S Janaki, Nightingale of South Indian cinema, falls silent | Tamil News
Long before her songs in various languages became a soundtrack to the lives of many, Sistala Janaki, or S Janaki as she was popularly known, was a young girl in Pallapatla, a small village south of Guntur in Andhra Pradesh, where the crackle of a boxy radio carried dreams from distant spaces. Janaki would sit by the family radio, captivated by Lata Mangeshkar’s songs. “Lata was my first guru,” she famously said later. Those evenings by the radio in the ’40s and ’50s planted the seeds for a remarkable career, one that would span nearly six decades and transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. Even with her deep admiration for Mangeshkar, Janaki forged a singing style that was entirely her own. It led her to find her own path and her own journey to become the ‘nightingale of South India’ and one of its most beloved voices. S Janaki, who recorded over 40,000 songs in multiple languages, including Tamil, Odiya, Bengali, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada and Hindi among others, died at a private hospital in Mysuru on …
