Asha Bhosle’s legacy: How her voice became India’s sound of ‘jawaani’

For one or the other the world goes wild—love, or youth. Asha Bhosle first sang those words, written by Anand Bakshi for an R.D. Burman song in Hindi, in 1979. Jiske liye hain, duniya deewani, ya hai mohabbat, ya hai jawaani. That is Zeenat Aman pretending to interpret the song of a Venetian gondolier for Amitabh Bachchan in The Great Gambler. It is Asha Bhosle describing herself and her voice to her listeners. Until very recently, India was a young country, and Asha, who died on 12 April, was the last of a generation of singers whose voices were the soundtrack of youth in India.

To many of her fans, she, more than any of her colleagues, was the vocalised embodiment of jawaani. At the beginning of her career, it was because she herself was very young, set up to rank perpetually second to her older sister, Lata Mangeshkar. This accident of birth framed her legend down to my generation growing up in the 1990s. We all believed that Shabana Azmi, playing a brilliant singer striving to keep up with her elder sister in Sai Paranjpye’s Saaz, was really playing Asha. It was 1997, and Yash Chopra, casting voices for his heroines in Dil To Pagal Hai, was still choosing Lata for stately Madhuri Dixit, and Asha for girlish Karisma Kapoor.

But there must have been something youthful about cinema itself when Asha first recorded a song at age 10 in 1943. It was not yet two decades since cinema acquired sound. Movies were full of clowns and children, magicians and myths. I think of how young Indians were in 1947, the year in which the country went from being a very old civilisation to a very new nation. How unmoored they must have felt, those millions who survived war, starvation, disease and Partition with little to show for it. What a relief it must have been to lose themselves in a medium in which no one acted their age; to tune into Vividh Bharati and muster up the optimism to dream about popular cinema’s chief value proposition, mohabbat (and jawaani).

That proposition changed, and India changed. But its fans formed an astonishingly stable consensus down the generations, about how good, how special and how fun film music could be. Through the fading of Radio Ceylon and the privatisation of FM radio, down to Doordarshan’s Sunday morning music parade, which gave way to cable TV countdown shows, we have arrived at the stage of conspicuous consumption where our retirement presents to elders are MP3 players mocked up to look like radios. On all these platforms, Aaiye Meherbaan has always been playing. The children of the people who watched Teesri Manzil in the theatres learned the words to O Mere Sona Re on MTV India.

Nor was this fascination confined to the music of the early decades of commercial cinema.

All my family elders who were alive to hear my personal favourite Asha song, Tanha Tanha from Rangeela (1995), understood why it was cool even if it was, for its time, scandalous. That was okay. It was Asha Bhosle.

That space of mutual understanding will shrink in tandem with her absence. We live in the age of the algorithm, divided, among other things, by media fragmentation. We are not streaming the same things as each other, and when we hear each other’s music, it is in intrusive snatches—before we close the window on street processions, before we turn away as someone scrolls through their phone without headphones on the train carriage.

My last Asha earworm, from a few weeks ago, happened to be the 1960 qawwali Na Toh Karvaan Ki Talaash Hai, originally composed by Roshan and written by Sahir Ludhianvi. Their song prominently features the voices of Asha and Sudha Malhotra, women matching and debating the mighty Manna Dey and Mohammed Rafi. A newly viral version from last year’s blockbuster Dhurandhar features an all-male ensemble singing about lone-wolf aggression, a deliberate subversion of the original. In 1960 it was a song about ecstatic togetherness, breaking the boundaries that segregated genders and religions. As the last of her peer group to pass away, Asha has perhaps outlived the generational consensus about the power of their music.

On the Sunday afternoon of Asha Bhosle’s death my first thought was predictably about Lata Mangeshkar, the genius who could bring prime ministers to tears. In orderly and sequential fashion I proceeded to the contrast of her brand of virtue with all the fun that Asha brought into the lives of my Malayali grandparents, who learned their comically haphazard Hindi from film songs; and my Bombay-born parents, who must have listened to Dum Maaro Dum in 1971 through whatever contraband means they could find after it was banned from the airwaves for promoting immorality. From their era-spanning fandom, I also learned to love the past, not with the insatiable hunger of nostalgia, but with something like the clarity of reason as I recognised the ways in which they animate the present, and my own world.

There is some historical grounding to the contrast between Lata and Asha, but really, the two sisters had repertoires so vast that they were as similar as not. Lata sang some of the most fun songs in Hindi movie history, and Asha’s ability to invoke jawaani was the result of her titanic training, and a discipline as austere as her sister’s. It is in the spirit, if not quite the tradition, of classical music in which you are a disciple forever.

Asha’s association with sprightly youth had no chance to stagnate in her own lifetime. That appeal across generations was possible because the music as well as her voice, changing, ageing, almost but not quite wavering with the years, held the possibility of endless renewal. Legacies can decay, but they can also hold the seeds of their revival in them, especially when they contain as much joy as the music of our movies once did.

To be jawaan is not just to be young. It is to grow out of childhood and into complexity. I understand, as my elders must have done in their own time, that mohabbat and jawaani, the conditions of a life in full bloom, are matters for grown-ups.

Supriya Nair is a writer and editor from Mumbai. She works for the Godrej DEI Lab and the Godrej Foundation.