Sometime in 2005 I walked into a hotel in San Francisco to meet the Elvis Presley of Indian music.
That’s how David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet had tried to explain the power and charisma of Asha Bhosle, one of the two singing sisters who had ruled Indian film songs for decades.
But this Elvis was a little grandmotherly, a woman in her late 70s, a cardigan wrapped around her sari, in socks and slippers, going flip flap on the polished floor of the Fairmont Hotel.
But when she sang with Kronos Quartet for their album You’ve Stolen My Heart she didnt sound grandmotherly at all.
ASHA1:
Asha Bhosle just died in India. Aged 92. 12,000 plus songs in her kitty and still recording. Most recently at 90 plus with the British Band Gorillaz and Kronos Quartet again,
HARD RAIN
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata.
Much has been written about Asha Bhosle. How she started her career in the 1940s to support her family. A single mother raising three children. The music industry was ruled by her older sister Lata Mangeshkar with a voice of crystalline purity.
LATA
Asha tried to carve out her niche with songs that were peppier, sexier, cabaret songs, songs that the bad girls sang on screen.
CABARET SONG
And sometimes, though rarely, they sang together
ASHA AND LATA
But while Lata was the more famous sister in India, Asha was the one who translated a little better abroad. “Lata is impossibly perfect, pure,” Arvind Kumar, the founding editor of India Currents magazine in California told me. “But Asha I can relate to - the one that has lived life, made mistakes, fallen down and gotten up again.”
When I watched her on stage in California, sure there nostalgia for the homeland but her story was also about new beginnings which is very much part of every immigrant’s story.
When asked whether tongues wagged when she married the composer Rahul Dev Burman, a younger man who had once taken her autograph as a fan, she said “People are always shocked. If I did not marry him and instead went around with him, they would say how bad I was. When I married him, they said ‘She married him!’ What is one to do? People don’t like it if you live honestly.” For many of us who had left India hoping we could be freer to follow our hearts in a country where no one knew our names (or our fathers’ names) her candour felt liberating.
Their combination was magical. That’s why when Kronos Quartet wanted to explore the music of iconic composer R D Burman who was dead by then they chose to do it with some of the songs his wife Asha had sung for him.
It was said David Harringon an opportunity to introduce our audience to a Stravinsky-like figure on one hand and to an Elvis-like figure on the other
ASHA 2
Long before collaborating with the Kronos Quartet in San Francisco, she had worked with cricketer Brett Lee, rock icon Michael Stipe and pop star Boy George
BOY GEORGE
When I asked her about why she decided to re-record some of her most famous songs with Kronos Quartet she said “It’s a new experiment for me. It’s a chance to go outside our boundaries.” That’s a sentiment most immigrants can relate to. Asha was never an immigrant. But she was brave enough to go outside her boundaries to try and discover new worlds.
Asha Bhosle could constantly surprise us. Harrington remembered how regal she looked the first time he met her in a beautiful sari, her diamonds sparkling. “Then I looked down and saw the Queen of Bollywood was wearing tennis shoes. I thought ‘I love this woman.’”
It is this utterly practical combination of saree and tennis shoes that made her such an icon to those of us who struggled to build new lives and new identities in far away places.
I remember buying a CD of Golden Hits of Asha Bhosle Vol. 1 at the local Tower Records at a time when the only Indian music available there was Ravi Shankar and Bhangra. I would play it on a loop at my home in San Francisco, chopping onions in the kitchen while she sang in my living room. I understand now her voice didn’t transport me to India. It brought India to my kitchen in San Francisco.
I’ll miss her.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW
ASHA3 OR HARD RAIN?