Star Wars

The political split in Bollywood has never been so wide open and seemingly unbridgeable as the two camps—Modi, anti-Modi—battle it out.

- Giridhar Jha

LATA Mangeshkar, who will be turning 90 in September, stopped singing for Hindi cinema long ago. But that will never alter her stature as the voice of the nation, ‘the Nightingale of India’, in a popular sense. A lot of voices, different textures of sound from this land, had to make way for her to attain that stature. It fell upon her tender, malleable, pure-pitch voice to turn culture into politics. There was a time when she moved Nehru to tears —that was when the nation was still being formed, in 1963. Politics has moved along a bit since then. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at one of his rallies soon after the Balakot airstrikes earlier this year, recited a poem that went: “Saugandh mujhe is mitti ki/ main desh nahin mitne doonga” (I swear upon this soil/I won’t let the country wither away…) She took it upon herself to record it as a song, dedicated to all Indians, especially its soldiers, which she uploaded on Twitter a few days before the general elections got under way. Between performing “nationalism” for Nehru, and now Modi, Lata Mangeshkar has spanned an almost impossible gamut. A yawning gulf that has never been much expressed, but which has always existed at the core of India’s most popular culture industry. A gulf that’s now at last becoming manifest.

Fifty-six years…that’s the gap between Lata Mangeshkar’s two songs. Over half a century in which the country and the world have changed irrevocably, at even subtle cultural levels. Now, “nationalism” does not evoke just a simple love —indeed, it often entails hate for the ‘other’ even within India. Lata, who has sung Naushad’s delectable version of the Krishna Leela-based thumri Mohe panghat par for Mughal-e-Azam and also backed the Shiv Sena in recent years, has the dichotomy running through her, more or less.