Daily Times

Liora Itzhak has an old diary on her nightstand, a collection of handwritten Lata Mangeshkar songs, which is like Bible to her. She never parts with it, takes it along everywhere she goes. Simply because it has answers to life’s every complexity and holds her up through its ebb and flow. “It will be there till my last breath and I will bequeath it to my children,” says the Israeli singer-performer, who sings Lata songs with such abandon that it doesn’t matter if she’s on stage or not. So long as her soul resonates with a rhythm divine.

Born in Israel, Itzhak credits her passion for Hindi film music to her parents. “They would play songs of Lata, Mukesh and Mohammed Rafi; I grew up listening to them. That’s how Lataji became my ‘cassette guru’ and I was drawn to compositions by Madan Mohan,” she says. That even got her close to Hindi, a language that she picked up because of these songs. “The great part about Lataji’s songs is that even if you do not understand the language, the lilt in her voice, the cadence, the melody, the subtlety and sensuousness connect with the depth of your own emotions that you never knew existed,” she says.

Such was her connect, which she believes is because she shares her birth month with her guru, that at age 15, she came to Mumbai and signed up for classical music. She trained under Ramesh Nadkarni and Padma Talwalkar. But since the rigour of discipline needed years to perfect, she shifted to learning light classical music under Kalyanji Anandji. “I knew they composed for Lataji and though I never got around to meeting the legend, at least I was on the periphery of her creative circle,” says Itzhak. Soon after her return to Israel in 1997, Mangeshkar’s Dil to pagal hai became a cult hit and seized the imagination of the young. “The song played on radio and it was on everybody’s lips. That was the time I began integrating Hindi film songs in my performances and began singing Lataji’s numbers.” Ever since, the 47-year-old has sung her favourite Mangeshkar numbers, be it before VIPs, visiting heads of state or at cultural clubs. “Be it Lag jaa gale, Duniya kare sawaal to hum kya jawaab dein, Mohabbat aisi dhadkan hai, Dil vil pyaar vyaar, O mere sajna or Baahon mein chale aao, their acceptability here is proof of her universality,” she says.

My father is in hospital right now. But the fact that my parents listen to Lag jaa jale together and the longing in me for him to return makes the song my very own. Then there’s always a Mere khwabon mein jo aaye to lift you up with hope. For me, she is the one,” says Itzhak, as she prepares to compile a digital tribute.

As the founder-artistic director of Berklee Indian Ensemble, Annette Philip doesn’t carry the weight of expectation lightly. Having contemporised Mangeshkar’s renditions for a global audience, particularly for the young, she’s not resting easy. Which is why she and her students from all corners of the globe are currently researching Mangeshkar’s repertoire and creating playlists for each decade. That might be followed by select “reinterpretations” of the originals. Philip doesn’t like the term ‘cover version’ because she believes you cannot clone an icon in the creative universe.

One such reinterpretation, Jiya jale, performed for the institution’s celebration of music maestro AR Rahman in 2014, became viral on social media and is till date the most visited video with over seventy million views. The ensemble act had young musicians of different nationalities come together. That encouraged Philip to attempt a second reinterpretation of another gem, Aap ki nazron ne samjha. “For the vocals we had Shreya Ghoshal, one of Lataji’s legacy keepers. But we went for a stripped-down version of the song and used different instruments to keep it together. We had a violinist, who was part-Iraqi and part-Jordanian, to build the prelude and interlude, along with a laouto player from Greece and a tabla player. So, we had their sounds settle into a symphony with the song. And they could do it because they understood its purity, felt its core,” she says.

Philip finds in Mangeshkar, a master storyteller. “She not only embodied the personality of the actor in the song but breathed new life in the way the story was told. Every artiste interprets the music and sets the context with his/her emotion, nuance and dynamism. Every time she performed, it was as if she was asking herself, ‘who am I as a narrator?’ As an educator, that’s how we reference Lataji. And that’s how we reinterpret her songs. She commanded the storyboard and mood board with an incredible vocal agility. That’s why she could be at one with every age and stage of not only her life but that of others. Her collaboration with Rahman is the biggest example of her ever-evolving self,” says Philip.

Recalling the nervous excitement about presenting Jiya hale, she says it gave enough inspiration to each of her students to bring out many versions of it. “It was incredible, the way they decided to retell a story as it were. And that’s possible only when you feel the story in your bone. Then imagine the depth with which Lataji carried the lyrics with a range of emotions, be it of grief, pain, loss, infatuation, passion, joy, innocence. She has coloured and visualised sounds. She is not just the definitive voice of India, she is the soundtrack of our lives. She is our catharsis, she has given us healing and solace,” says Philip.

Analysis, technique grammar or theory, Philip can explain the science of music. What she cannot explain is Mangeshkar’s ability. “Every singer can sing but Lataji is so delicately fragile yet powerful. Her strength comes through with such intricacy and ease of delivery. And what patience and dedication lay behind it. As legacy keepers, that’s what we need to remember,” she says.

She began as a fan and now no live act in Dhaka is complete without her singing Lata Mangeshkar’s Bangla hits. Her idol led Sohana Ahmed to classical music and become a practitioner of the Indore gharana. Now a music teacher herself, at 53, she uses Mangeshkar’s songs as therapy for autistic adults.

“Growing up, we heard Bengali modern songs by Hemanta Mukherjee, Salil Choudhary, Manna De and Lata Mangeshkar. At that time, I didn’t ever feel that Lataji was a non-Bengali speaking artiste, she flowed so effortlessly alongside our own home-grown artistes like Runa Laila and Sabina Yasmin. Her compilations of Bengali songs were bestsellers here. I remember lakhs and lakhs of her cassettes sold out in no time and you could hear her Nijhumo sondhyaye pantho pakhira in the remotest tea shop in villages. Besides, every popular Hindi song composed by Bengali music composers would also have a Bengali variant sung by the same artistes. That’s why Lataji is so close to us in this part of the sub-continent.” A young Ahmed would often tune into Akashvani’s Vividh Bharati programme to listen to the latest Mangeshkar songs. Then she came to Delhi in 1996, trained at Shriram Bharatiya Kala Kendra and completed her PhD in Hindustani classical music from Delhi University in 2004. She now teaches music at the Jagannath University, Dhaka. And yet for all her theories on classical music, she cannot analyse the classicism of her idol. “Her originality, confidence, maturity, faith in her understanding and her full-bodied melodies gave her such mastery at a young age. She not only had the innate ability to make the composer’s brief her own but interpret it on her own and convince everybody about her strength,” she says. Something she carries with her is Mangeshkar’s ability to treat both the classical and popular genres as worthy of her sadhana, treating every rehearsal as riyaaz and making every note, pitch and tone easy to perform to. “Having sung her songs, I know how difficult it is to recreate the complex layers and notes that sound mellifluous. She never missed the slightest note,” says Ahmed, who cannot imagine any celebration, festival or national day in Dhaka without the sparkle of “Latadi’s gaan.”

Before 2018, Parisienne Pauline Laravoire had no idea who Lata Mangeshkar was. That changed when she met her now husband Meghdut Roy Chowdhury and moved to Kolkata in 2020. That’s when the lockdown began and the newlywed couple decided to fill their time indoors by practising music of both countries. “Group singing is a key ingredient of socialisation in Kolkata. I thought learning to sing in Bengali would help me pick up the language faster. That’s how I was introduced to Lataji’s Bengali numbers. Meghdut would explain the lyrics, we would rehearse a song for three weeks and put the final cut on Instagram. That’s how Indo-French Singing Sundays came about,” says the 28-year-old.

She has sung two numbers, Aaj mon cheyeche ami haariye jaabo and Ajeeb dastaan hai yeh, which went viral. “That didn’t matter much. What mattered was the incredible lightness of being I felt, the uplifting melody that centred me. And it’s not just me. My friends in Paris heard the tracks and have been wanting to listen to more Lata numbers now. And having experienced her through songs, I think we should internationalise such a virtuoso.”

She considers herself a spiritual descendant of Lata Mangeshkar and listens to her songs once every eight hours in between her riyaaz. Sara Azad Khan’s most prized possession is the Saregama Carvaan, the digital audio player that she sourced from Dubai only because she wanted to listen to Mangeshkar’s songs. Singing from the age of four, but with no formal taleem in a family that stayed within religious boundaries, the sari-clad Mangeshkar became her inspiration, with a little help from her mother, who was a diehard fan. One of Sara’s favourites was Didi tera devar deewana, a song that she perfected and was the reason why she made it to the finals of the music talent show Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Challenge in 2009. “I was in Mumbai for six months during the contest and would pass by her flat every day for rehearsals, hoping to catch a glimpse,” says Khan.

However, her crowning glory came when she was allowed to sing Rang dil ki dhadkaan bhi laati on Pakistan national television despite an official ban on Indian content. “An exception was made and I have been singing her songs ever since, not only in the sub-continent but at concerts in Korea and China, too. Of my seven million fans on YouTube, half are Indian. How do you explain this borderless space? It is only because of Lataji’s purity, depth, and rootedness to the sub-continental classicism and culture. If the youth of today are swayed by her, then music directors too need to create songs based on our classical traditions rather than copying Western beats and rhythms. This is how we will last,” says the 27-year-old.