There are singers who belong to an era, and then there is Asha Bhosle, who treated decades like passing trends she would dip into and then outdo. A vocal sponge, Bhosle was soaking up the pop and jazz greats long before the internet made it easy. “I used to watch Carmen Miranda a lot and try to imitate her style,” she had said in an interview, “like I did later with Shirley Bassey.“ Tucked into voluminous saris, the Asha tai who loved dishing out her signature ‘Maa ki Dal’ and jaggery kheer was the same woman who wat-ched Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock three times just to nail the phrasing for ‘Eena Meena Deeka’; who received a letter from the Vatican for her rendition of ‘Ave Maria’; and became the first Indian singer to form a pop group overseas in Britain, the West India Company, in the 1980s. At a time when playback voices in India were still neatly boxed – classical, romantic, devotional – Bhosle was slipping between them. Trained in Hindustani classical music, she said, “If you have the desire and riyaz… you can sing anything.” She wandered into cabaret, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, and global pop long before the industry had quite figured out what to call any of it.
The turning point, as many stories go, arrived with the Burmans. S D Burman first showed her how to add her own ‘inputs’ to a track to make it work, but it was with R D Burman it started taking root when the duo would sit up until 4am listening to jazz and rock. When he handed her ‘Aaja Aaja’ for Teesri Manzil, she is said to have balked at its Westernised swagger. This wasn’t a tune you could approach like a ghazal. It needed breathless phrasing and a loose shrug. Ten days of rehearsal later, she owned it so completely that it now sounds like it was always hers. That became a pattern. Whether it was the smokey, rhythmic breathing of ‘Piya Tu Ab Toh Aaja’ or the pop-ballad ease of ‘Chura Liya Hai,’ Bhosle could adjust her vocal cords to match every mood. By the 1990s, when ‘crossover’ became a buzzword, she was already living it. “I told my son Anand, I’ve sung in practically every Indian language but I haven’t done English,” she said of her jump into the West India Company. It was a leap into the unknown that would have terrified a lesser artist. “Although the music was ready, there was no fixed tune to sing. I had created my own tune and melody,” she said about merging Indian vocals with Western club rh-ythms and electronic music. This ability to improvise allowed her to record ‘Bow Down Mister’ with Boy George, where Indian devotional strains met synth-heavy pop. It could have been a gimmick. Instead, it sounded like a natural extension of what she had alw-ays done with unaffected ease. At 64, she stepped into the centre of the MTV glare. She teamed up with Code Red for the ballad ‘We Can Make It’ and appeared in a music video, matching the boy band and their R&B groove with her silk sari and alaaps. Soon after, she appeared on ‘The Way You Dream’ with REM’s Michael Stipe for his project ‘1 Giant Leap’, a track that drifted into Hollywood with the 2003 action-comedy film ‘Bulletproof Monk’. Bhosle did not so much cross over from East to West as meet it, on equal terms. Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ turned her into a cultural reference point, later remixed by Fatboy Slim. Black Eyed Peas sampled her in ‘Don’t Phunk with My Heart’, tucking her voice into 2000s hip-hop. Sarah Brightman lifted ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai’ into operatic pop. In 2005, the Kronos Quartet built an album around her, ‘You’ve Stolen My Heart’. She recorded the R D Burman classics with such velocity – three to four songs a day – the quartet struggled to keep up. It earned her a Grammy nomination. Even in later years, she seemed game for unlikely pairings, whether it was a duet wi-th cricketer Brett Lee to collaborations with Pakistani pop si-nger Jawad Ahmed that igno-red the politics of the moment. Which brings us to 2026. Bhosle, well into her nineties, recording ‘The Shadowy Light’ from her Pedder Road home for the genre-blurring British virtual band Gorillaz – her voice against a swirl of hip-hop, dub and electronica, with an old harmonium in the mix – in what would be her final collaboration.
