India Today '81 Cover Story+Interview-Lata Mangeshkar:Singing Machine

It is the voice that no Indian can miss. Delightfully high, the notes rendered clearly to the last bar, the words pronounced with a rare panache the voice has haunted Indians for over three decades. It has chased them wherever they have gone at film shows, restaurants, hairdressers, carnivals, beach parties, Durga Puja pandals. It has greeted them on the radio and television, record-player and tape-recorder.

The voice, like the blithe spirit of music, has wafted far and wide. It is the voice to which the roadside vendor in Delhi has transacted his business, the long-distance trucker has sped along the highway, the Army jawan in Ladakh has kept guard at his frontier bunker, or the glittering elite of Bombay have dined in luxury hotels.

The voice, like Mahatma Gandhi's loin cloth and Rabindranath Tagore's beard, has become a part of India's collective unconscious. If Marshall McLuhan, the communication wizard, were still alive and called upon to cast an eye across his "global village" -to India's music scene, he might have paid homage to the voice with the new phrase: "music is the massage".

The "masseur" of this all-pervading music, and the queen-empress of India's immensely popular light music industry, is a portly, dark, camera shy, plain-as-Jane Marathi woman.

Latabai Mangeshkar, who, as a playback singer, enjoys today a clout which even the movie moguls of the country's Rs 100-crore film industry cannot dream of. One imperious frown from her sends the country's highest paid music directors in a panic.

A single disapproving shake of her head makes the top brass of internationally connected record companies grow cold feet. As Shanker of the famed Shanker-Jaikishen music director duo put it: "Lataji catches cold, and the whole industry sneezes."

No woman in the world has cut as many discs as Lata, at 51, has. It is doubtful if any man has matched her output, though the publishers of Guinness Book of Records, caught in a maelstrom of controversy a few years ago, have dropped from their latest issue the earlier claim that she indeed held the world record.

Record Numbers: She might not have recorded all the 26,000 songs that Guinness had earlier said. But industry sources aver that she had sung 300 songs on an average in each of the first five years of her career.

500 songs annually during the next 23 years. Since 1974, though foreign tours have been interfering with her singing in India, she has still managed 150 songs in a year. That adds up to 14,050 songs, not to speak of at least 500 songs in her private records. This fact, in itself, should imply that she has out sung her closest rival, the late Mohammed Rafi. In the process, she has reportedly earned fabulous riches, only a rough estimate of which is possible.

The tinsel world of show business advertises everything but is tight-lipped about the actual amounts that change hands. Lata does not discuss her finances, not with newsmen at least. But the industry has its own system of keeping tabs on individual earnings. Such unconfirmed guesstimates suggest that she charged Rs 300 for a song on an average during her first five years of film-singing: Rs 2,000 for the next 10 years; Rs 5,000 for the next 13 years; and anything around Rs 25,000 as of now. The same pundits aver that no singer today gets as much as Rs 15,000 for a song and many of them frequently settle for much less than their professed rates. Lata never does that, they say.

However, Lata's earning from films does not include the huge royalty which is roughly one rupee on each of her LPs sold. Her annual royalty is estimated at Rs 1.5 lakhs, from the Calcutta-based Gramophone Company of India (GO) and about Rs 50, 000 from Polydor. Add to that the many times higher earning from gate sales of tickets for her performances in India and abroad, and there is a staggering inflow of cash, spread over many years.

Says a film financier: '"Lataji's earning power must amount to about Rs 350-400 per hour." Lata herself refuses to comment but denies the validity of the calculations such as these. Said an industry source: "What she does with the money she earns is the greatest mystery yet." Nobody seems to know and the people in her immediate circle are very tight-lipped. However, she owns a film studio in Kolhapur called Jai Prabha studio.

She seems to have an emotional attachment with Kolhapur, because she has kept the studio even though it hardly breaks even. And he adds as an afterthought: "She's got chewing gum on her hands, no money ever leaves once she's got it.

Unlike the other money-earning machines in Bombay's film industry, Lata has remained at the top for over three-and-a-half decades. In the process, it is she who has set the exchange rate between music and money in this country And. like a living juke box, she has sung on without fatigue, for a price of course."Indisputable'' Queen: In artistic terms, she has done much more. She has elevated playback singing from its surrogate status to that of a highly valued component of the country's burgeoning entertainment industry, as far back as 1959. Time described her as the "indisputable and indispensable queen of India's playback singers".

The reservoir of accomplishment that Lata is today is the consummate end-product of years of sweating and grinding in a very limited sphere of vocal music. The playback singer is only required to identify himself with the person on the screen within a bare span of three-and-a-half minutes. It may be a restricted art; but. like a carving of ivory two inches high, it calls for a highly effective condensation.

Lata Mangeshkar does it with a breathtaking ease. In most cases, she sings without a proper rehearsal and sings straight into the film's sound track, without any re-take and with the accompaniment of a 70-man orchestra.

In 1977. she flew straight back from a long foreign tour to record for Raj Kapoor's Satyam Shivam Sundaram. Listened for 10 minutes to the music directors Laxmikant-Pyarelal humming out the tentative outlines of the theme song, and walked into the recording studio. The result was a song that topped the charts for nearly two years.

She sang in Hindi films as early as 1946. Last fortnight, she had contracts to sing for at least 50 films in Bombay. She sang for the glamour queens of the past, like Madhubala and Nargis.

She sings with equal ease now for girls born yesterday. There is a joke in the filmland which says: "Pay up double her price to Lata, and she'll sing both for the heroine and the hero."

Critics: Like all successful artistes, she too has her bitter critics who would argue that she had lost her golden voice. "The Lata Mangeshkar of today is a pale ghost of what she was in the past,"said C. Ramchandra, the music director who created the fabled score of Anarkali and was once an intimate friend. But chances are, as a young music director snapped back, men like Ramchandra are themselves "a pale ghost" of their past.

As though to prove him right, the disc of her live performance at London's Palladium Theatre, cut in December last, sold out its first 25,000 impressions in a matter of five weeks despite its high price tag of Rs 100.

There is no sign of decline in her recent best-selling songs of Sargam, for which the record company issued a gold disc. The disc she has cut for the recent film, dosha, is as meticulously honed to perfection as some of her earlier top-sellers. As late as 1979, EMI, the US-based principals of the GCI, chose her as the first Asian artiste to receive their platinum disc.

She is now cutting back on her film singing, but has hit upon an ingenious device to re-cycle her old film hits: re-recording them at live concerts. This is entirely to her advantage since the 10 per cent or so royalty on these songs goes straight to her. bypassing such intermediaries as producers of films where the songs featured.

She is also getting more and more exposure abroad. It started with her performance at London's prestigious Royal Albert Hall in 1974 in aid of the Nehru Memorial Fund. She cut a disc from it set in two LPs which sold more than 133,000 copies.

Presently she performs all over the USA, Canada and Europe, where she draws unbelievably large ethnic audiences. Last November, all the 8, 500 seats at Felt Forum auditorium in Madison Square Garden, New York, were full with cheering, clapping Indo-Pakistanis even though tickets sold for $30 (Rs 240) apiece. Amitabh Bachchan, flown in specially for the occasion, regaled the audience with a brief appearance. A 20-man orchestra accompanied her on the tour, at her cost. The expenses were met from the $180,000 (Rs 14.4 lakh) she grossed in her dozen performances in America.

High Fee: A measure of her saleability abroad may be found from the fees charged by her and Ravi Shankar for a single performance in the USA and Canada. While she demands, and gets. $ 15,000 (Rs 1.2 lakh). Shankar charges a paltry $1,000 (Rs 8,000). But, unlike Shankar, she hardly commands an international audience. Says Veena Ahuja, 30, a Lata fan in New York: "She's a rage among the Indians in America and a passing curiosity among the Americans."

The music industry is all set to exploit her popularity overseas by selling the "voice" to the petro-dollar market. The plan is to set her most popular film tunes to Arabic translation of the words, and to get Lata to sing them out.

"It shouldn't be difficult," says Anil Sud, who heads the GCL "given Lata's talents as a perfectionist." He is probably right on that point, because in all the 14 Indian languages (other than Hindi) in which she has sung, her pronunciations have been surprisingly close to the natural. Her 1979 album of Bengali songs cut during the Durga Puja, sold out 13, 000 copies in three months.

If there is any musical range in which she has faltered it is in ghazals and devotional singing. In ghazals, the Jagjit-Chitra team has put everyone else in the shade, Begum Akhtar and even Pakistan's Mehdi Hasan, not to speak of Lata.

The first Jagjit-Chitra LP, cut by the GCL in 1976 and named The Unforgetables has sold nearly 52,000 discs till now and is still selling 500 discs a month. Their Come Alive a two-LP album, cut in 1978, has sold 60,000 copies. Compared to Jagjit-Chitra, Mehdi Hasan, the famous Pakistani ghazal singer, was only a moderate success in India, his lone LP selling some 18.000 copies. And Lata's sole ghazal venture, Lata Mcmgeshkar sings Ghalib cut as far back as 1969, has sold only 12,892 copies.

Again, if Lata had never quite been able to make it to the top in ghazals, she lost her lead in devotional songs recently to Hari Om Sharan, a musical phenomenon of the late '70s whose bhajans, sung in a mellow velvety voice, leapt to the top of the charts. His first LP Pushpanjali, cut in 1975, has sold 65,360 copies, and is still a hot seller, Premanjali the next LP released in 1978, has sold 25,371 copies and is likely to level up with Pushpanjali in a couple of years.

Lata with the late Prithviraj Kapoor: Spanning generations

Performances Abroad: Lata's own repertory of devotional songs is extensive. But the sales do not come anywhere near Sharan's. Her 1971 LP of Meera bhajans, for example, sold 28,959 copies while her 1976 album of bhajans, Chala Wahi Des, sold 18,967.

Abhang Tukyaehi, her album of Marathi devotional songs, marketed largely in western India, sold only 14,528. In 1970, the ingenious marketing cell of GSI evolved its own packaging of devotion and music when it got Lata to recite the Bhagvadgita in Sanskrit. The result was a steady-selling album. However, Lata still won a pyrrhic victory over Sharan, Jagjit-Chitra and the rest of the non-film singers by showing the highly popular albums of her live performances abroad as basic records.

Apart from the record sale of the Royal Albert Hall discs, the indications available in the industry make it abundantly clear that her 1980 live recording of the Palladium Theatre performance will sweep into the six-figure mark shortly.

Lata Mangeshkar's early life is a Dickensian saga of nightmarish poverty, drudgery and hard luck. She was born in Indore, away from the Maratha heartland of Maharashtra. Her father, Dinanath Mangeshkar, who came from Mangeshi in Goa, was a classical singer trained in the colourful Punjabi school of Baba Mushelkar. Dinanath owned an itinerant dramatic troupe which made him pitch his tent in nearly every town that dots the state-among them Pune, Kolhapur, Satara, Sangli, and Miraj.

The children-four daughters and a son-were roped into a nomadic life by their father's profession. Unable to arrange a proper schooling for his children, Dinanath however sought to compensate by injecting stiff doses of music lessons early in life. "The foundation of my musical propensities was laid as early as that," Lata said.

With Beatles guitarist George on: 'They sing very tunefully'

Early Life: It was a carefree life where music held the key. The children hopped in and out of stage whenever the story needed child artistes, and they sang whenever they were home.

The stuff that they practised on was rather heavy. To make up for it, they sat by the wings as curtains rose on those endlessly long mythological plays which were music, music all the way.

Dinanath's drama company, Balwant Sangeet Natak Mandal, though not a hot money spinner, allowed the family a modestly comfortable life. The only childhood calamity for Lata, the eldest of the children, was an attack of smallpox at the age of two. She still carries its marks.

The real disaster for the family came in 1934-35 after Ardeshir Irani, an interpid Parsee, pushed the Indian cinema out of the silent era with the first "talkie", Alam Ara.

The multitude of roving drama companies of Maharashtra, the only other state to have them except Bengal, reeled under the impact of this "sound invasion". Most of them, including Dinanath's Balwant Mandal, closed down. The family moved to Sangli, a small trading town, where, as Lata says, "We settled down for the first time."

At Sangli, Dinanath, who had all the tiery determination that marks the Mangeshkar clan, pawned his wife's ornaments to start a film company. The switchover was not easy.

Audience sensibility in the '30s was rapidly changing, so his canned theatre could not find many buyers. Dinanath's four mythological plays in Marathi and his lone Hindi film, Andheri Duniya, were flops in a row.

As creditors closed in on him, the only escape route available was in alcohol. In 1938, the film company wound up and the family moved out again, this time to Pune.

The first Asian to receive the platinum disc from the EMI

The Breadwinner: For the remaining four years of Dinanath's life, the family survived on his meagre income from singing at the Pune station of All India Radio. In 1942, when Dinanath died of pleurisy, heart disease and frustration, Hridaynath, the youngest child, who is a music director now, was lying in bed next to his father with tuberculosis of the bones.

On the eighth day of Dinanath's death, Lata, only 13 at that time, put on full war paint to act and sing in Pahili Manglagaw, a Marathi film by Master Vinayak Rao, father of Nanda, the well-known actress.

In Pahili, Lata played the heroine's sister and had three songs. "I hated putting on make-up; I hated standing in the glare of lights. But I was the breadwinner of the family, and there was hardly any choice left. The day I went to work in Master Vinayak's film, there was nothing to eat in the house." Her struggle had in fact begun a month earlier when Sadasivrao Nevrekar, a friend of the family, had offered her the maiden chance for playback singing in a film called Kitti Nasal. "My first playback song was chopped off at the editor's table," she reminisces with a smile.

Vinayak was happy with her performance in Pahili, and signed her as a staff artiste on a monthly salary of Rs 60. It became Rs 350 by the time Vinayak died in 1947 and his Prafull Pictures closed down. But, in 1945, the company had already shifted its headquarters to Bombay, and Lata had moved out into the big city of her dreams. She took a house at Nana Chowk, not very far from her present apartment house- valued at Rs 20 lakh on fashionable Peddar Road. The two-room flat at Nana Chowk cost her Rs 25 a month, which was still not easy to fork out with eight mouths to feed, including cousins.

Asha Bhonsle, the younger sister who is a celebrity singer now, was too young to earn by singing. "Didi was burning the candle at both ends to keep the family going," Hridaynath remembers with obvious gratitude.

The first big event for Lata in Bombay was her introduction to Aman Ali Khan Bhindi bazarwala, a classical singer who accepted her as a disciple. It was a ceremonial acceptance complete win the ritual tying of a cord around her arm. But Aman Ali left for Pakistan in the wake of Partition, and Lata had to find a new guru in Amanat Ali, an accomplished singer who taught in the same school as Amir Khan, the celebrated classical singer.

Amanat Ali's death in 1951 abruptly ended Lata's apprenticeship in classical music. "Maybe I'd have become a classical singer if Amanat Ali were alive," she says wistfully.

But there was only an outside chance of mat, because by 1947 Lata was already established as a playback singer. The same year, she sang for a film called Majboor. It was her debut as a singer for the heroine, Majboor was a big hit. Her break in Majboor came in a dramatic manner. Soon after Vinayak's death, and the closure of Prafull Pictures, the Mangeshkar family was again down and out as Lata had no fixed income.

She approached a supplier of film extras who took her to Master Ghulam Haidar, a close friend of Amanat Ali and a leading music director of the times. Haidar, who was struck by the range and sweetness of the young girl's voice, took her to Subodh Mukherjee whose Filmistan Studio was the Mecca of Bombay's show business. Mukherjee rejected her out of hand, saying that the "poor little thing" had a "squeaky" voice which would not match with that of the heroine, Kamini Kaushal, the screen siren of the '40s.

Haidar calmly told him: "Mukerjee, let me foretell today that this kid will very soon put to shade everyone else, including Noorjehan." Noorjehan, who subsequently migrated to Pakistan and is still at the top there, was the biggest name in light music those days.

The Beginning: The same day, Lata accompanied Haidar to the studios of Bombay Talkies at Malad. It was raining torrentially. At the platform of Goregaon station, Haidar asked Lata to sing the same song that she had just sung for Mukherjee - bulbulo mat roa tha. She sang, and Haidar kept time by tapping a tin of 555 cigarettes. The trains whistled in and out. The combined noise of commuters and vendors filled the platform. The rain pattered on the tin shed. But Haidar was immersed in the song. He did not say a word after the song ended.

An hour later, Lata was singing the same song at Bombay Talkies where she was selected to sing for Majboor. "I never looked back since then," she says, flushing with pride. The recording for Majboor was not easy; it was recorded at the 32nd take. A whole battery of music directors was present at the rehearsal room of Bombay Talkies to listen to Haidar's "discovery". Prominent among them were Husseinlal Bhagatram, Anil Biswas, Naushad and Khemchand Prakash.

The first to come forward with another offer was Naushad, the suave Lucknow-born music director whose melodies were largely responsible for the success of the musical films in the '50s. He signed Lata for Andaaz, a smashing box-office success. Bhagatram got her to sing for Badi Batten, yet another success. Then came Barsaat where she sang jiya bekaraar hai - a song whose popularity is undiminished even today. Says Shanker who, with the late Jaikishen, created the music: "The barsaat (rain) that had started in 1948 keeps pouring even today."

Fame came quite suddenly to Lata, but big money still eluded her. She was paid just Rs 200 for jiya bekaraar hai and never got more than Rs 400 for a song for many years. For each song she had to sit at the rehearsals for at least a fortnight not to speak of the agony of going through at least half-a-dozen retakes.

"It was a hard life," she says, "going from studio to studio." Her day began at nine in the morning when she would board the train at Grant Road station, heading towards Dadar, Goregaon, Andheri or Malad, where the big studios were located. She would hop around the studios to catch up with the shifts. Eating at the canteens was a luxury So was a taxi ride.

Lata Mangeshkar receiving the Padma Bhushan award from the President of India

Encounters: She would often go off to sleep while returning home late at night. She was frequently overcarried to Churchgate, the terminus, and, way past midnight, the sweeper women nudge her, asking her to get off. "I walked back home from Churchgate even at that hour. Bombay was a civilised place those days," she says.

One day, Naushad introduced her to Dilip Kumar, the actor, in a third-class compartment of the local train ("we were all commuters those days"). Dilip Kumar was amused by her Marathified Hindi, and teased her till "my ears tingled in shame". Over three decades later, Dilip Kumar himself recalls the incident and says his own ears tingle in shame when he hears Lata pronouncing each Hindi and Urdu word with a rare eclat. Even in her conversation, she pronounces the words in Hindi with an uncanny precision, which is the result of years of practice.

"The story of Lata Mangeshkar," says film director Basu Bhattacharya, "reads like a powerful feminist script." It has indeed all the ingredients of a feminist plot, the single woman's search for identity in a male-dominated society, her eventual triumph and the dramatic turn of fortune.

A very important music director of the past, who is now a resident of Delhi, analysed the scenario objectively. He said: "Some of us treated Lata like our exclusive property. We sought to dominate her, overshadow her, browbeat her. Maybe we were upset as she began paying us back in our own coin." Some of them were obviously more than just "upset". Ramchandra, who was Lata's "close friend" for a decade, calls her "a despotic, ruthless and vain woman; a jealous woman who cannot tolerate a single other singer; a business woman rather than an artiste."

Her Rivals: Most of her critics are too awestruck by her personality to stick their necks out the way Ramchandra does. They shoot their darts from the safe fortress of anonymity. But the main charge against her is that she is wary of competition and pulls no punches to see that her rivals are squeezed out of the industry. "No one can stop a coming force," she once said in an interview with Bombay TV. But her detractors see her invisible hand in at least half-a-dozen failure stories of recent years - Vani Jairam, Runa Laila, Sulakshana Pandit, Priti Sagar and Hemlata.

Except Jairam, who went back to her native Tamil Nadu where she is the topmost singer in Tamil films now, none of Lata's "victims" is brave enough to accuse her in public. But "off-record" conversations point to a modus operandi. One of them said: "She is deceitful and has the low cunning of a bania. Often she gives boost to a singer by recommending her to music directors, and makes it known immediately so that nobody can accuse her of being intolerant later on.

Thereafter, she begins to pull the strings. At first, the 'offending' music directors find their dates with Lata cancelled. Then her 'close sources' pass on the message that peace with her could be bought only at a price, that they'd have to 'eject' the new singer." Such deals are hard to prove. But, some years ago, Jairam, who had attained instant musical fame with the song bole re papihara in Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Guddi, suddenly found the ground slipping from under her feet.

In fact, she had compounded her 'sin' by singing in Gulzar's Meera (music: Ravi Shankar) even after Lata had at first reportedly tried to push Hridaynath as its music director and, failing which, walked out on the contract to sing for it. The demand for Jairam tapered off with unbelievable speed, and she packed off to Madras, literally unsung. Later on, Jairam charged Lata with having "blackmailed" the music directors into elbowing her out.

Jairam is not the only one to have gone through such an ordeal. A few years ago. Runa Laila, the stunningly beautiful singer from Bangladesh, was forced to bid goodbye to Bombay. Her private record, dama-dam masta kalandar, was a runaway success; so were her songs in Gharaonda whose music director, Jaidev, was the only person in the establishment to accept her. But others treated her as though she was untouchable. Before long, a rumour swept Bombay that she was a spy, and signing her for a song came to be regarded as almost unpatriotic. She too had to beat a hasty retreat. To Kenya, in her case.

Tremendous Clout: Lata brushes aside the charge that she was indeed responsible for the high infant mortality rate among women's singing talents. "I was present at Runa's first public performance in Bombay; I was present even at her first recording," she says. "That's exactly her alibi," say her critics.

Undoubtedly, she has enough clout in the industry to gag any other singer if she chooses to do so. And why singers? Some years ago, she sent even Raj Kapoor on a madcap polka by playing hard-to-get for Satyam Shivam Sundaram. She sang in SSS after a long hassle, and only after Kapoor yielded to give her a share of the royalty from records.

The only major director who has not acceded to Lata's demand for royalty-sharing is B.R. Chopra. Says a close aide of Chopra: "We don't mean any disrespect to her. But we don't agree on business terms." Nevertheless Chopra refuses to talk about her, even off the record. "The fact that I don't use her means nothing, it is not because of any prejudice or anything. It is just that she ties a raakhi to me and because of the relationship with Asha I use her most of the time. But occasionally I use Lata too, it's a fantastic experience working with her," he averred. "I don't even know her price, she takes whatever I pay her, she's never asked me for money. I know for a fact that when a producer does not have any money she will sing for him without charging any money. This is true of both the sisters."

In private, however, music and film directors complain about her "whims". As one of them says: "If she's not in a mood, her chauffeur would ring up the studio to say that 'madam' won't come. Not even a 'sorry'. Other leading film-makers talk in hushed tones of how her ego "needs constant massage."

The other music directors, while referring to her, compete with each other in toadyism. Says Laxmikant of the famous Laxmikant-Pyarelal duo: "We've worked with Lataji for 25 years. It's impossible to describe the pleasure of working with her. In my view, there is no singer in the world who is as talented... etc." Says Kalyanji, the betel-leaf chewing, balding harmonium player who teams up with Anandji to create such superhit scores as those of Qurbani and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar: "Lataji accounts for 90 paise of India's film music, we make 10 paise."

The praise, like most things in the Bombay film industry, is purely utilitarian Ramchandra fulminates in counterpoint: "Music directors know only the third note of the octave - ga - and the sixth - dha. And that defines them - gadha (ass) They're grateful to Lata because she can lead them by their nose."

The truth of Ramchandra"s bitter observation becomes apparent as one watches Lata working at the studio. She is like a clockwork, never taking more than one shift to learn, rehearse and record a song. Even a singer of Kishore Kumar's reputation often takes 10 rehearsals and a number of retakes for each recording. Rafi too could not wrap up a song at short notice. And, on a 70-man orchestra, saving a single shift means an economy of Rs 2,500, not to speak of the studio rent.

What makes this incredible singing machine tick? Answer: flexibility of her style, the range and quality of her voice. Sweetness of a voice may be indefinable, but its steadiness can be seen on a VU-meter, which measures pitch. Says a sound recordist at Film Centre recording studio: "When Lata glides down to say the note A, the arm of the VU-meter stands rock-steady at 440 cycles. Eve never seen this happen with any other singer." Her voice also has a mind-boggling range. It touches F sharp in the higher octave and descends as low as A in the lower.

Rahul Dev Burman, the doyen of the pop-style in Hindi film music, maker of the score of Shaky, and Asha's husband, says: "In the past, it was a common practice with women singers to sing with a lot of vibrato. Only a few of them, maybe Shamshad Begum alone, avoided it. But everyone else allowed the notes to vibrate. But the style changed, and long notes became popular. Lata at once switched over to a mardana style without vibrato, without frills."

Asha also has a breathtaking flexibility of voice. But she lacks Lata's range. Her other problem is an oozing sensuality of her voice, a compelling come-hitherness, which makes her slotted only for the cabaret and disco numbers.

Crusade: However, in the Bombay film industry, music forms an integral part of a packaging scheme. As late as 1975, the film posters used to carry the music director's name in types as bold as those of the director. But the playback singers' bargaining power was not quite decisive until Lata led a one-woman crusade in the '60s. She bargained with the producers to jack up the remuneration to a five-figure amount for every song.

Later on, she mounted collective pressure on producers to gain for the singers a part of the colossal royalty from record companies. "It was a major victory for the singers," admits Vijay Kishore Dubey, chief of the key Bombay unit of the GSI. However, the money she has earned and the authority she has wielded pale into insignificance when compared to the tremendous popularity she has commanded among Indians here and abroad.

Jawaharlal Nehru wept in public when he heard her singing ai mere vatan ke logo. Though the nation conferred on her a mere Padma Bhushan, thousands have flocked to listen to her wherever she has sung.

She has recorded in 15 Indian languages. She has been accepted in the "deep South" where she was given the title of Asthana Sangeetha Vidwansulu (Court Musician of the Shrine) at Tirupati. She sang a song in Nepali for which King Mahendra wrote the words. Her songs in Assamese touched as deep a chord as her Bhojpuri songs or the songs in her native Marathi.

The burden of fame is a heavy cross, though she has borne it with remarkable ease. It has imperceptibly thrown a sort of cordon sanitaire around her, like the cloud of Madame Rochas perfume in which she is always entombed.

Sitting primly in it like a dowager queen, she lives up to the public image of a modern Meera - the single woman in a white sari who visits the Mahalaxmi Temple every week in a white Ambassador car, a white vanity bag dangling from her hand.

Different Image: Only on rare occasions does she play down the image, such as during her foreign tours. Nowadays, she stays away from the country for at least four months in a year, without counting her innumerable "week-end trips" to the USA and Europe. There, she does let herself go. Says Shanta Anand, a Delhi housewife married in Chicago: "I've seen her losing heavily at casinos in Las Vegas; I've seen her enjoying her food at Bombay restaurant in New York; I've watched her driving down 52nd Street in a gay, printed sari. These are so unlike her, but I like the way she sheds her inhibitions in America."

Lata seldom talks about that, because it does not fit into her Meera image. With all the power at her command, she keeps the nosy-parker Bombay film press at bay. She is so sensitive about her personal image that she does not even allow photographs to be taken of the yoga exercises she performs everyday for breath control. Thanks to her yoga lessons, she can carry on indefinitely without pausing for breath. But she will never admit it publicly. Nor will she accept the fact that she receives classical music lessons for one-and-a-half hours everyday from a man called Tulsidas Sharma at her house. "The people may misunderstand if you say that Lata Mangeshkar has to take lessons from anyone," argues a friend of Lata's.

She is essentially a secretive person, a lone ranger in a gregarious world of glamour. Her only enduring companion is a handsome Rajasthan princeling and cricket commentator, Raj Singh Dungarpur, 45, who fixes dates for her, finalises her deals with producers, and even accompanies her on foreign tours. Both of them get uptight if their companionship gets discussed in the press. And it is only a sign of Lata's unassailable stature that the relationship is never exploited by Bombay's professional muck-rakers. The "rumour" chases them only at filmi cocktail parties and dies out as night advances and voices slur.

However, there is nothing to disturb her Meera image, which she cherishes. Nor does the other accusation that she has been trying to monopolise the market. But these really do not matter to her as long as she remains the "indisputable and indispensable" queen of Indian film music.

But the music itself may undergo a change some day, as it threatened to do in '70s with the advent of "action-packed" movies. The average number of songs in Bombay films has already come down to four from a dozen in the '60s. Melody is giving way to electronic noise; geel is yielding place to beat.

Such are the grim forebodings for India's one-woman music industry. But, till doomsday comes, Lata Mangeshkar will reign supreme-towering above criticism, and curiosity.