Ashwin Walke retweetledi
Asha Bhosle was cast out by her own family at 16. She’d eloped with her elder sister Lata Mangeshkar’s secretary, a man twice her age. The marriage turned abusive. She walked out with two children and a third on the way, returning to a family that barely wanted her back.
To survive, she took every recording job the top singers rejected. In Indian cinema, actors don’t sing their own songs. Singers record in a studio, and the actors lip-sync on camera. In the 1950s, the big films went to established voices. Bhosle got the leftovers: B-grade soundtracks, cabaret numbers, songs for the villain’s girlfriend. Between 1948 and 1957, she recorded more songs than any other singer in the country, but almost none of them mattered.
Her break came from composer O.P. Nayyar, who gave her the lead songs in Naya Daur (1957). For the first time, she was the voice of the heroine. By the mid-1960s, she’d partnered with a young composer named R.D. Burman. Their first major collaboration nearly didn’t happen. When Bhosle heard the westernized dance number “Aaja Aaja” for Teesri Manzil (1966), she told Burman she couldn’t sing it. He offered to rewrite the music. She refused, rehearsed for ten days, and delivered one of the decade’s biggest hits. That professional partnership became a marriage in 1980. Burman died in 1994.
In 1981, composer Khayyam asked her to sing two notes lower than usual for the film Umrao Jaan. The ghazals (traditional Urdu love songs) she recorded won her India’s National Film Award and shattered the idea that she could only do pop. At 62, she recorded the Rangeela soundtrack with A.R. Rahman. At 79, she made her debut as a film actress.
Guinness World Records certified her in 2011 as the most recorded artist in music history. She put out over 11,000 songs in more than 20 languages across eight decades, and no other recording artist on Earth has come close.
Her voice crossed borders in ways almost no Indian artist had before. Cornershop wrote “Brimful of Asha” about her in 1997, and a Fatboy Slim remix sent it to No. 1 in the UK. The Black Eyed Peas sampled her vocals. The Kronos Quartet, a classical string ensemble, recorded an album of R.D. Burman compositions with her and earned a Grammy nomination. Earlier this year, at 92, she appeared on a Gorillaz track.
She outlived the people closest to her. Her daughter Varsha died in 2012 at 56. Her son Hemant died of cancer in 2015. Her sister Lata, the most famous singer in Indian history, died in 2022, also at 92. After Varsha’s death, Bhosle told reporters the pain would stay with her until her last breath, but added: “You should always laugh with others but cry alone.”
Asha Bhosle died today in Mumbai at 92. She recorded her first song at 10, her last collaboration at 92, and spent the 82 years in between proving that the woman they once threw out could outlast every voice that came before or after her.
Narendra Modi@narendramodi
भारतातील सर्वात ख्यातनाम आणि अष्टपैलू आवाजांपैकी एक असलेल्या आशा भोसले जी यांच्या निधनाने अतिशय दुःख झाले. त्यांच्या अनेक दशकांच्या अद्वितीय संगीत प्रवासाने आपल्या सांस्कृतिक वारशाला समृद्ध केले आणि जगभरातील असंख्य लोकांच्या मनाला स्पर्श केला. भावपूर्ण गीतांपासून ते जोशपूर्ण संगीत रचनांपर्यंत, त्यांच्या आवाजात कालातीत तेज होते. त्यांच्याशी झालेल्या संवादांच्या आठवणी मी सदैव जपून ठेवेन. त्यांच्या कुटुंबीयांना, चाहत्यांना आणि संगीतप्रेमींना माझ्या भावपूर्ण संवेदना. त्या पुढील पिढ्यांना प्रेरणा देत राहतील आणि त्यांची गाणी सदैव लोकांच्या आयुष्यात गुंजत राहतील.
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