Remembering Asha Bhosle: To be like the legendary Indian singer was to be a cool girl

BENGALURU – The death of legendary Indian singer Asha Bhosle on April 12 has led to an entire country listening to her music on loop.

But I need no such reminders of her brilliance. I need only to recall a mortifying public moment in my college years when I truly realised Asha’s genre-defying talents.

I was trying out for Channel V’s Popstars, a show on the hunt for members of India’s first girl band. It was 2002. I was 19, with all the required free time, gusto and overconfidence to join the audition.

Led by youthful conceit, I had picked a Bollywood super hit sung by Asha to showcase my vocal chops and devil-may-care pop star attitude. It was an oldie: Piya Tu Ab To Aaja (Lover, Come To Me Now), from the 1971 Hindi film Caravan.

The number was composed, sung, choreographed and shot to dazzle. It was only when I tanked in front of the judges that I realised how impossibly difficult it was – and what a true genius Asha was.

I began well enough. As I crooned the opening lines “Piya tuuuu...”, the preoccupied judges raised their heads and smiled.

But by the next line, it was all over.

When the drums begin, Asha joins in with a breathy “ah-ha huh-huh-huh” in a superb rhythm of inhales and exhales. My version in the audition made the judges suppress a giggle. I completed the song in all professionalism, my ego drowning with every passing second, and with it, my admiration for Asha peaking.

At the end, when I stood in a pool of shame, Shubha Mudgal, a classical singer and one of the judges, asked me: “Would you like to try a Lata Mangeshkar song instead?”

Generous as the offer was, it exasperated me.

Lata Mangeshkar was Asha’s sister, a legend of musical virtuosity who ruled Hindi cinema for decades. Known as the Nightingale of India, she won national awards, and ended up defining the ideal Hindi female playback singer as the high-pitched soprano, as she herself was. She influenced two generations of female singers, and aspiring vocalists even today pray at her altar.

Both singing sisters were unrivalled.

But for decades, Lata was usually the voice of the traditional woman and leading lady in Indian cinema, while her little sister Asha often voiced the playful songs of the vamp, the moll and the modern heroine.

Music-loving Indians often split themselves into Lata fans and Asha fans. Lata was revered, Asha was loved. To be a Lata was to be a good girl, and to be an Asha was to be a cool girl.

It computes then I had always secretly wanted to be an Asha. Even though my parents, both beautiful singers, encouraged their eldest daughter to deify Lata.

Asha had struggled in the Hindi film industry initially, singing for B-grade movies. She gradually came into her own by collaborating with composers Ravi Shankar Sharma, O.P. Nayyar and finally R.D. Burman, a young, wild musician who redefined Indian music, and whom she would later marry.

Unlike other singers who performed sultry cabaret songs, Asha gave the glamorous girls in films sass but also preserved their dignity. No wonder a superstar actress like Madhubala once had a contractual stipulation that only Asha voiced her songs, such as Aaiye Meherbaan, and renowned actress Helen was said to have visited the recording studio to observe the way Asha sang before she choreographed the number.

Asha’s explosive short notes, swimming long notes, scale changes, scatting and vibrato borrowed from Western and Eastern styles. She crafted her own sound, heightening the mischief in songs like Chhod Do Aanchal and unearthing the feminine maturity of a courtesan singing the ghazal Dil Cheez Kya Hai.

Her life choices were as unconventional as her musical career. At 16, she had eloped with her sister’s 31-year-old secretary Ganpatrao Bhosle, after which Lata – who remained single – disowned her for years. When the husband became abusive, Asha left him to raise three children as a single mother.

She then had a storied romance with Burman and married him in 1980. She was 47, and he, 40. They lived separately, allegedly owing to his heavy drinking and smoking, but remained married till his death in 1994.

In the 1990s, she adapted herself for a movie industry transforming in post-liberalisation India. At 62, she recalibrated her voice for a heroine one-third her age in A.R. Rahman’s first Hindi album, Rangeela (1995).

To a Tamil speaker like me, Asha is among the few north Indian singers in the 1990s to nail the pronunciation of Tamil lyrics. It tickles me that she actually says “Saptumber maadham” for September, as someone with a Tamil accent would, in Rahman’s song from the movie Alai Payuthey.

Asha’s voice also crossed borders. English indie rock band Cornershop wrote Brimful Of Asha in 1997 as a tribute to “our queen”, and a remix of the song by English DJ Fatboy Slim topped the UK charts. Black Eyed Peas sampled her Aye Naujawan Hai Sab Kuchh Yahan in Don’t Phunk With My Heart.

In 2006, she recorded You’re The One For Me with Australian cricketer Brett Lee, appearing in the music video in her sari and bindi, a flower in her hair – as she always dressed.

Her last collaboration was with English band Gorillaz, earlier in 2026, at the age of 92.

She captured desire, abandon and grandeur in her songs – and life – like no other Indian artiste. In a tribute, Bollywood’s current top singer Shreya Ghoshal called her “limitless”.

I spent years fearing that Channel V would air my faux pas in a montage of comical auditions. But now, I wish I had the video clip, if only to relive the gut-wrenching awe I felt in that moment for Asha Bhosle, a singer whom millions love but almost no one can match.