Over the course of nearly eight decades, Mangeshkar was a major presence as a playback singer, singing songs that were later lip-synced by actors in India’s lavish Bollywood musicals. She was also fondly revered as the “Melody Queen” and “Nightingale of India.”
Born in Indore on Sept. 28, 1929, Mangeshkar first sang at religious gatherings with her father, who was also a trained singer. After she moved to Mumbai, India’s film industry capital, she became a star with immense popular appeal, enchanting audiences with her smooth but sharp voice and immortalizing Hindi music for decades to come.
Few musicians defined singing versatility like Mangeshkar, who issued her debut song in 1942 for a Bollywood film when she was just 13. Soon after, she became an icon of Hindi singing, lending her voice to over 5,000 songs in over a thousand Bollywood and regional language films. She sang for Bollywood’s earliest women superstars like Madhubala and Meena Kumari and later went on to give voice to the industry’s modern divas like Priyanka Chopra.
Mangeshkar was still in her 20s in the late 1950s when she had already been established as one of the best playback singers in India. But her career-defining moment came in the epic historical Mughal-e-Azam, a romantic tragedy that was released in 1960. The film’s iconic song Pyar Kiya To Darna Kya? (Why fear if you are in love?) is considered one of the defining songs in Bollywood films, one that over decades has become an undisputed epitome of love’s often rebellious nature.
