Hridaynath Mangeshkar
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Sacking by All India Radio
Vaibhav Purandare, February 9, 2022: The Times of India
The sacking of Hridaynath Mangeshkar by All India Radio in the mid-1950s for setting to tune a poem of Vinayak Damodar or ‘Veer’ Savarkar revived talk about the Mangeshkar family’s “troubled” relations with the Nehruvian establishment.
The “hounding” of Lata’s youngest sibling, Hridaynath, was for long a subject much-discussed in Maharashtra but is little known outside the state; of late, it had receded from public memory even in Mumbai though the composer himself has often narrated the story.
In 1955, Hridaynath was 17 years old when he joined AIR in Mumbai. Happy to get a job at the then-princely sum of Rs 500 a month, he composed, days after joining, a song based on Savarkar’s famous poem ‘Saagara pran talamalala. ’ The poem is about Savarkar’s yearning for his homeland, written on the shores of Brighton in 1909 when Scotland Yard was chasing him after the assassination of British official Curzon Wyllie by Madan Lal Dhingra. Alongside him when he wrote the poem was his friend Niranjan Pal, son of Bipin Chandra Pal.
By the 1950s, Savarkar, a political revolutionary once sent off to ‘Kaala Paani’ by the British Raj, was a figure sidelined in Indian politics, having led the Hindu Mahasabha and having been accused in the Mahatma Gandhi assassination case before being acquitted of all charges.
The day after the song was ready, Hridaynath got a show-cause notice from his bosses. He said he “showed” two “causes” – “great poet” and “great poem. ” Immediately, on his seventh day in the job, he got the sack.
Hridaynath also alleged he was “warned” by police informers against visiting Savarkar at his Savarkar Sadan residence at Shiva ji Park and once “detained for a night and threatened”.
But even as Hridaynath faced consequences, Lata Mangeshkar never concealed her heroworship of Savarkar or her father-daughterlike relations with the other ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat,’ Bal Thackeray. Lata wanted to join Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha in the 1950s but Savarkar insisted she focus on her singing. She was already a top-notch singer by then, and ‘Tatya,’ as she used to call Savarkar, told her she was “serving the nation through her music”.
And though Lata mastered Urdu for her work, she also supported Savarkar’s campaign of ‘bhasha shuddhi’ for removal of Persian words from Marathi and Hindi. In a speech at a Marathi literary meet held in Alandi, she had said Savarkar’s agitation for ‘bhasha shuddhi’ had been unfairly criticised. Years after the AIR episode, all the Mangeshkar sisters sang and recorded ‘Saagara pran talalamalala,’ as composed by their brother. The song is so popular it is still played at public functions in Maharashtra. Another sung by Lata, Savarkar’s ‘Hindu Nrusinha Prabho Shiva ji Raja,’ which has the line ‘Kari Hindu rashtra hey tute vandana’ (‘The Hindu rashtra pays homage to you’), became a hit.
Lata’s association with Savarkar began with her father Dinanath Mangeshkar, for whose theatre company Savarkar had written the 1931 Marathi play ‘Sanyasta Khadga. ’ Her father began to take her for Savarkar’s inter-caste dinners in Ratnagiri, where he was interned by the Raj from 1924 to 1937. She was, in subsequent years, a regular visitor to Savarkar’s Dadar home, and Savarkar would especially ask her to get for him his ‘favourite pulao’ cooked by Lata’s mother, ‘Mai’ Mangeshkar.
Only some years ago, Lata had tweeted that Savarkar was ‘pita samaan’ (like a father) to her. Until the last, India’s Nightingale, who moved first PM Jawaharlal Nehru to tears by her rendering of ‘Aae mere watan ke logo’ after the 1962 China conflict, remained a firm supporter of Savarkar and his militant nationalism.
