionados number in the millions, it may be surprising that no one really knows how many songs Lata performed.  However, in other respects as well there is something askance and quaint in the widespread approbation of her as the ‘Nightingale of India’. Growing up in India in the late 1960s, the ‘GK’ (General Knowledge) book assigned in school ensured that we knew that the ‘Lion of the Punjab’ was Lajpat Rai, ‘Frontier Gandhi’ was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Lokamanya (‘Beloved of the Nation’) was Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and ‘Deshbandhu’ (‘Friend of the Nation’) was C. R. Das—and that the ‘Nightingale of India’ was Sarojini Naidu, not Lata Mangeshkar.  Sarojini Naidu was, of course, a feisty freedom fighter, a close associate of Gandhi and, after independence, Governor of the United Provinces.  It is a lesser-known fact that she was also an accomplished poet, indeed celebrated by more than one English writer as India’s best poet in English.  Sarojini Naidu was, however, no singer, and it was the expressive, lyrical, and emotive quality of her poetry that earned her, from Mohandas Gandhi, the sobriquet ‘Bharat Kokila’. 

Here Gandhi was following the English tradition that has long associated literature and poetry with the nightingale.  The English romantic poets, in particular, were enchanted with the nightingale, most famously among them John Keats whose ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ remains a staple in English poetry classes. It is perhaps this verse which captures the Indian public’s view of Lata’s ‘full-throated’ voice for the ages: 

                        Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!

                             No hungry generations tread thee down;

                        The voice I hear this passing night was heard

                             In ancient days by emperor and clown . . .

His friend and contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, in his famous ‘Defence of Poetry’, did not doubt that the nightingale commanded the world—as did the poet:  ‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.’  Gandhi knew, however, that the nightingale is not an Indian bird; thus, he refers to Sarojini Naidu by the word ‘kokila’, the indigenous bird that most closely approximates the nightingale. More tellingly, though perhaps few in India at all care for such matters, only the male nightingale sings.  The female does not sing at all; the male nightingale, which has a vast and astonishing repertoire of over 1000 different sounds, compared to around 100 for a blackbird—the bird celebrated by the Beatles with the lines, ‘Blackbird singing in the dead of night / Take these broken wings and learn to fly’—serenades the female, and that too mainly at night.

Still, even as one takes the measure of Lata’s popularity, a more enduring question remains to be understood.  What made her popular to the extent that she became practically the voice of the nation, and how did she remain at the top for decades?  To many, the answer is obvious:  she had a ‘golden voice’.  By this it is meant that her singing was flawless and her sur was perfect; her singing, it is claimed, was uniquely expressive and she could even get into the skin of the actress for whom she was singing.  Her biographer, Nasreen Munni Kabir, states that Lata also had the gift of capturing the mood of the song and the meaning of the words.  Lata had grit and determination—and discipline, too.  To sing in films in the late 1940s and into the 1960s one had to know Urdu, and Lata had to learn it; and the story is famously told of the time when Dilip Kumar rubbed it into Lata that her Urdu had a little too much of dal-chawal in it!  Lata worked on her Urdu, to the extent that, as Javed Akhtar has related in a recent interview, he did not once hear her mispronounce an Urdu word.  But he suggests that none of this was sufficient to produce the magic that one associates with Lata, and he points out that within fifteen minutes of getting the lyrics for the first time, and not having heard the music either, she had virtually mastered the song.  There was some other quality Lata possessed that was uniquely her own, and Javed Akhtar attributes this to her ability to penetrate to the subtext, the meaning of a song that lay beyond the words.

Beyond even this, I would argue, there is something else that made it possible for Lata to become the heartthrob of the nation. She emerged on the national scene with a bang in 1949 by establishing her presence as a singer in several films, many of which became hits:  Mahal; Barsaat; Andaz; Bazaar; Dulari; and Patanga.  The historical context that saw her take the country by storm is critically important.  India had acquired its independence in 1947 and one of the many questions before the country had to do with the status of women.  Gandhi’s noncooperation movement of 1920-22 had brought women out into the streets for the first time and the trend accelerated with the Salt March and subsequent satyagrahas.  But, in most other respects, women were not part of the public sphere, and though the Constitution that was being drafted by the Constituent Assembly envisioned an equal place for women in Indian society, the prevailing sentiment was that women belonged mainly in the domestic sphere. To take one illustration, though women played an important role in the communist-led Telengana Rebellion (1946-51), studies have shown that even their male compatriots expected women revolutionaries to give up their rifles and return to the kitchen once the rebellion was over. 

At the same time, the struggle for freedom was also built on the idea of service to, and sacrifice for, Bharat Mata.  The nation in most parts of the world is construed as a feminine entity, but in India this had resonance beyond the ordinary for many reasons, among them the fact that Hinduism, in contrast to the Abrahamic faiths, has still retained a space for the feminine in various ways.  This can be seen in the attachment to goddess worship that is still found in nearly all parts of the country, though it is more pronounced in some parts of the country, such as Bengal, than in others.  Indian art during the freedom struggle from the 1920s until the attainment of independence is suffused with invocations to Bharat Mata.  In the aftermath of independence, the idea of Mother India had to be given a new incarnation—and then, fortuitously, Lata came along.  She represented the idea of the feminine principle in its least threatening form.  Where the prominent female singers of the previous generation had heavy, contralto voices, often having to sound almost like a man, as is evidenced amply by Malika Pukhraj and Zohrabai Ambalawali, Lata started off with a voice that was somewhat girlish and somewhat desexed.  The contrast is all too apparent in the very first film, Mahal (1949), where Lata and Zohrabai, both uncredited, first appeared together:  Lata sang ‘Aaayega aayega aanewala’, which blew everyone away, but the intoxicating mujra, ‘Yeh raat phir na aayegi’, is performed by Zohrabai.  Lata’s was a voice that domesticated women, so to speak, and put them in their place as keepers of the hearth and custodians of the nation’s morality.  This placed Lata at a considerable remove from the generation preceding her, some of whom also had to struggle against the stigma attached to female singers.

As historians of the Hindi film song have argued, but more importantly as every listener who has heard Lata and Asha Bhosle at some length knows, there is a marked difference in the artistic trajectories of the sisters in one fundamental respect which has a bearing on the argument that Lata speaks for a certain kind of femininity which places her in a different relationship to the idea of the nation.  If Lata’s singing was more soulful, Asha’s singing had more body to it and exuded a kind of raw sensuousness—in part because Asha sang for actresses who had taken up roles where the heroine could to some degree project her sexual identity.  It is common knowledge that Lata would not sing the songs of the vamp, but Asha gave a sexual feel to feminine identity in ways that went beyond simply being reduced to a vamp or someone who did mujra songs. The womanliness that Asha’s voice embodied hinted at sensuousness, a comfort with one’s own sexuality, but only occasionally did it border on the salacious. 

If we had to put this in simpler terms, we can find the source of Lata’s popularity not only in everything that has been ascribed to her—perfect sur, flawless pronunciation, expressive soulful singing, and a genius for comprehending the mood of every song that went beyond the words—but also in the fact that she came to embody the idea of a virginal womanhood almost at the very inception of the nation.  (Some may find the notion of ‘Bharat Mata’ and ‘virginal womanhood’ do not easily sit together, unless one was invoking some Indian conception of the ‘Virgin Mary’.)  No one, after all, speaks of ‘Asha Didi’.  Much work needs to be done to understand the magic wrought in India, and over India, by Lata Didi.

This is a slightly edited version of a piece published under the same title on 10 February 2022 at abplive.in.

Identity and the Colossal Failure of Contemporary Electoral Politics

Part III of The Trouble with Kamala:  Identity and the Death of Politics

In an effort to understand what the rise of Harris might mean, it may be more productive to enter into the vortex of her life and the belly of that beast called American politics in a more tangential fashion.  I would wager to say, on no authority except my own hunch as a reasonably educated and moderately well-read person, that Kamala Devi Harris was very likely named after Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (1903-88).  That this hunch is far from being a demonstrable fact is immaterial since the invocation of Kamaladevi’s name suggests both the possibilities that are inherent in Kamala Harris’s gradual and probable ascendancy to the pinnacle of American politics and, though this will be less evident to most people, the profound misgivings that one must necessarily have about electoral politics–especially at this juncture of history.   It is almost inconceivable that Kamala’s mother, Shyamala, was not inspired by Kamaladevi, a fiery Indian nationalist, socialist, and feminist who was a major figure in India’s struggle for freedom and a close associate of Mohandas Gandhi.  Kamaladevi was not only a staunch advocate of women’s rights but a leading exponent, at a time in the 1930s when even feminists in the West were reluctant to advocate for the complete equality of women, of the idea of equal pay for women and men. She was the first woman in India to stand for elected office, losing her bid for a seat in the Madras Legislative Assembly in 1926 by a mere 60 votes!  Kamaladevi forged extensive contacts with socialist feminists around the world, led satyagraha campaigns in India, and preceded Shyamala Gopalan in making her way to the United States as a single—or, more accurately in this case, divorced—woman for a lengthy visit which took her to prisons, American Indian reservations, and reform institutions in an attempt to understand the underbelly of American life and initiate a transnational solidarity of the oppressed.

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay (center), with her sister-in-law, Sarojini Naidu, to her left, at the Simla Conference

The Fear of Dissent: India’s New Colonial Masters

Protest in Assam against the Citizenship Amendment Bill, passed into law as Citizenship Amendment Act on 12 December 2019.  Source: Zee News.

There is almost nothing as fearful as a lawless state.  India is on the brink of being such a state, as the actions taken by the government to squash dissent against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) so clearly demonstrate.  It is not “lawless” in the sense of being a political despotism, “empty of law” as India’s former colonial rulers characterized the supposed state of the country before they took the reins in hand.  India is on the verge of being “lawless” in the more unsettling and insidious sense of falling into a system of political authoritarianism where law itself is deployed to subvert both the spirit of law and the rule of law.

*Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food: Part I, On the Ideal Dinner Guest

Earlier this month, as Barack Obama prepared to deliver a national address to school-children, conservative politicians, radio talk-show hosts, and many ordinary citizens went on the offensive at the thought that the President was proposing to indoctrinate young minds with communist ideology.  School boards were instructed in a number of states that parents who wished to spare their wards the ordeal of being addressed by a sitting President of the United States could withdraw their children for the day from school or at least from a live viewing of Obama’s address.  Indeed, the White House even made the speech available to schools before it was broadcast, lest anyone should have occasion to accuse the President of secretly hoisting dirty or radical ideas upon the young.  (No lesser a person than Socrates, let us recall, was compelled to consume poison after he was found guilty of leading the young astray.)  As it transpires, Obama gave a harmless little speech, venturing forth, as he often does, to inspire the nation’s youth with sunny thoughts about the virtues of schooling, the gains to be wrought from hard work, the importance of education in shaping a bright future, learning from one’s failures, and the desirability of dreaming.   This talk should be described as an improvement of sorts upon the efforts of his predecessor who, at a commencement address, I think at his alma mater Yale, lovingly described how he had managed to secure the Presidency of the United States even as a ‘C’ student in his undergraduate days.  (And then we’ve been told that in banana republics high elected offices are for sale, when not appropriated at the barrel of a gun.)  We might say that Obama’s speech is in a similar mold, if more elevated in style, substance, and elegance of delivery:  dream the best dreams, and they may well come true.  The road to the White House is less crooked than is imagined.

Leaving aside for the present the question of whether there is anything more than a liberal bone in Obama’s body, and the even more interesting question as to why this kind of political comedy is peculiar to the United States, there is a little detail about his visit with 32 ninth-graders at Wakefield High School in Arlington before his address that demands attention.  One girl by the name of Lily posed this question to the President: “And if you could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?”  The room shook with genial laughter.  “Well, you know, dead or alive, that’s a pretty big list,” Obama replied to more mirth making. “You know, I think that it might be Gandhi, who is a real hero of mine.”  Had Obama said Marx, Mao, or Che – let us stick with the dead, with known ‘revolutionary’ figures, and with those who are of foreign vintage – there would have been an uproar, to say the least.   But Gandhi:  isn’t he the harmless little chap, Jesus-like, who spoke about turning the other cheek, and giving away the cloak (not that Gandhi owned one)?  So, though Gandhi has his detractors, as I recall from some of the vitriolic reviews of the hagiographic film by Attenborough that appeared in late 1982, for the most part he is viewed as the champion of non-violence, the apostle of peace, the messenger of love, and so on – pick your favorite cliché.  In the received version of what Gandhi wrought, he used non-violence successfully against the somewhat gentlemanly British, who having failed to hold on to their colonies on the east coast of America moved on to India.  (And, here’s a small history lesson from a history professor, all this is captured in the figure of Lord Cornwallis, who disgraced himself by conceding defeat to George Washington – see the painting by John Trumbull, ‘Surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown’, 1797 — and was at once sent to India to lord it over the natives, which Cornwallis proceeded to do with a reckless piece of legislation called the ‘Permanent Settlement.’)  If Obama had picked a somewhat unusual figure as his ideal dinner guest, at least he had picked a charming if somewhat quixotic world historical figure.

In a later blog, I shall turn my attention to the idea of Gandhi as one of Obama’s heroes.  For now, let us try to digest the idea of Obama dining with Gandhi.  What would the evening have looked like?   Obama himself elaborated on the possibilities:  “Now, it would probably be a really small meal because, he didn’t eat a lot.”  Indeed, Gandhi ate very little, often nothing more than small raw or boiled vegetables, a small bowl of curds or yogurt, and, apparently, quite a few nuts.  It is the nuts, which are not the poor man’s food, that might have prompted Gandhi’s close friend, the poetess Sarojini Naidu, to quip, “It costs a lot of money to keep Gandhi in poverty.”  Had Obama wanted to make his audience go nuts with laughter, he could have cited Naidu, but among the hordes of his advisors there is evidently no Gandhi specialist.  Now let us continue with Obama, who immediately added the following:  “But he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in. He inspired Dr. King, so if it hadn’t been for the nonviolent movement in India, you might not have seen the same nonviolent movement for civil rights here in the United States. He inspired César Chávez”, the last a reference to the eminent Chicano political activist and labor union leader.  So Gandhi ate very little, “but he’s somebody who I find a lot of inspiration in.”   Obama’s use of “but” is, to put it gently, bizarre:  the supposition is that though Gandhi ate very little, it is still possible to be inspired by him.  Perhaps, in a land where food is plenty, one has to be a huge or at least generous consumer of food to be taken seriously?

The next course of the dinner — Part II of ‘Obama, Gandhi, and a Few Morsels of Food’ — to follow tomorrow.