An unparalleled playback singer whose career spanned eight decades, and whose voice has reverberated around the walls of countless homes in and beyond India, tributes poured in when Lata Mangeshkar, at the grand old age of 92, passed away on February 6 in Mumbai. And as people took to social media to weigh in on her so very public legacy, many drew attention to her right-wing leanings. Supporters of the incumbent dispensation at New Delhi celebrated these leanings as much as her musical career, while a section of their opponents used them to diminish and indeed dismiss Mangeshkar’s legacy.
Like so many other popular figures in the subcontinent, Mangeshkar had her political contradictions. She spoke glowingly of the Hindu nationalist ideologue V.D. Savarkar, who was a family friend, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – the paramilitary organisation whose creation by K.B. Hedgewar in 1925 was inspired by Savarkar’s exclusionary idea that India was a nation that belonged only to its Hindu majority.
Mangeshkar lent her voice to Savarkar and Hedgewar’s ideological descendants too. In the early 1990s, she sang a tune for the BJP provocateur L. K. Advani’s rath yatra as he campaigned for the installation of a Ram temple at Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid still stood. And when, in 2020, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation stone of the temple 28 years after the mosque’s demolition by karsevaks, Mangeshkar congratulated the contemporary pantheon of Hindu nationalist leaders for bringing their Ram Janmabhoomi movement to a successful conclusion.
Also read: Recording a Charming Song and Lata Mangeshkar’s Gesture of Generosity
Clearly, Hindutva gets its meaning not just from an assertion of Hindu identity per se, but an assertion that is made in explicit opposition to Muslim identity. And yet, it is curious that Mangeshkar seemed not to share the same degree of antipathy to Muslims and Islam that was so integral to the politics of the ideologues and leaders that she admired. In fact, she positively celebrated her Muslim colleagues like Dilip Kumar and Shah Rukh Khan, and her work was often reflective of the rootedness of Indian Islam and its contribution to a wider, cosmopolitan culture. If Mangeshkar performed bhajans and Rabindra Sangeet, she also sang na’ats and Mirza Ghalib’s couplets. She was trained in Hindustani classical music by a Muslim ustad, and worked with Hindu and Muslim music directors alike. Mangeshkar also drew great admiration from neighbouring Muslim-dominated Pakistan, and received it with grace and humility, not least during two television interviews with journalists Kamran Shahid and Wajahat Khan.
For her playback colleague Mohammad Rafi, who she described as an ‘honest, sincere-minded human being (saral mann ke insan)’, no praise seemed to be enough. In a humanising homage to her friend in her 1992 album Shraddhanjali—My Tribute, Mangeshkar focused on Rafi’s artistic versatility and ‘melodious’ voice (‘bahut surile the’) that could supposedly entice even those unfamiliar with the Hindustani language. She happily declared that: ‘it is my good fortune that I sang the most songs with him (ye meri khush qismati hai kih maine unke sath sabse zyada gane gae).’ ‘Singers like this,’ she concluded, ‘are born very infrequently (aise gayak bar bar janam nahi lete).’
Together, Mangeshkar and Rafi gave countless hits. Two among the many songs they sang together are ‘Chalo Dildar Chalo’ written by Kaifi Bhopali for Kamal Amrohi’s film Pakeezah (1971) which centred around the life of a Muslim courtesan, and ‘Jo Wada Kiya Wo’ which the renowned progressive poet Sahir Ludhianvi penned for M. Sadiq’s Taj Mahal (1963) about the 17th-century Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s love for his wife Mumtaz.
And so, when we think of Lata Mangeshkar, not just as a remarkably skilful singer but as a public figure who produced so much of the contemporary culture of a socially mixed region of the world, we are left with a set of great contradictions on some of the most fundamental questions about Indian – and indeed South Asian – belonging. In fact, her inconsistent engagement with inter-religious relations may have found a reflection in her attitude to caste. Allegations persist – ones that I have been unable to adequately corroborate – that Mangeshkar, though not from the upper castes herself, made casteist remarks about the celebrated Dalit lawyer-politician, B.R. Ambedkar. On the other hand, what we do know for certain is that she publicly hailed him for his role in scripting the Indian constitution, and celebrated the fact that she had once met Ambedkar.
Be that as it may, I want to suggest that we take all these intellectual contradictions seriously, instead of just dismissing them for being nonsensical or inauthentic. Not least because Mangeshkar’s ostensibly incongruent sentiments are shared by so many in society. It is not uncommon for enthusiasts of South Asia’s shrill religious nationalisms (and casteisms), on both sides of the border, to concurrently embrace elements of the communities and traditions they have otherwise ‘othered’. And however stunningly irregular this tendency appears to the liberal mind, close analysis is bound to reveal that, somewhere, in the depths of this kind of argumentation, there’s a point at which chauvinism – however dominant it may be – reaches its limits, and the inescapable but suppressed universality of humanity begins.
Also read: Memories of Longing and Lata Mangeshkar
The problem has been that the liberal mind, while proudly and rightly holding aloft its own ideals, has failed to award the courtesy of intellectual integrity or credibility to those with whom it differs, and especially to those people whose thoughts seem outwardly muddled, incoherent and chaotic. Liberals are more likely to confer integrity to a Savarkar or a Modi than to a Mangeshkar, precisely because those men are easier to fit into an ideological straitjacket.
But a deep engagement with the complexity of the Mangeshkar-type position is in the interest of liberal Indians. This is because, unlike with doctrinaire Hindutva, here within its contradictions there is still intellectual room for manoeuvre. In other words, its bigotry is not yet all-pervasive or even stable. My point, therefore, is that if liberals understand the complexities and nuances of the common viewpoint that Mangeshkar represented, they will be well-placed to engage with it, and thus redirect it too. They would be able to help overcome its less-fixed chauvinism, and harness its still-curtailed humanity.
Armed with a better understanding of the Mangeshkar-type position, liberals will create the opportunity to reveal these contradictions to their right-leaning owners, rather than counterproductively shaming or ‘cancelling’ them. Ultimately, the owners of these contradictions have to unlock their chains of fear and antagonism for themselves. But an open, honest dialogue – however traumatic that may be for both sides – gives us hope of reaching that hallowed end. In short, there is a need to create space for a set of conversations through which a transformation away from chauvinism becomes possible.
What I have argued in this article must not be mistaken for abandoning one’s own liberalism, or be reduced to some banal argument about two-sideism. Rather, this is a call for the kind of complexity that will better serve a vibrant, inclusive politics, and the social media debates around Mangeshkar’s legacy have brought this problem, once again, into view. Mangeshkar lived an intellectually inconsistent life and some of the positions she held I, and many readers, would struggle to condone. But I will always listen to her unrivalled oeuvre.
It is possible, after all, to appreciate her musical skill while being acutely aware that she was a multifaceted personality whose political contradictions remained unresolved. What I am suggesting, then, is neither the glorification nor the erasure of Mangeshkar, but a more nuanced engagement with her legacy. My engagement with her music will no longer have the innocent, unbridled joy of my childhood. And while that may sound dispiriting, that is also reflective of India’s complex and imperfect reality. The real India is not the pluralistic utopia that many of us had imagined growing up, but nor is it an entirely bitter or bigoted one either.
Amar Sohal is an Early-Career Research Fellow in Indian political thought at the University of Cambridge, where he is currently writing his first book on Maulana Azad, Sheikh Abdullah, and Abdul Ghaffar Khan. He tweets at @amarsohal1592.