Lata Mangeshkar

Lata Mangeshkar's voice was soft enough to sing a baby to sleep and strong enough to make a whole country cry. She began singing as a young girl to help her family after her father died, and never really stopped.

For over seventy years she recorded songs in more than thirty Indian languages. When she sang 'Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon' in 1963, remembering soldiers who had died in the border war, even Prime Minister Nehru could not hold back his tears.

Everyone called her the Nightingale of India.

Lata Mangeshkar was born in 1929 in Indore and grew up in a musical family. Her father, Deenanath Mangeshkar, was a classical singer and stage actor.

When he died in 1942, thirteen-year-old Lata began working to support her mother and four younger siblings. She recorded her first Hindi film song in the late 1940s and slowly became the leading playback singer of Indian cinema.

Over her career she recorded thousands of songs in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil and many other languages. Her patriotic song 'Aye Mere Watan Ke Logon', composed by C.

Ramchandra and written by Kavi Pradeep, was sung in 1963 shortly after the 1962 war and moved Jawaharlal Nehru to tears. She was awarded the Bharat Ratna in 2001 and the French Legion of Honour in 2007.

When she passed away in 2022, India observed two days of national mourning for a voice that had shaped its music for seventy years.