The heartbeat of Bollywood's leading ladies

The voice of generations, Lata Mangeshkar became the soul and a definitive voice for all

Entering the sparkling galaxy of Hindi film music with the haunting Aayega Aanewala (Mahal, 1949) for ethereal Madhubala, Lata Mangeshkar became the definitive voice of several generations of legendary Indian film heroines, from Meena Kumari to Madhuri Dixit, Nargis to Neetu Singh, Padmini to Parveen Babi, and Sharmila Tagore to Sridevi.

As the voices of singing superstars such as Noor Jahan and Suraiyya were stilled due to emigration or premature retirement and changing tastes made the likes of Shamshad Begum obsolete, Lata Mangeshkar, who was born on September 28 in what was then the princely state of Indore in 1929 in a family that made its mark in music, ably filled the gap with other superlative talent.

To this end, she gamely surmounted what Dilip Kumar once gently mocked as the "dal-chawal" flavour of her Urdu, to achieve perfect diction in that expressive language to fashion magic in thousands of songs she rendered for a gamut of talented music composers and lyricists. Let us revisit this superlative voice of Lata Mangeshkar through the immortal songs that she sang for divas of the silver screen down the ages, though this effort can be highly subjective.