Farewell, Nightingale!

Mumbai: Legendary singer Lata Mangeshkar breathed her last at Breach Candy Hospital, here on Sunday. She was 92. The singer, called the Nightingale of India, was laid to rest at Mumbai's Shivaji Park with full state honours.

Lata Mangeshkar, whose name was written into legend long years before she took her last breath, had been in hospital since January 8 when she was diagnosed with Covid with mild symptoms.

She was also diagnosed with pneumonia. The singer, one of India's most well-known and well-loved personalities, died at 8.12 am due to multi organ failure, her doctor Pratit Samdani said.

Daughter of Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar and Shevanti Mangeshkar, Lata belonged to a musical family. Her father was a well-known Marathi musician and theatre artiste. She was first tutored by her father and later appeared as a child artiste in several of his plays.

Lata Mangeshkar recorded her first Hindi song called "Mata Ek Sapoot Ki Duniya Badal De Tu" for the Marathi feature Gajaabhaau, which had released in 1943.

Later, she went on to collaborate with some of the most popular names of the Hindi music industry, including the likes of Anil Biswas, Shankar Jaikishan, Naushad Ali and SD Burman among others.

She has lent her voice to songs in Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu and other regional languages. She has been honoured with the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, Bharat Ratna, Padma Vibhushan and Padma Bhushan as well as several National and Filmfare Awards.

As a flower-bedecked cortege went from Mangeshkar's Peddar Road home to Shivaji Park for the last rites, surging crowds of mourners walked or jogged 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. Sounds of "Lata Mangeshkar Amar Rahe" could be heard through the route. "… 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.

The government announced a two-day "state mourning" for Mangeshkar, who had a prodigious almost eight-decade career in which she sang an estimated 25,000 songs in as many as 36 Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil and Kannada, and across classical and other genres. The national flag will fly at half-mast on Sunday and Monday throughout India. There will also be no official entertainment in this period.

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 "Lata didi" to so many.

The film world she had worked with for decades expressed their condolences too. "She has left us… The voice of a million centuries has left us… her voice resounds now in the Heavens! Prayers for calm and peace...," Amitabh Bachchan said in his personal blog.