Lata Mangeshkar...celluloid trap?

NEW DELHI, May 10: Imagine the story of two Maharashtrian nightingales, with a weakness for white saris and a propensity to wear their hair in pigtails into maturity, who fight it out for playback singing's top slot in Bombay's commercial film industry for over three decades. Imagine their humble origins as the daughters of a small-town theatre actor, his early demise from alcoholism, and the girls' long, slow haul to become the golden-voiced divas of the Indian screen marred by cut-throat competition and bitter sibling rivalry.

Such a plot can suggest only one account in filmdom's contemporary history, and that is the story of Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsale. After the feud over Phoolan Devi and Bandit Queen, the cross-cutting of real life and reel life could once again raise a storm in Sai Paranjpye's latest film Saaz, previewed by Star TV in the Capital on Friday evening. Produced by Amit Khanna of Plus Channel, the film is slated to be premiered on Star TV shortly.

Several key incidents and characters in the 2 hr 20 mts long film, packed with songs and fine performances from Shabana Azmi, Aruna Irani, tabla wizard Zakir Hussain and Raghuvir Yadav, are either inspired by or closely resemble happenings and people in the true lives of the Mangeshkar sisters. The film's opening shots are of a drama in progress in a small town in Maharashtra, much the kind of play that Lata and Asha's father Dinanath Mangeshkar used to perform in the Kolhapur-Pune region during the 1930's and 1940's.

In fact, a sequence of a drunken Dinanath (called Vrindavan in the film and played by Raghuvir Yadav) standing in pouring rain and singing a malhar in order to pay for his liquor is based on an apparently true incident about Dinanath recorded in the memoirs of the well-known Marathi director and playwright Vishram Bedekar.

Although the film takes the precaution of a title asserting that ``all resemblance to persons living or dead are purely coincidental'' and many events in the lives of Mansi and Bansi Vrindavan, the two sisters in Saaz, are clearly fictional, several others echo facts that are either true or widely assumed to be true. When Mansi (the elder sister based on the Lata Mangeshkar character and played by Aruna Irani) moves to Bombay and gives lessons in bhajan-singing to neighbourhood ladies, it approximates situations in Lata's life; also when Bansi's (the Asha Bhonsale character played by Shabana Azmi) marriage to a husband who ill-treats her breaks down, the saga of marital discord may contain hints of the collapse of Asha Bhonsale's first marriage.

More telling is the chronicle of sisterly love souring as Mansi fiercely guards her numero uno status against Bansi's inexorable advance as a singing star in her own right. Flashpoints occur not only in their professional association with top music directors - both Indranil and Hemant, the music directors in the film played by Amar Talwar and Zakir Hussain, seem to be modelled on O P Nayyar and R D Burman. But one particular incident causes the final rupture between the sisters. This is when Bansi is requested by officials to sing a patriotic song and Mansi steals the assignment from under her sister's nose through subterfuge.

Film industry insiders have long speculated whether Lata Mangeshkar could have come to sing her famous nationalist number Ai Mere Watan Ke Logo in similar circumstances.

Curiously enough some of the inspiration behind Saaz was inadvertently sparked off by the Mangeshkar family. It was Shabana Azmi who first spotted a magazine article by Asha Bhonsale's daughter Varsha.

``It was a very frank and moving piece about her relationship with her mother Asha, with her unmarried aunt Lata and also her deep affection for her mother's companion and husband R D Burman. As a woman and member of the film industry I have often wondered what it must be like for a woman in a male-dominated industry to keep the top jobs in playback singing. I took the idea to Sai and begged her to consider it.''

Given her long association with Marathi threatre Sai Paranjpye was game but she strongly resists the notion that parts of her film violate the privacy of the Mangeshkar family. ``My film is a fabrication and I make no other claim. I am not capitalising on anything sensational. Certain incidents or characters may be drawn from real life but such happenings and people are in the public domain and it is my creative prerogative to fictionalise them. So the argument for intrusion of privacy doesn't hold.''

Amid rumours that Lata Mangeshkar may sue, Paranjpye insists that Saaz deviates widely from known facts about her or Asha Bhonsale's life. ``My film shows the heroine losing her singing voice through trauma. No such thing, God forbid, happened to Ashaji. It shows the girls' mother dying in childbirth, certainly not true of the Mangeshkar family. It delves deep into a mother-daughter relationship for which, if anything, the inspiration came from my own life....''. And so her defence of the film continues. But there are others who think that the saga of Saaz has just begun.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.