It’s impossible to imagine Indian cinema without the crystalline, four-octave voice of Lata Mangeshkar. Since her breakthrough as a playback singer (dubbing songs for the characters onscreen) in the late 1940s, Mangeshkar, who died in February 2022 at the age of 92, recorded thousands of songs over the following decades, making her one of Bollywood's most prolific and revered female artists and earning her the nickname “the Nightingale of India.” While she was particularly active during the ’50s and ’60s, when local music had not yet experienced massive Western influence and was rooted in the traditional Indian styles of ghazal and bhajan, she worked extensively through the 2000s, and in 2001 was honored with the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award. Explore her extraordinary range in this playlist of some of her finest work.