How film magazines wrote about Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle

Madhuri devoted an entire issue to playback singers in 1971, giving text and photographs equal space, while Filmfare carried cover page stories on Lata Mangeshkar in March 1971 and June 1987. Both issues relied on the biographical form, giving importance to Lata’s early days of struggle in the industry and showcasing her ability to survive in challenging circumstances to become a star.

The critics writing on aural stars had no official access to information about their private lives and drew on oral gossip to write biographical pieces. One of the key strategies deployed by the music critics was to draw attention to the sentimentality of the songs in order to write about the singer’s private self. The critic used his own listening experience— foregrounding the “affect” in the playback voice— to recuperate earlier regimes of listening associated with musical genres like the thumri, traditionally performed by the courtesan. Through the use of speculation and innuendo, the private selves of the singers were conflated with the narrative address of film songs.

Both Lata and Asha remained the focus of discussion in popular magazines from the 1950s to the ’90s. In the “Star Focus” series in Filmfare, an article by Lata (1964) carried photographs of her puja room and a large picture of Swami Vivekananda at her home. This iconic framing was crucial in creating an image of the singer as a simple, sincere woman, devoted to her music.

A special issue of Madhuri on playback singers gave special treatment to Lata by carrying a full- page color photograph of her standing next to the sculpted figure of Meera Bai, a mediaeval saint poetess, holding a tambura in her hand. On the other hand, Asha Bhosle’s image in the same series was largely constructed around her successful partnership with music composer O. P. Nayyar, who played an important role in giving her the heroine’s songs. Later, two kinds of narratives dominated the print media: one related to the Asha/O. P. Nayyar breakup and the other about her relationship and creative partnership with R. D. Burman.

In articles on Asha Bhosle with accompanying photographs, the speculation about her private life were bolstered by selectively citing the genres and lyrics of her songs. Though critics and biographers often described Asha Bhosle as a versatile singer, the notion of versatility was deployed to underline her facility in singing seductive songs. The song lists on popular radio countdown shows, however, point us toward the popularity of Asha’s songs in diverse genres that were performed by children, prepubescent boys and girls, alms seekers, and queer bodies on-screen. However, this repertoire of songs performed by Asha was given scant attention by the print media, thus eliding her versatility.

Magazines like Filmfare frequently carried pictures of her lighthearted interactions with O. P. Nayyar and other co- singers in music studios. The array of gestures and facial expressions in these photographs conveyed a sense of abandonment and alluded to her relationship with Nayyar. Her overriding performance of “bad girl” songs like mujras and cabaret dance numbers was often con flated with her off- screen persona, relayed primarily through photo graphs in film magazines.

In constructing Lata, on the other hand, the dominant narrative was that of a devotee of music and her purity of style, an image that could not have been created without her own involvement. Her photograph with the tanpura became an iconic image. Other recurring images showed her with her head covered, and pictures of her puja room in her Pedder Road house. Often called the woman in white, Lata had self- consciously created an image of simplicity with her white saris. This process of exteriorization illustrates how stars are cast in broad moral and emblematic terms where the use of the body relayed through photographs short-circuits linguistic constraints.

In representing Lata, critics often used arbitrary adjectives to describe the voices of other female singers, while attempting to establish her superiority over them. For instance, in an attempt to defend Lata on the monopoly issue, Arvind Dhurandhar, a regular Lata enthusiast, wrote, “Lata’s sugar and spice voice scored easily over the rustic and harsh voice of Shamshad Begum, the earthy and seductive voice of Geeta Dutt and the nasal and courtesan voice of Amirbai.”

A recurring trope was to write about the expression of dard, or pain and suffering, in Lata’s voice. Dhurandhar’s piece evoked several letters by readers, some defending his account, while others criticized him for “weeping into his own pathos.”

In another article, Dhurandhar tried to make speculative connections between Lata’s “heart- rending” personal life and the early days of struggle in the industry.

By citing some of Lata’s “sad songs,” Dhurandhar attempts to draw attention to Lata’s “helplessness” by subtly referring to her struggle as the oldest daughter who took care of her family after she lost her father. Lata’s image as a single woman was based on either a recurring motif of grief and trauma or speculation about some hidden unfulfilled desires.

By citing Lata’s “sad” songs, critics attempted to give the readers a comprehensive image of the aural star. This involved a subjective engagement with the voice undergirded by the conventions of melodrama. For example, in the same article, Dhurandhar wrote, “Lata never got an opportunity to experience motherhood herself. However every line of her in ‘O mere lal Aja’ drips with rare brand of ‘mamta.’ It is hidden mother in Lata that has surfaced in the song.”

Dhurandhar’s contrived and selective recall of Lata’s songs about maternal love points us toward a highly gendered discourse. Reading strategies that attempted to collapse the subjective voice of the playback singer with the emotional and narrative import of film songs were applied only to female singers.

Further, the narratives on Lata were built by a complete disavowal of her erotic songs: cabarets, mela songs, boisterous numbers like “Hai hai majboori,” “Hai sharmayun,” or “Bahon mein chale Aao.” To be clear, I am not suggesting that playback singers could never dip into their inner selves while recording a song. My argument is that print media’s speculative and intrusive interest in playback singers’ “interiority” was skewed toward women singers, reifying an essential notion of femininity.

Excerpted with permission from The Female Playback in Bombay Cinema: Voice, Body, Technology, Shikha Jhingan, Orient BlackSwan.