How Asha Bhosle broke boundaries from Bollywood to the Kronos Quartet

Around 2005 I walked into the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. I was a little nervous. I had after much back and forth with the organisers snagged a face-to-face interview with a living legend—Asha Bhosle. She was collaborating with the renowned Kronos Quartet, recreating some of R.D. Burman’s classic songs with them for a new album, You’ve Stolen My Heart, an unusual choice for Kronos who usually works with the composer.

I had seen Asha Bhosle in the flesh once decades before. We were on a family vacation in Shimla. One day a guest walked over to the piano in the lobby and casually played a few notes. My mother said in hushed tones “Do you know who that is? It’s Asha Bhosle.” I was just a little kid. I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. I wanted to go ride horses.

This time I knew who she was. And was utterly in awe of her and painfully aware of my lack of musical chops.

Then I spotted her in the hotel lobby. She was in a sari and socks, her slippers going flip-flap on the polished floor. “You are Bengali?” she said with a smile. “I can cook fish very well.”

I was the rare Bengali who disliked fish curry but I didn’t let on. I had bigger fish to fry. I was worried about how I would explain a phenomenon like Asha Bhosle to an audience that didn’t grow up with her songs.

David Harrington, the founder of the Kronos Quartet, tried to explain the magic of R.D. Burman and Asha Bhosle in terms westerners would understand.

“As an orchestrator I’d put (Burman) in the same sentence as say Stravinsky or Debussy. As a melodist I would put him in the same sentence as as Schubert or Mahler or George Gershwin.” He was aware that most of his audience had never heard of Burman or Asha, a singer blessed with a voice he described as breathtakingly instrumental, at one moment sounding like a trumpet and at another like a violin. He said their album together, with beloved classics like Dum Maro Dum and little-known songs like Nodir Paare, was “an opportunity to introduce our audience to a Stravinsky-like figure on one hand and to an Elvis-like figure on the other.”

As I looked at Asha in the hotel lobby all I could just think was—a rather grandmotherly Elvis.

She knew it too. Harrington said after one of the takes where she did a particularly sexy turn of phrase, she looked over at him, winked and said, “Not bad for a grandma.”

Listening to him I began to understand why though Lata Mangeshkar was the bigger name in India, Asha translated a little better abroad. It was that knowing wink.

Ashu Rai, the DJ at the popular New York City Desilicious dance party told me Asha’s songs from Jawani Jaan-e-man to Rang De were always among the most requested numbers. Her music appealed to every desi demographic, Rai said: “Queer and straight, young and old, gay and lesbian, Pakistani/Indian/Indo-Caribbean, drag queens and muscle boys, butch girls and femmes.”

This is not to reduce Asha’s formidable talent to cabaret songs and catchy item numbers. Lata was the gold standard. Her white sari, the hint of diamonds, the carefully airbrushed life story, the crystalline purity of her voice all embodied an immigrant’s yearning for a homeland left behind, its memory preserved reverentially in amber. When I saw Lata in concert, she parked herself in one corner of the stage and never moved, as she sang song after song, like a jukebox wrapped in white silk. Asha flounced around the stage, told stories, flirted, chuckled and even had a costume change. She too was about nostalgia for the homeland but her story was also about new beginnings, which is very much part of every immigrant’s story. “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.”

Asha told me about how she had to eat humble pie when she left the man she had married against her family’s wishes and came home, a young mother with two young children in tow and pregnant with the third. She said it was hard to swallow her pride and come back to her mother. “A mother is a mother—she will always take her child back,” she said. Then she smiled and said, “Though of course she never stopped reminding me ‘See, didn’t I tell you?’”

When asked whether tongues wagged when she married the much younger Burman, a 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.

Perhaps some of that life experience seeped into her music. All I know is that in India I loved Lata. But when I went to America I understood Asha a little better.

A few years ago when I watched her perform in Kolkata, her voice well past its prime, I wondered why she kept doing it. Then I remembered she had told me, “What is retirement? It is death.” And so she kept going not because she had anything left to prove but because she was genuinely curious. Recently she collaborated with the British band Gorillaz on the song The Shadowy Light.

At one time I thought her experiments with singers like Boy George and Michael Stipe and Brett Lee were hit-and-miss attempts to cross over to the west. At that time it was hard to talk about Bollywood in the west without using adjectives like kitschy and campy. 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. She, like us, had gone outside the safe space. And like us, she had the scars to show for it. But also some great stories. The New York Times describes her voice as “distinctive and adventurous.” It is right. Listening to Asha always felt like an adventure. As Kumar reminded me, “Many have tried to imitate Lata and some have come close. But no one has tried to imitate Asha because no one can.”

It’s because Asha 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 sari 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 Vol. 1 at the local Tower Records at a time when the only Indian music usually available there was Ravi Shankar and Bhangra. I would play it on loop at my home in San Francisco, chopping onions in the kitchen while she sang Bhanwara bada nadan hai from the living room. I understand now her voice didn’t transport me to India. It brought India to my kitchen in San Francisco. There’s a difference.

She somehow, with a smile and a wink, gave us the ijaazat to just be ourselves.

Sandip Roy is a Lounge columnist.