CINEMA ABROAD: Indispensable Queen

Hollywood would not look twice at India’s Lata Mangeshkar. Tin-Pan Alley might cover its ears. But last week plain little Lata, her hair braided in a pigtail, drove to one of Bombay’s biggest movie studios, was ushered up to a mike, and the sweet, childish voice that struggles to rise above the accompaniment was nursed through its 6,000th recording. For 16 years, barefoot Lata has been putting on sound tracks the songs that Indian actresses fake when they appear on the screen. Now, at 29, she is the undisputed and indispensable queen of India’s “playback singers,” with an output of 30 songs per week and more recordings to her name than any other singer in the world.

Twelve Kinds of Syrup. The fact that Lata does not appear on the screen never bothers her fans. Nor does it trouble them that the studio mixers, who build up her voice electronically to help it ride over the orchestra, rarely manage to synchronize her song with the “singer” on the screen. The offbeat result helps the audience identify Lata. And in Indian movies (TIME, Jan. 5)—three-hour, syrupy soap operas relieved by interludes of pop music—the audience likes to know who is actually carrying the tune. With Lata the moviegoers can hear their favorites in any one of twelve Indian dialects, and her popularity is such that she never changes her soft tone .or lilting style to fit the character on the screen. The effect is as if Doris Day did the singing for Baritone Tallulah Bankhead, Monotone Marilyn Monroe and Tammytone Debbie Reynolds in the same movie.

Lata learned her trade long before she ever saw a movie. She roamed India with her actor father, joined his touring company at the age of seven, was singing Indian classical music in public at eight, was barely 13 when she landed her first playback job. For a while, producers managed to keep her ignorant of her growing popularity. “They were afraid I would ask for more money,” she explains. Eventually Lata caught on. By 1949 her movies were all over the country, and her songs were played everywhere, including remote rural areas where villagers clustered around wind-up gramophones listening to Lata until all that could be heard from the records was an eerie scratch.

Two Kinds of Cars. Today Lata’s seven-day-a-week schedule earns her about 175,000 rupees a year ($37,000), a fabulous income for an Indian working woman. She could probably make more, but she handles her own finances, a foredoomed undertaking considering the uncertain economics of the Indian cinema. Rubber paychecks pile up, and she is never quite sure who owes her what. “It is embarrassing to ask for money,” she says. Even so, she makes enough to maintain a Bombay apartment and a summer home in the hills. She has a Chrysler, a Chevrolet, five long-haired Pomeranians, and a constant army of beggars on her doorstep.