Indian cinema is often a strange animal. Unlike in practically every major film industry where actors are trained into a wide range of skills including music and dance, actors here often stumble into our screens without such education. Playback singing is the Indian response to this peculiar problem. And S. Janaki was the finest product of that response.In terms of both proficiency and longevity, Janaki is comparable only to Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhonsle. Yet there is a loud silence among both cultural commentators and the larger Indian film industries at the passing of one of its legends. Even tributes and reports that do exist eulogise her as the ‘Nightingale of South India,’ as if to caveat her immense talents by her regionalism. At the same time, the official handle of the President of India identifies her through her work in Hindi, Tulu, Urdu, Punjabi, and Bengali, without a mention of her tall contributions to Southern music. The ongoing silence raises uncomfortable questions on how ‘regional’ cultural icons have always been otherised and pushed to the margins – in fact, Janaki rejected an extremely belated Padma award for the same reason. It also undermines and refuses to recognise the impact that Janaki’s career had on the South. The Mangeshkar sisters are often analysed as representing two different images of Indian women. Lata lent her voice to the pure and the pedestalised woman while Asha sang for and to the warts-and-all, urban woman and her corporeal desires. Such a dichotomous tension simply did not exist for Janaki. She was the consummate singer-performer, possessing a rare dexterity that allowed her voice to not simply sing but perform characters of all shades. In Nagu Endhidhe (Pallavi Anu Pallavi 1983), there is a lovely, wordless vocalisation. One can sense the anxieties of a single mother, laced with the sweetness of finding joy in her son. Consider her also in Oho Megham Vandhadho from Mouna Ragam (1986). The context is this: the female protagonist is being coaxed into an arranged marriage.Instead of going home straight after college to meet her prospective groom, she runs away with her friends. She becomes one with the uncontrollable rain.Janaki lends her voice to the unbridled joy of the girl-woman, at once playful and confident, singing and mocking: naan penaanuthu, kalyanam thedava? (Did I become a woman only to search for a husband?) One notices the same assuredness in Roja Poo Aadivanthathu (Agni Natchathiram, 1988) where the lilt in her voice matches the jazzy beats to which a young, smitten Amala dances in leotards and a one-piece. There is such deliciousness with which she enunciates the first word in the line daagam theruma (will this thirst be quenched?) She sings in a low register, almost as if she were uttering a secret, revelling in the knowledge that only she is aware of it.But Janaki is also the young village belle, Panchavarnam in Thevar Magan (1992) who, through by chance and circumstance, is married off to an anglicised punk (played by Kamal Haasan). She is the diametric opposite of her husband’s chic westernised ex-girlfriend whom he still pines for. She is aware of this. Janaki in Inji Iduppazhagi, a song where she and her husband finally begin to speak in the same language, elevates Revathi’s performance as the woman whose voice, with touching naivety, breaks into a husk at the touch of her husband’s hand on hers. She would take the malleability in her song to the extreme in Kanna Nee Engae (1980), a song that she also composed and wrote the lyrics for. Here, she sings for a child, complete with the mushy diction and raspy gurgle of a toddler.The sheer plasticity in her voice was reflected in her masterful command over the South Indian languages. It is this talent of belonging to so many languages that made Janaki the undisputed female voice – in its happiness, gloom, heartbreak, and anger – for us. Lata Mangeshkar may have ruled the North, but Janaki owned the South. Utterly and completely. Her regionalism had the effect of not limiting her talent, but in cementing its impact.I remember a particular weekend morning. I opened my eyes to see the corridor lights seep through the ventilators and into the hostel room. The lights had been switched on by the janitor, the ayyahamma. She was on her morning rounds, mopping the floor and clearing the dustbins that had been stuffed overnight with boxes of fast-food chains. Her phone was set to a decent volume; it played a song that I have heard about a hundred, maybe two hundred times before. Sendhoora poove sendhoora poove, a joyous voice crooned as my mind conjured the image of a teenage Sri Devi perched on a tree with a thousand blossoms. For a few brief moments as I lay there listening to that voice, my de-contextualised, somewhat culturally uprooted University turned into something resembling home.A bilingual daughter of Tamil and Kannada parents (with a dash of Malayalam thrown in somewhere), I am now educated and civilised in English. As a child, I would be asked: do you like Kannada more or Tamil more? I have spent my life trying to answer that question. In a country where language is so deeply emotive and polarised, any kind of ambiguity in identity dirties our conception of belonging. Yet, when I listen to Janaki, my anxieties dissolve. Along with her beloved collaborator S.P. Balasubrahmanyam, Janaki presents a kind of aural home for me. My playlist switches between Janaki’s Kannada and Tamil songs, just as I switch between the two languages in my home, sometimes in the same sentence. As is the experience of acquaintances with me, you could never work out her identity. Her voice meandered between the Southern languages — the slippery zha of Tamil and Malayalam, the roundedness of Telugu and Kannada — with the intimacies of a native. She also took my hand and also introduced me to my sister languages, that is Telugu and Malayalam. These are languages with which I am fairly unfamiliar, but her voice has comforted me enough to find meaning and solace even in them. As late as last year, several of us listened to Kiliye Kiliye where her voice was remixed to Afrobeats by The Independeners. I am not alone in my disappointment with the lack of recognition given to Janaki on her passing. But perhaps her gifts to us are too crystallised for them to be troubled by considerations of validation. I imagine when I have children of my own, I would play Thumbi Vaa for them. It does not matter that I am not really a Malayalee – it is a Janaki song and that is all that matters. As we mourn the past that slips like sand between our fingers, I am consoled by the fact that there are generations ahead of us who will find a sense of home and refuge in her voice. Such is the force of Janaki. Niveditha K. Prasad is a graduate of the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru and founding editor, The Last DVD.