Bengal's melody queen Sandhya Mukherjee passes away at 90

Kolkata: Legendary Bengali singer Sandhya Mukherjee passed away on Tuesday. She was 90. Sandhya Mukherjee had been unwell for the past few days. As per hospital sources, the veteran singer suffered a massive cardiac arrest.

Hailed for over 70 years as Bengal's melody queen, Sandhya Mukherjee's status as the greatest Bengali female singer has remained intact through the generations, and perhaps, would remain so, for many more years to come.

Honed by decades of training in classical music, Mukherjee's range of voice, its depth, sweetness, and, above all, her absolute devotion to music through her life, helped the singer to churn out a wide variety of evergreen film and non-film songs during her marathon musical journey that began during the last years of the British colonial rule.

The argumentative Bengalis can spend hours quarrelling about the comparative greatness of singing legends Hemanta Mukherjee and Manna Dey, actors Uttam Kumar and Soumitra Chatterjee, soccer rivals East Bengal and Mohun Bagan, or political adversaries CPI-M and Trinamool Congress, but all views converge to anoint Mukherjee as the best female voice of all times.

Though her light modern and film songs made Mukherjee a household name in Bengal and East Pakistan (now independent Bangladesh), she retained her proficiency in classical music throughout her career, and would often turn down lucrative offers for recording film songs in the runup to classical music conferences.

"In the run up to music conferences, I don't sing light songs for 15-30 days,” she said later.

Born on October 4, 1931 in a middle class family in South Kolkata's Dhakuria area, Mukherjee's father Narendranath and mother Hemprobha were both music lovers, with the latter adept at tappa (semi-classical vocal).

As a child, she sang devotional songs with her father, and took herfirst formal training under Jamini Ganguly, while Begum Akhtar taught her the use of the tanpura.

Later, she took singing lessons from Pandit Santosh Kumar Basu, Professor A T Kanan, and Professor Chinmoy Lahiri. But Mukherjee always took pride in describing herself as the disciple of the legendary Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan.

After his death, she trained under his son Ustad Munavvar Ali Khan. But before all that, as a 12-year-old, she secured the first position in Bhajan at the All Bengal Music conference, and came up with her first gramophone recording in 1945 - “tomaro akashe jhil mil kore”.

That was the time when the music world had not become commercialised as it is today. “Technically, as also because of the use of modern gadgets, things may have improved. But in those days, a tremendous effort was put to make a song of high quality. Right from the lyricist to the composer, to the singer – everybody used to spend a lot of time behind every song,” she once said.

Mukherjee's debut in films happened with the Bengali-Hindi bilingual Anjangarh, that had Raichand Baral as the music director. She trained for one month before recording the song. However, the first film that released with her playback was Samapika (1948), in which she sang four songs. The songs were well accepted by music lovers. “The public endorsed me as a singer of the future then,” she said at a television interview four decades later.

Impressed with her talent, singer-music director Sachin Dev Burman called her to Bombay (now Mumbai) to sing in Hindi films. In 1950, she started her career in Bollywood with a song in the film Taarana directed by Anil Biswas.

Over the next two years, Mukherjee did playback for 17 Hindi films, but returned to Kolkata in 1952 due to personal reasons. Over the next few years, she sang in Hindi films of fan on, but her focus was on Bengali songs. According to critics, her best known collaboration happened with the Bengal singer Hemanta Mukherjee with whom she sang numerous duets, primarily as playback for Bengali films. Hemanta and Sandhya became known as the voices behind the evergreen silver screen pair Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen. The duet “Ei path jadi na sesh hoi” has retained its popularity till date. She also became the singling voice of almost all other actresses cast opposite Uttam Kumar.

She crooned in over 400 films, and is rated as one of architects in modernising Bengali songs through her easy and spontaneous, but simultaneously soulful, singing style. In the early 1970s, Mukherjee played a key role in aiding the Bangladesh liberation war, by collecting money for the millions of refugees who had poured into the eastern metropolis and other places of Bengal, and also helped in setting up the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendrain Kolkata that played a salient part in the liberation war.

Mukherjee received several awards for her music. She won the National Film Award for Best Female Playback Singer for her songs in the films Jay Jayanti and Nishi Padma in 1970 and the Bengal Film Journalists Association award in 1971 and 1972. The Bharat Nirmaan Award for Lifeitme Achievement followed in 1999.The West Bengal government bestowed on her the state's highest civilian award Banga Bibhushan in 2011, before awarding her the Sangeet Mahasamman.

However, a few days before her death, On January 26 2022 – India's Republic Day – Mukherjee refused to accept the Padma Shri – the country's fourth-highest civilian award. Mukherjee was once asked about the reason behind the evergreen popularity of her songs. “I think, good lyrics, good compositions have permanent appeal,” she replied, with her characteristic humility. (Inputs from UNI)