The ‘Queen of Melody’ Lata Mangeshkar is one of the greatest voices in the Indian subcontinent, if not Asia. A career in music spanning eight decades, she sang in 32 languages, including Bengali, Marathi, and Hindi. Her first recorded Bengali song was ‘Akash Pradip Jwole’ composed by Satinath Mukherjee in 1954. Her life is a timeline, and thus has been preserved meticulously by Snehasis Chatterjee. For 42 years, Chatterjee has preserved long playing disks, cassettes, CDs, VCDs, journals, magazines, and many more.
This truly magnificent collection was showcased at the Jamini Roy Gallery, at ICCR, from 28 November to 1 December. Snehasis Chatterjee currently holds the Limca Book of Record award for the collection of the works of Lata Mangeshkar. Snehasis Chatterjee addressed the inauguration with, “I had to collect so much material to create the Lata Geet Kosh. The first edition of the book was prefaced by Srikanto Acharya and esteemed singer Shobita Choudhury. The latter parts of the collection were prefaced by legendary and pertinent music personalities like Manna Dey, Yash Chopra, A.R. Rahman, Usha Mangeshkar and other personalities. I had to collect all these materials to materialise and justify the collection of Lata Mangeshkar. I have brought just a small portion from that collection to showcase today. I have created an archive in Serampore, which you can surely visit. I hope to show you m a n y more rare and unique collections there.”
The opening ceremony was hosted by Debashish Basu, radio artist and orator. Present at the opening were Srikanto Acharya, maestro singer, musician Joy Sarkar, composer Prof. Pabitra Sarkar, former V.C RBU, Shoma A. Chatterji, journalist and film scholar, Swapan Shome, singer and music researcher, Debasis Mukhopadhyay, journalist and scholar, and Subhankar Dey, Dey’s Publishing. Pabitra Sarkar said, “You might be thinking what a professor has to do with Lata Mangeshkar. But I wasn’t always a professor; I was a street loafer too. So, when I came from partitioned Bengal at the age of 10 and settled in a suburban city called Kharagpur as a refugee, I saw a lot of microphones playing. On any occasion, be it birthdays, deaths, or cinemas, there were mics playing. There were radios in the pan shops, and there I heard the songs of Lata and “Ayega Aane Wala” as I grew up.
From Nagin to Jangli I sang those songs shouting in the streets. So as a common listener, I too have a connection to Lata.” Lata Mangeshkar only remade songs of four artists in her life, the album titled “Shraddhanjali”. The four artists were K.L Sehgal, Pankaj Mullick, Muhhamud Rafi, and Hemanta Mukherjee. Yet another Bengali legend was hugely influential in the life of Mangeshkar. Salil Chowdhury, who turned 100 this year, was the man to record Lata for the second time in her life in Bengali. “Sath Bhai Chompa” remains the harrowingly beautiful track; this exhibition showcased Salil Chowdhury as a loving father figure to the national voice of India. Chowdhury had said in an interview about Lata, “I was surprised when she sang out a line of my Bengali song Runner to me. She said Hemant Kumar had sung it many times, and that she knows me already through such songs.
And she was too keen to sing for me. We established a cosy and respectful relationship almost on our first meeting.” Srikanto Acharya addressed the opening event with sombre notes, “I have nothing to say about Lata Mangeshkar, because it is foolish to say something in front of the ocean that she was. I have not even scratched the surface of what the magical singer has given to this country. What I want to iterate is that people should visit this collection at least once.” The exhibition welcomed the visitors with a long-playing disk playing the best of Lata Mangeshkar songs, setting the tone of the exhibition. The gallery was filled wall to wall with posters, labels, covers, and cases of the musical life of the maestro, “Voice of the Millennium”.
Lata Mangeshkar recorded her first basic disc at the age of 13. It has been a meteoric rise since then. Soma A. Chatterji said, “The Lata foundation used to host an annual competition in Bombay, in front of Palazzo cinema, Dadar. I won the first prize in Kathak. I had a dream to see Lata Mangeshkar upfront. She came, dressed in her simple white saree, showed me love, and started talking to me in Bengali. She said she wasn’t feeling too well in colloquial Bengali. I was very surprised to see she knew my language so well. So, I asked her, and she replied that she had to learn the language in order to sing in it. She informed me that she was learning Urdu as well.
This is how dedicated she was to her art.” There is probably not a single Indian who has not heard the voice of Lata Mangeshkar. The exhibition is not just a showcase; it is the physical evidence of what dedication brings on. It is also nostalgic to see so many pieces of memorabilia in one place, and to see how the designs have changed drastically in how music is projected today. From Vanjaraa, Rahi, Chatrapati Shivaji, Pinjra to Prem Parbat, the collection boasts such vast horizons, it would take a whole day to just see it, let alone connect all the references.