ety at large -- was saturated with prejudice, hypocrisy and factionism -- and Asha Bhosle had tacitly been branded a fallen woman. It certainly didn't help when the closest comparable rival was her own sister, the ethereal Miss Lata Mangeshkar. Soon, choice assignments were withdrawn, and a conspiracy of silence manifested itself into Aai's musical career... But, if anyone so much as suggested something to alleviate the situation, you could bank on Asha Bhosle to do the opposite. After more than a decade of suppression, and of keeping the shame of her squalid married life from her family and colleagues, she simply revelled in her absolute freedom. What still fascinates me is the total honesty and fearlessness with which she lived, as if to say, "My life is an open book, make of it what you will."
It's accepted that one needs to humanise a hero in order to understand and truly appreciate him; the corollary to which may be that an idol admitting to be made entirely of clay, as they all must be, is soon relegated to the tar-pits. Whatever others may say, I'm convinced that her being typecast by music directors as the perennial cabaret/ mujra/ qawwali singer is a fallout of her early life. I'm not quite qualified to comment on music, but one fact is undeniable -- like any other extraordinary singer, she excelled in all genres, but Hindi film-makers were ticklish about giving their on-screen epitomes of Indian womanhood the voice of this rather camp personality. If the character was 'westernised', her voice was that of Asha. And this label stuck just at the time when the most memorable music was being composed for the Indian heroine.
Curiously, the Marathi, Bengali and Gujarati music industries were totally unaffected by any of these tags: some of h ..... |
