None in the world has been singing for 82 years. Asha Bhosle, who recorded her first song in 1943 at age 10, is, without doubt, the world’s longest performing singer. And she declares that she is raring to drive to the studio and face the microphone and the orchestra.
She sang this 65 years ago. However, the iconic 1960 song, still hummed at farewell parties, is “….Ke dil abhi bharaa nahin”. She is not about to bid farewell. What is the hurry?
She has outlived global performers: Aretha Franklin (65 years), Tony Bennett (72 years), Dolly Parton (65 years), Umm Kalthum, Nightingale of the Arab world (50 years) and her compatriot P Susheela (70-plus years). Also, Lata Mangeshkar, her elder sister, who logged 73 years of singing before her death in 2022.
But with 12,000 songs, she has a long way to go to reach Lata Didi’s 27,000. On September 8, Asha turned 92. Will she do it?
The two have performed in scores of languages, both Indian and foreign, but mostly Hindi, Hindustani, Bengali and Marathi, their mother tongue. Lata’s language score is 36, which includes Dutch, and Asha has done so in 20.
There is no doubt, however, that their cumulative numbers as singers make them so formidable that nobody is likely to match or surpass them in a single lifetime – world of music, please take note if you haven’t.
Their musical genres include film music, pop, ghazals, bhajans, traditional Indian classical and semi-classical music, folk songs, qawwalis, and Rabindra Sangeet. Arguably, nowhere else in the world has such diversity.
The global music industry, where millions are sung and billions are spent and earned, is a larger story. But the duo’s role as singers remains predominant in India, where numerous others have come, stayed to make music and gone.
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It is unique because they have mostly done playback singing, where they don’t just sing, but match their voices to those performing on the screen. The composition is not only for the singers, but also for the viewer to see. The singer has to excel, guided by the composer, but also facilitate the actor to be heard. This is a point that their listeners, who transcend generations in the last century and this, are likely to miss.
Asha has aptly said that she is part of the transition from theatre to cinema. Her family travelled with father, Deenanath Mangeshkar, a renowned theatre personality, from town to town. That was the only source of entertainment till cinema came. Indeed, cinema’s advent heralded the exit of the travelling theatre across the Indian Subcontinent.
Playback singing becomes the yardstick, since singing per se is one thing, but singing to match the voice of others on the screen and the situation for which it is rendered is quite another.
For nearly a century (95 years, actually, as the Indian cinema went ‘talkie’ with Alam Ara released on March 14, 1931). In whatever language, in its vast diversity, it has stuck to song and playback singing to tell the story on the screen. It may be edited out for brevity at international film festivals, but the audience stays with it.
There are singers, and there are singers, but only India can boast of two sisters with voices to suit the young, of all ages, to leave a permanent mark on playback singing.
Although she began only a year after Lata, Asha grew under the shadow of her formidable sister and took a long time to break out, both as a sibling and a singer. Yet, she has been compared to Lata for decades now. The last word is unlikely in the debate that the discerning listeners engage in, besides singing, in terms of the number of songs, the number of films for which they have sung and the non-filmy music albums they cut, or the awards they won.
Asha began as the underdog to her sister, but more than just held her own, when scores of brothers, sisters, sons and daughters who got typecast as clones and faded out. One is only referring to her two other sisters, Usha and Meena, who chose family lives after their stints in singing.
Asha not only survived but also developed her own style. That survival was essential for a woman with a broken marriage and a single mother bringing up three children. Singer. Mother. Grandmother. Fighter. Survivor – Asha Bhosle is all that.
All along, the “Lata factor” was constant because the composers and filmmakers, if their equations with one faltered, switched to the other. Tempting to call it hegemony, as many persist, but the Mangeshkar-Bhosle factor has remained constant for the music industry.
If Lata was meticulous, even ‘divine’ (“my singing is the gift of God”, she once said), Asha is sensuous and spicy and sings for girls in their teens and twenties. She retains that rare youthful verve at an age that is nothing but advanced. It is at once earthy and come-hither, if songs she has rendered for cabaret dancers and night club singers – for a Helen or a Bindu – are anything to go by. Indeed, along with Geeta Dutt, Asha pioneered crooning for night club dancers. For A R Rahman, Asha sang Tanha tanha yahan pe jeena for Rangeela (1995) when she was 62 years old.
As for the singing style, Lata was as stoic as versatile, while Asha is not afraid to experiment. On her 92nd birthday, Asha rightly claimed: “Whenever musical boundaries were broken, I remained the common thread.”
From Naushad to O P Nayyar and S D Burman to R D Burman to A R Rahman, she has straddled generations of composers. In between, there have been Ravi, Laxmikant Pyarelal, Jaidev and many more. She was supposedly in a relationship with Nayyar, which Lata is said to have resented. And she married R D Burman.
Now, a wet blanket here. It is impossible to name even some of the great songs in this limited space. The effort here has been to depict the role of the Mangeshkars and music in Indian films.
Yet, two instances may suffice. Writing on Asha cannot be complete without a mention of her singing in Umrao Jan (1981). After over four decades, they define the zenith of the careers of not only Asha, but also Rekha for whom she crooned, for Shahryar the lyricist, for Khayyam who composed them and for Muzaffar Ali, the film’s producer-director.
As for Lata, an apt example, not in her voice though, may be a song composed by Ravi for the film Bharosa (1960), showing a love-lorn Asha Parekh. The original “Woh dil kahan se laun teri yaad jo bhulae” is available on YouTube.
But alongside is its rendering by a male voice, Charanji, at a meeting held at a different time in a different situation. The ‘peaceful’ song to mourn the passing away of a friend has many wiping their moist eyes. It is difficult to escape the genuine emotional outpouring.
