After a Kannada message about getting the caller tune, you hear her newest Malayalam song —Manogatham Bhavan from Anuraga Karikkin Vellam. Mathangi Jagdish, the voice of the song, picks up and speaks in racy English. Not that she is in a hurry, her words are just in the habit of jumping out like that. But the speed disappears when she sings and takes control. Manogatham is only the second song she sings in a Malayalam movie but Mathangi has to her record about 475 film songs in various South Indian languages, mostly in Tamil.
“My first Malayalam song was Ragasudha for the film Seethakalyanam. That was about a decade ago,” Mathangi says in a telephone interview. She also used to host a show for Rosebowl channel and would come to Thiruvananthapuram every three months.
But then Malayalam is still not a language that comes easily to her. She was born in Kolkata, raised in Delhi, been in Chennai and now in Bengaluru. But when she sang Manogatham for Prashant Pillai, Mathangi made sure she knew what syllables to stress and what not to. “I had help from a Malayali sound engineer called Lijesh because I was in Chennai and Prasanth was in Kerala.” Prasanth had worked with Mathangi earlier for a bilingual film called Andhra Mess that came out in Hindi and Tamil. She sang the song Nittham Sittham in Tamil and also its Hindi version — Shiddath Qurbath.
Even as she talks about the song, Mathangi sings her lines the different ways she could have sung it, classically. “It’s based on Raga Shyaama and Aarabhi,” she says. Mathangi has been learning classical music — Carnatic, Hindustani and Western — since she was a child and when it comes to film songs, Mathangi doesn't restrict herself to any genre. "I am lucky that I have not been typecast. There will be one style cutting into another, most of the time. It can be Carnatic, or western pop.”
She has worked with the Tamil music legends AR Rahman and Ilayaraja. One of her most popular songs remains ‘X Macchi Y Macchi’. She was featured in Coke Studio Season 1 and toured with them through several cities to perform live. Ma.Ja, as she is known, also has her original songs coming out. She had a recording for Kappa TV’s Music Mojo with originals like ‘Swingin like a Pendulum’, that she wrote, composed and sang, inspired from her life.
