OP Nayyar had made Asha the leading lady’s voice in Naya Daur in 1957, after the singer had spent several years struggling to shrug off the bad girl persona she had been stuck with. But it was Burman who gave her an unmistakable contemporaneity with ‘Piya Tu Ab To Aaja’ in Caravan (also directed by Nasir Hussain) in 1971, in a cabaret shot on Helen, in a nightclub that screamed early cosmopolitanism with its Big Ben like clock tower, flamingoes by the side and the Bombay skyline behind her.
Both Caravan and Yaadon Ki Baaraat celebrated a mobile young India, which seemed more at ease with the world and everything it had to offer. And Asha epitomised it in her voice, which literally breathed freedom and liberty, shattering the binary between the good girl and the bad girl, enabling the heroines of the 1960s and 1970s to demand love with confidence and a certain coquettishness.
In a career that began in 1943 and spanned 12,000 songs, Asha created a cosmopolitan voice that embodied the emerging Indian woman. She was the soundscape to generations that wanted to be Asha Parekh as she seduced a recalcitrant Shammi Kapoor with ‘O Mere Sona Re’, fluttering eyelashes, tight churidar, and faux innocent smile in Vijay Anand’s Teesri Manzil (1966) with music by RD Burman. She was the voice our parents pretended didn’t exist as she breathed her way through ‘Dum Maro Dum’, picturised on a chillum-smoking Janice played by Zeenat Aman in Hare Rama Hare Krishna in 1971. And she was the voice our children heard in ‘Tanha Tanha’ in 1995, picturised on another Marathi woman who symbolised earthy sensuality, Urmila Matondkar, in Rangeela.
If Lata Mangeshkar, her elder sister, symbolised prim, proper, socialist India, Asha Bhosle was the personification of an India trying to break away from the shackles of the past. It was her own past as well, of a difficult marriage with an abusive man, life as a single mother with three children, her early struggles trying to establish herself, and the loss of two children, one to a suicide and another to cancer. She didn’t ever endorse Sai Paranjpye’s 1997 film, Saaz, but the story captures an essence of her relationship with Lata in the story of Mansi and Bansi, two singing sisters who, despite their love for each other, seem forever in competition, or as the film called it, a “healthy rivalry”.
ASHA’S TRANSFORMATION into the voice of the leading lady began in BR Chopra’s 1957 movie, Naya Daur, with Nayyar making her the voice of Vyjayanthimala. Her duets with Mohammed Rafi, like ‘Maang Ke Saath Tumhara’, ‘Saathi Haath Badhana’ and ‘Uden Jab Jab Zulfein Teri’, penned by Sahir Ludhianvi got her much acclaim. Their work together ensured a distinct voice for her, and it was aided by the songs often being from the woman’s perspective. As singer Shreya Ghoshal remarked recently, this female orientation is missing from contemporary music, with most ballads being sung by men now, and the woman’s voice being slowly and steadily erased.
