Lata Mangeshkar turns 80 on Sunday. Like a flash of lightning, she lit up a musical world on the verge of change in 1949 and it has never been the same since. Every singer for the past six decades has been singing in the space, the vast terra infirma, charted by Lata’s voice. Great singing, unlike good singing, is an experience of beauty laced with pity, a haunted happening in the shadow of our transience. And rarely has a singer so defined and symbolised this experience as Lata has over the last several decades. 

Listen to Aayega aanewaala: its freshness never abates; to listen to it, even today, is to feel present at the birth of something new, the beginning of a journey. The beginning of

Indian film music as we have come to know and love it. If Lata had given us nothing more, that would be enough. 

Today when the wider soundscape of India is as chaotically rich as that of any Western nation, with experimental music, indie-rock shows soaked in hipster attitudes, pop idols cavorting on HD monitors in malls and innumerable winners emerging from ceaseless reality singing competitions, a demure woman in a white sari still manages to capture the attention of the nation every time she sings or even speaks. She connects us to much that we hold dear in our musical tradition with a humility that is as remarkable as the genius from which it springs. 

It is easy to get hyperbolic when talking about Lata but words can so easily fail to adequately describe what Lata has meant to the world of Indian music and to the generations of Indians who have grown up listening to her divine voice. Her achievements are so gargantuan that even if she had stopped singing after the first 15 years of her career, Indian music would still be in her debt.

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