- Thursday, April 25, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
BEFORE she became a singing legend, Lata Mangeshkar started her career in the film industry as an actor playing smaller parts to support her family after her father’s death.
Born in Indore in the present-day central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh on September 28, 1929, Mangeshkar was named Hema at birth but was renamed as ‘Lata’ by her parents after a female character called ‘Latika’ from her father Deenanath Mangeshkar’s play ‘Bhaaw Bandhan’.
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Not many had known that at the age of five, Mangeshkar, the eldest of five siblings, had started to work as an actress in her father’s musical plays in Marathi language, the Press Trust of India reported.
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Writer Yatindra Mishra recalled in his Hindi biography on Mangeshkar the singer’s debut on stage.
“Father Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar’s drama company ‘Balwant Sangeet Mandali’ staged a play -‘Soubhadra’, based on the story of Arjun and Subhadra. Pandit Deenanath played the role of Arjun while nine-year-old Lata played Narad,” he wrote in ‘Lata: Sur Gatha’.
Before the start of the play, the young Mangeshkar told her father that she would get ‘once more’ from the audience like he always did and delivered on her promise.
She also played Lord Krishna in her father’s production of ‘Gurukul’.
In 1942, when Deenanath died of a heart disease, Master Vinayak Damodar Karnataki, film actor-director and a close friend of the Mangeshkar family, helped Mangeshkar start a career as an actress and singer.
She had sung a Marathi song ‘Naachu Yaa Gade, Khelu Saari Mani Haus Bhaari’, which was composed by Sadashivrao Nevrekar for Vasant Joglekar’s Marathi movie “Kiti Hasaal” in 1942 but the song was dropped from the final cut.
Master Vinayak had offered Mangeshkar a small role in a Marathi movie “Pahili Mangalaa-gaur” and also made her sing a song ‘Natali Chaitraachi Navalaai’.
When Mangeshkar moved to Mumbai in 1945, she started taking lessons in music.
Mangeshkar played a minor role along with her younger sister Asha Bhosle, who is also an eminent singer, in Master Vinayak’s first Hindi-language movie, “Badi Maa” in 1945. In the film, she also sang the bhajan ‘Maata Tere Charnon Mein’.
While acting was the need of the hour, she took up small roles in Marathi films like heroine’s sister, hero’s sister. However, she never liked putting on make-up and working in front of the camera.
“I started out as an actress. But I never used to like acting. I used to work with Master Vinayak. I acted in films but I never enjoyed it as I was very small. I used to hate putting on make-up and having to laugh and cry in front of the camera. All this while I used to love singing. I was attracted to it since childhood,” Mangeshkar told Indian news channel NDTV in 2008.
When Master Vinayak passed away in 1947, their drama company Praful Pictures was shut down. Mangeshkar was back to playback singing.
“I started playback singing after that,” she added.
Music director Ghulam Haider gave her her first major break with the song “Dil Mera Toda, Mujhe Kahin Ka Na Chhora” — lyrics by Nazim Panipati — in the movie ‘Majboor’ (1948), which became her first big breakthrough.
Then came “Aayega Aanewaala,” a song in the movie ‘Mahal’ (1949), composed by music director Khemchand Prakash and picturised on late actor Madhubala.
The song went on to become one of her first major hits and the rest, as they say, is history.
(With PTI inputs)
