PTI, MUMBAI: Bharat’s ‘ratna’
Lata Mangeshkar was cremated with full State honours here on Sunday, her life
and death testimony that end of an era is not always a cliché and sometimes
carries a ring of truth that imprints itself into lasting memory. She was 92.
The Indore-born Mangeshkar is
survived by her siblings Meena, Asha, Usha and Hridaynath. Her coffin was
draped in the tricolour and placed on the hearse draped in white flowers with a
giant photograph of the singer known as “Nightingale of India”, “melody queen”
or simply “Lata didi”.
Mangeshkar, whose voice stirred
millions of hearts everyday and who will forever be counted as one of India’s
greats with an estimated 25,000 songs in an almost eight-decade career, died in
Mumbai’s Breach Candy Hospital on Sunday morning due to multiple organ failure.
Flames licked the rapidly
darkening sky as her brother Hridyanath Mangeshkar lit the funeral pyre at
Shivaji Park and a nation held its collective breath as it were, many searching
through their mental — and digital — songbooks to identify their favourite
Mangeshkar number.
The haunting strains of “Rahein
na rahein hum, mehka karenge”, “Ae mere watan ke logon” and “Nam gum jaayega”
played in the backdrop as politicians, film stars and the many thousands whose
lives she had touched with her music paid their last respects to her.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was
also in Shivaji Park to pay tribute to the singer whose name was written into
legend long before she took her last breath. Also there were Chief Minister
Uddhav Thackeray, NCP chief Sharad Pawar, MNS supremo Raj Thackeray and actors
Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan.
Earlier in the afternoon, as a flower-bedecked
cortege went from her Peddar Road home to Shivaji Park, surging crowds of
mourners walked along, many thousands lined the 10-kilometre route and millions
tuned into their screens — to say goodbye to the woman who had been an
integral part of their lives and to fuse into memory a moment in contemporary
history.
Mangeshkar, one of India’s most
well-known and well-loved personalities who voiced songs for actors down
generations, died at 8.12 am, almost a month after she admitted to hospital with
mild Covid symptoms, her doctor said. She was also diagnosed with pneumonia.
The government announced a
two-day “state mourning” for the playback singer, who had a
prodigious career in not just Hindi and Marathi but in more than 30 other
Indian languages, and across classical and other genres.
The national flag will fly at
half mast from February 6 to February 7 throughout India. There will also be no
official entertainment in this period.
“… I’m just shattered that
Didi, who has shaped my life and that if crores of others, is not
anymore,” said 60-year-old Savita Shah, one of the many who had gathered
outside her home to pay their respects to the woman whose voice they woke up
to, listened to as they went about their day and as they turned in for the night.
