Senses and Citizenships by Susanna Trnka Christine Dureau Julie Park

Author:Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, Julie Park [Susanna Trnka, Christine Dureau, Julie Park]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Government, Civics, Social Science, Anthropology
ISBN: 9781136690594
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-05-02T04:00:00+00:00

LEAVING “POSTCOLONIAL” BEHIND

The proportion of film songs recorded by Mangeshkar decreased during the 1980s. Multiple and only partially interconnected factors led to the decrease. Age may have been a factor, but there was also increasing competition. India's fascination with disco through most of the 1980s engaged younger, more explicitly pop-style singers, often supported by new music companies and composers. At some level, no doubt, after thirty years, Indian listeners were ready for a change of singer. Nevertheless, in the late 1980s and through the early 1990s, as melodic songs made a comeback so did Mangeshkar, although she never regained (nor perhaps sought to regain) the dominance she had enjoyed until 1980. As she moved through her fifties, Mangeshkar's voice acquired a “thicker,” more complex timbre as might be expected. Nevertheless, she continued to sing the romantic songs of heroines well into the 1990s (e.g., Dil To Pagal Hai 1997). By that time, however, listeners and commentators had begun to note that her voice, now clearly a mature one, seemed increasingly incongruous coming out of the mouths of twenty-year-old heroines dressed in jeans and miniskirts.

The modernist postcolonial ideology supporting the gendered representations and behaviors of the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s was also shifting, and by the late 1990s, the effects of changing governmental policy and globalization were being felt. The Mangeshkar voice, so clearly associated with postcolonial Indian femininity sounded less authentic in the mouths of increasingly postmodern and globalized heroines. It also began to take nostalgic overtones as India entered its second half century.

The strength of the association between Lata Mangeshkar, the sound of her voice, and India's first fifty years of independence (and postcolonialism) meant that by the 1990s, her voice was more than simply old-fashioned. It had acquired a broader significance that combined elements of nationalism and/or patriotism with an increasingly nostalgic connection to the first decades of independence. In films such as Dil to Pagal Hai, the increasingly unexpected sound of Mangeshkar's voice became a sound of industrial and cultural continuity.

As the values and pleasures of postcolonial times began to be left behind in the 1990s, the extent to which Mangeshkar's voice had dominated the national soundscape during India's first thirty or more years became ever more apparent to Indians. In an article celebrating her seventy-fifth birthday, a journalist could write that, “till September 1979, we merely had Lata as the undisputed topmost female voice”; the post-1979 period, on the other hand, led to Mangeshkar “curtailing her recordings progressively and yet dazzling us when she did go in front of the mike. This was the phase that simply saw Lata finally acquire the status of a living legend” (Vijayakar 2004, 24). Just as she had voiced perseverance in the face of endless adversity in 1957’s Mother India, by the 1990s her voice was a sign of national and cultural survival and of India's increasing national and global success. Furthermore, as it receded from the daily soundscape, Mangeshkar's voice took on added nostalgic significance; that significance was put to careful and effective use in 1998.

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