The song of Lata Mangeshkar in the video-clip above is said to have moved Prime Minister of India, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to tears when he first listened to it.
That should not really surprise any Indian heart…. The song even today does not fail to bring a choking lump to the throat of even the most ordinary Indian, the poorest and even the most unschooled ones on the teeming streets of the country, every time he or she listens to it and is moved by its patriotic fervor, by its solemn, soul-stirring quality. Language is no barrier, nor is religion, region or caste one for this song of India to melt its citizen’s heart.
I listened to Lata-ji in the above Youtube video last night before I went to bed after I had watched scenes of her last journey being beamed on the evening TV news-channels. She deserved all the honors that were bestowed on her in death as truly as she did the ones that were heaped upon her in life — including the Bharat Ratna.
As I started drifting into slumber, there was one thought that crept into my mind and did not go away until the moment when I sank into sleep: What is that ineffable quality in Lata’ji’s singing of this song that makes it so unfailingly intense, authentic and overpoweringly patriotic?
Is it only her mellifluous voice?
Or is it the song’s rousing lyrics?
Or, the somber mood of deep patriotic reflection and pride it arouses in our hearts?
None can really say what exactly it is but then, the fact remains that — although a rose by any other name might well smell as sweet — this very same song sung by any other singer simply does not and will not touch the Indian heart as deeply and as solemnly.
Why?
I myself think it is because Lata-ji’s heart and soul were imbued with a genuine sense of patriotism, not in its sentimental or superficial sense, but in its truest and practical sense of “desh-bhakthi“. A patriotic song like this one can assume an ethereal, transcendent quality only when the singer is herself imbued with love for country and for all countrymen… It is only then that “ae mere watan ke logon….” will ring true in the ears and hearts of all citizens… It is only then this song can become a clarion call and arouse this country’s “watan ke logon” .
Little does this country’s “watan ke logon” seem today, however, to remember or even care to know that the extraordinary, deep and abiding sense of patriotism that made Lata-ji render this song with such exceptional fervor was instilled in her by the example of none other than the hero of her childhood and youthful days: the indomitable freedom-fighter, Damodar Vinayak “Veer” Savarkar.
Even I was not aware of the fact all these years until just a few years ago I read an excellently researched, sympathetic yet objectively historical biography of Veer Savarkar written by Vaibhav Purandare titled “SAVARKAR: The True Story of the Father of Hindutva”“.
Lata-ji and her entire Mangeshkar family — that included father, Dinanaath Mangeshkar, mother, “Mai” Shevanti Mangeshkar and siblings, brother Hridyanath, sisters Asha, Usha and Meena — were personally attached to Savarkar and adored him. They were all deeply influenced by Savarkar’s life and exploits as the daring, stormy-petrel of the Indian Freedom Movement and struggle, by his political activism, his rousingly patriotic Marathi poetry and works, by the lifelong ‘tapasya‘ and painful self-sacrifice that he had inflicted upon himself while fighting for his causes…. And of course, they were all greatly moved by the extremely tragic events of privation and misery he endured in his personal life and the even sadder end that he suffered which that overcame him at the end of it…
Instead of paraphrasing Vaibhav Purandare’s biographical account of the deeply patriotic impact Veer Savarkar, the man and his life’s message, had on Lata Mangeshkar, I choose to simply reproduce relevant extracts verbatim from his book if only to evoke and underscore the authenticity of the narrative. My own brief explanatory notes have been added — in parentheses [ ] and italics — only to contextualize the extracts.
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Page 55-56:
Savarkar, like many other leaders of the time, wrote prolifically during his college years for Pune’s famously vibrant newspapers and periodicals and, during the year he spent in Mumbai after graduating from Fegusson College to prepare for the London law entrance exams, for a weekly called Vihaari. He met the Kaal editor S.M.Paranjpe… at his Pune office and impressed him with his intellgence and wit and became a close friend of Paranjpe’s son Krishna. His poems published at that time drew a lot of attention, and one of them, “Jayostuthe“, a paean to Liberty’s patron goddess, subsequently set to music by Hridayanath Mangeshkar, brother of India’s favorite singer of the post-Independence era, Lata, continues to be played on big occasions in his home state (Maharashtra) (even) in the 21st century.”
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Page 90:
[In London 1909, Savarkar was implicated as co-conspirator in the assassination by Madan Lal Dhingra, a member of the Free India Movement (society led by Savarkar), who shot dead in public two senior British officials of the British Raj, William Curzon Wyllie, political secretary to the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, and Colonel Dunlop Smith, an aide for the Viceroy, Lord Minto. Savarkar was under intense investigation by the British intelligence and police authorities while the assassin himself was undergoing trial in the criminal courts.]
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Scotland Yard detectives were meanwhile unrelenting in piling up pressure on Indian agitators ( in London) and especially on Savarkar, convinced that he was deeply implicated in the Dhingra affair, The strain of being shadowed and of the anxious movement from one lodging house to another told on Savarkar’s health, and he decided to travel down to the seaside sanctuary of Brighton for a bit of a breather. There, staring at the waves that hit the shores, he gave uninhibited expression to his mental and emotional landscape. With his friend B.C.Lal’s son Niranajan or “Nanu” by his side, he composed a Marathi poem in which he gently and movingly asked the sea to deliver him to the shores of his “maathruboomi” or motherland. There was, he wrote, a terrible restlessness, an impatience in his soul, for a glimpse of his own land. This poem would (later) prove to be his most celebrated and most enduring. Set to music in post-Independence India by the composer Hridayanath Mangeshkar and rendered by all four of the illustrious Mangeshkar sisters — Lata, Asha, Usha and Meena — it acquired a unique position in the historical and cultural memory of Mahrarashtra.
Page 204-208
[Savarkar after being banished in 1910 by the British Government to the dreaded Circular Jail in Andaman Islands (not too different from what we know today to be the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Guantanmo Bay, Cuba, to be), underwent unspeakable tortures, served his sentence and was released from there and returned to Mumbai in 1924. The condition however was that he would have to remain under a kind of parole — he could never leave the vicinity of Ratnagiri without local police dept. permission to which authority he would have to report without fail every week. So, although freed from the jail environs of Andaman Islands, Savarkar continued to serve another harrowing and humiliating open-jail-term sentence of 13 long years in Ratnagiri….
Finally, when in 1937, Savarkar was released from even the open-jail-term sentence, he had achieved the record of having spent, under some form of arrest or the other, 27 consecutive years in the prime of his life (i.e. taking the years of incarceration combined in England, France, Andaman Islands and British India)! Only twice was Savarkar allowed to leave the coastal district of Ratnagiri; once in 1924 for a few months for Nasik as the plague had struck Ratnagiri, and the second time in 1926, for just a fortnight, for Mumbai to meet his ailing older brother.
Today, many Indians are often found to be celebrating the great Nelson Mandela for having spent 27 years imprisonment as a freedom-fighter in the jail at Robben Island, near Cape Town, South Africa…. But little do those same Indians care to know or to celebrate with equal awe the fact that Nelson Mandela had only equaled the jail-term record which, quite long before him, had already been set by one of their own freedom-fighting heroes — our own Veer Savarkar!
Savarkar was not allowed to practise as a lawyer. To enable him to eke a living, he was forced to accept public charity in the form of “Savarkar Purse Fund Committee” to which ordinary citizens in Bombay Province, the Central Provinces and Berar contributed now and then. Savarkar accepted a sum of Rs.13, 000/- then saying he was “not taking it for services he had done but as an earnest reward for the services yet to be rendered by him”.]
QUOTE:
Savarkar had by this time extended his support to B.R.Ambedkar’s landmark anti-caste satyagraha …. (in the Konkan)…. and organized a number of inter-caste dinners….
Many were queasy about these inter-caste dinners…. Some others were not so queasy (about it).
One enthusiastic participant at these dinners (commensality) was the singer and stage artist Dinanath Mangeshkar. The impresario had recently developed a friendship with Savarkar, and he visited the internee off and on with (all) his family in tow. Savarkar in particular looked forward to the scrumptious vegetarian pulao that Dinanath’s wife, Shevanti, better known as “Mai”, brought for him every time. On one such visit, Dinanath decided to take his 5-year old daughter Lata along for one of Savarkar’s inter-caste (commensal) dinners.
Her regard and affection for Savarkar notwithstanding, Mai was reluctant to send the girl (Lata) along, (which Lata Mangeshkar herself recalled years later in life). “She’s so small, Why take her there?!” the concerned mother asked. Firstly, those (commensal) dinners were mostly male affairs; secondly, children who had barely started school were hardly ever made part of the proceedings; and thirdly, partaking of the food there was likely to make anyone unpopular, as most Hindus were still firmly in the grip of orthodoxy.
“Baba (father) would not not hear of it. He told my mother, “She needs to know right now what Savarkar is doing and why it’s so necessary”, Lata said, recollecting how she ended up becoming perhaps the youngest member of the Savarkar (anti-casteist) squad at the same time”.
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Page 332-335:
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Sometime in March 1963, Savarkar slipped and fell in his house and broke his left thigh bone. He underwent surgery at a clinic in Dadar and was bedridden for 3 months. ….
From his 80th birthday onward, Savarkar’s health took a turn for the worse, With his health failing rapidly, he had told many of his friends, including the Mangeshkar family, that he now wished to spend his time alone. The Mangeshkars — Lata, Hridayanath and their mother Mai — used to be regulars at Savarkar Sadan, and Savarkar loved speaking to them on a number of subjects ranging from politics to the arts and culture. Mai invariably took for him the pulao made by her that he so loved, and according to Lata she was once so moved by his thinking during a conversation that she voiced her desire to give up singing altogther and work along with him for the nation’s well-being. He dissuaded her, however, saying that giving full expression to her talent as a (professional) singer was also a way of serving India, and she ought to continue doing that”.
UNQUOTE
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Thus, it is from a reading of the above biography of Veer Savarkar that I came to realize how and why the music of Lata Mangeshkar, and especially her one immortal song of patriotism, “ae mere watan logon….” was imbued, out and out, inside-out, with the spirit of her love for this country called India — a spirit that she and her entire family had imbibed from their long friendship with Veer Savarkar, and from the unconditional love and the admiration they had cherished for him in their hearts.
If Damodar Vinayak Savarkar — who is reviled and shunned even today by many Indians as a “desh-drohi” and “Gandhi-killer” — had not firmly dissuaded Lata Mangeshkar from taking what might have been a most impetuous, most momentous and most unfortunate decision in her life — i.e. “giving up singing altogether to work along with him for the nation’s well-being” — India i.e. Bhaarath would have certainly lost one of her most precious “Ratna–s“!
Much as he was touched by young Lata-ji’s offer to plunge into public service along with him for his causes, and much as he was moved by the extraordinary love and affection for him she had revealed through such a selfless offer, Savarkar declined it… and bade her not to stray from her life path. Since he loved his country first and foremost, and above everything else in life, Savarkar would never do anything in his last dying days that he feared might end up only robbing Bhaarath of one of its future Ratna-s….
Last night, as I turned off the lights in my bedroom, and sunk deeper into my pillow to drift away into the night and sleep, there was only nagging question that my mind kept asking itself… and it was this: “Why does this country of mine that bestowed the honor of Bhaarath Ratna on Lata Mangeshar remain so reluctant to confer the same on he who Lata-ji always regarded as a Ratna greater than herself?
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Sudarshan Madabushi