Asha Bhosle

Asha was born in Sangli in 1933, the third of Deenanath Mangeshkar's five children, and like her sister Lata she started singing in Marathi films as a child after their father's death in 1942. Her first Hindi film song came in 1948. At sixteen she married Ganpatrao Bhosle, Lata's secretary, against the family's wishes, and for some years sang whatever work came — B-grade films, second leads, vamps and dancers — while her sister sang for the heroines.

The turn came with O.P. Nayyar, who did not work with Lata and made Asha his principal voice from the mid-1950s: C.I.D., Naya Daur, Howrah Bridge, Kashmir Ki Kali. Nayyar's rhythm and swing suited her, and the Asha–Rafi duets of those years are some of the best-loved in Hindi film. S.D. Burman gave her Kaagaz Ke Phool and Teen Deviyan; Ravi gave her Waqt and Gumrah; and in Teesri Manzil (1966) R.D. Burman, then new, found the voice he would write for over the next twenty years.

With R.D. Burman — whom she married in 1980 — she sang the songs that defined the 1970s' sense of modernity: Piya Tu Ab To Aaja, Dum Maro Dum, Chura Liya Hai Tumne, Yeh Mera Dil, Mehbooba Mehbooba. Then Khayyam's Umrao Jaan (1981) asked her to drop her voice and sing slow courtesan ghazals, and the result won her a National Award. Ijaazat (1987), with Mera Kuchh Samaan, won her a second.

In the 1990s she sang for a new generation — Rangeela with A.R. Rahman, Tanha Tanha, Kahin Aag Lage, Radha Kaise Na Jale in Lagaan — and recorded ghazal albums with Ghulam Ali and Jagjit Singh and the pop album Janam Samjha Karo. She has toured internationally for decades and run a chain of restaurants. In 2000 she received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award and in 2008 the Padma Vibhushan; a 2011 entry in the Guinness book called her the most recorded artist in music history.

She has had private sorrows: her first marriage ended, R.D. Burman died in 1994, and her daughter Varsha died in 2012. Her son Anand manages her career and her granddaughter Zanai sings. Into her nineties she remained a performer who could fill a hall, and her stage shows still move from Nayyar to Burman to Khayyam in a single evening.

Asha's voice is darker and fuller than Lata's, with more body in the lower register and a natural flirtation in the tone that composers used for the dancer, the vamp and the heroine's modern cousin. Technically she is the most complete singer of her generation — fast, accurate, able to bend a note or breathe a phrase in the Western manner when the song needed it — and the Umrao Jaan ghazals showed she could also sing slow, low and still. The energy is what people remember: a Nayyar or Burman number with Asha at full tilt is the sound of Hindi film music enjoying itself.