S Janaki, the playback singer whose voice carried South Indian cinema through six decades and roughly 20 languages, died on Saturday at Apollo BGS Hospitals in Mysuru after suffering multiple cardiac arrests. She was 88. For an artist known as “Janaki Amma” to generations of listeners who never met her, the tributes flowing in today read less like obituaries and more like a chorus of gratitude, for a voice that, as one composer once put it, could sound like a child, a bride or a grandmother in a single song. Born Sistla Janaki on 23 April 1938 in Pallapatla, a village in Guntur district of what is now Andhra Pradesh, Janaki grew up with little in the way of formal classical training. Her early grounding came from a local nadaswaram player, Paidiswamy, who noticed her talent when she was still a child performing on makeshift stages. She got her first real public break in 1956, winning second place in an All India Radio light-music competition and receiving her prize from the President of India, a …