ऐ मेरे वतन के लोगों...

 February 6, 2022 marks the day Bharat Ratna Lata Mangeshkar passed away, and what a loss it is. It’s apt that she received the civilian honor that literally means “Jewel of India” because that is indeed what she was.

The news of her death in itself is a shock, but the implications are what scared me even more. There are sentiments I associate with her passing that I was too afraid to voice before, but I don’t imagine there will be a better time for them.

The first thought that crossed my mind as I ruminated the implication of her passing was (and forgive me for naming a person outright and for the harshness of my words), I don’t want to live in a world of Neha Kakkar's!

What I really meant, I suppose, is that I still want to have music in this world that is more than just digitized voices and background noise to lose your mind to. I am partial to music that expresses emotions of more than what I hear in music that has been coming out since roughly 2015. (And I want to clarify that there is, of course, good music in this time frame, but not to the credit of the people I am about to talk about.) I fear that we may have lost a large part of that with our nightingale’s passing, because to me, that is what she stood for in this world that…never quite encoded certain emotions quite like she did. I feel like we’re never going to be able to match Lata Ji's levels of soul and emotion without her voice and without her light in general. It may be unfair of me to say so, but I am not quite in a rational headspace just yet.

Two of her songs that carry a story with them in my life are “Jiya Jale” (Hindi) and “Bhaya Ithale Sampat Nahi” (Marathi). I first encountered the former when I was around ten years old. Back then I was more taken with the beats and music, but now that I’m older (and just a tiny bit wiser), I understand the words and what the song is trying to communicate. The song creates a visual in my head and dips me into that world as if I’m in a vivid dream. It makes me think of my own encounters with the emotions of that song. (I’m in my twenties; is that such a surprise?) And that’s a power I wish more songs had.

The second of those songs actually talks about life and death (as I interpret it). It talks about how the list of struggles in life never ends, how there’s always something to dread around every corner (the literal meaning of the title). My favorite line from that song – mostly because it’s one of the few I understand, and also because I feel like it sums up the song quite nicely – is झाडांशी निजलो आपण, झाडांत पुन्हा उगवाया. “We sleep under the trees, only to rise as them, among them, again.” That resonates with me because this is why I love the concept of burial after death: from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, back into the Earth we go after having lived on it. Where my father gets goosebumps from good music, I find that I get chills.

My family and I always note the clarity with which Lata Ji pronounced her words in her songs. The sounds श and ष have a clear distinction. All variations of the letter य (the बारहखडी of it, if you will) are sharper than how someone speaks it. I really appreciate that because as someone who only uses Hindi and Marathi colloquially, I like learning new words from songs and it’s a huge help knowing how a word is pronounced with no ambiguities. Less chance of mondegreens.

After being immersed in that world, it’s really hard – and really sad – to come back to a world of “Chittiyan Kalaiyan” and Neha Kakkar enthusing how a song moved her to tears for the first time. I’m sorry it feels like I’m more fixated on her, but in her own words, “People only talk about the person who’s at the top.”

In the end, I am saddened by the light that we lost in Lata Ji, and I am overcome with the feeling that we lost an important thread in the tapestry of Indian music. I hope her legacy will remain untouched no matter how far we stray from it.