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| Pic courtesy: NBC News |
When
I began writing the series of posts as a tribute to Asha Bhosle, I deliberately
stepped away from the ‘typical Asha’ songs. I delved deep into her musical
repertoire to discover songs that explored the length, breadth and depth of
Asha’s range as a performer. Yet, a niggling disquiet troubled me… was I not,
in my zeal to discover ‘untypical’ Asha songs, trapping the singer into yet
another box? Did I feel that Asha’s sensual, seductive, sultry songs
were somehow ‘lesser than’? That I had to prove she could sing the
‘purer’ melodies with as much felicity as her sister did?
And
why was I so apologetic about it? Asha certainly wasn’t. Somewhere along the
way, she blurred the distinctions between heroine and vamp, ‘good’ women and
‘bad’. She made female desire not just acceptable, but worth celebrating. In a
post mourning the chanteuse, contemporary singer Sona Mohapatra wrote, “It’s
not grief [that she feels]; it’s gratitude…. for giving voice to desire,
to playfulness, to seduction… at a time when those were still taboo for women.”
Asha
had broken with convention all her life – from the time she was 16 years old,
when she eloped with a man nearly double her age; when she walked out on an
abusive marriage eleven years later, with two small children and pregnant with
her third; when she married a man six years her junior… each struggle, each
obstacle had only honed her skills, made her even more determined to succeed.
As she told her daughter, she had to ensure she was never dependent on anyone
ever again. But she never complained. In an interview on Doordarshan, when
asked about singers complaining about lack of opportunities due to the
perceived ‘Mangeshkar monopoly’, she shrugged, ‘Both didi [elder sister
Lata Mangeshkar] and I have had our struggles. But you never saw us going
around complaining that we weren’t given opportunities. We worked hard to get
where we were.”
And
Asha’s struggles were real, not just because she was pitted against her by-now
well-established older sister, but because she was also jousting against an
industry that insisted that she be typecast as the voice of the ‘other’ – women
on the outer boundaries of society. She became the voice of the tawa’if,
the cabaret dancer, the villain’s moll. But in so doing, she took the power
into her own hands, gave herself [and the characters she sang for] agency, and
made it clear that female desire was not just here to stay, it was something to
revel in.
Asha
leaned into the desire, but made it conversational, playful, teasing. She knew
the allure of her voice and, in the knowledge that she could not be bound in
any box society deemed fit, she not only subverted convention but also
reinvented herself over and over and over, defying any attempt to confine her
to genres or generalisations.
Desire
in Asha’s voice was not shameful or sinful; it was a feeling, an emotion that
she allowed to exist. Asha’s women were emotionally complex creatures, and she
allowed them the space to live and breathe, giving them the right to be
delightfully flawed, excitingly seductive and achingly human, all at the same
time. These feelings and emotions were, more often than not, missing from the
narratives in which her songs were set.
Asha’s
voice allowed women’s feelings to sound different, inhabiting the song
in a way that turned ‘feeling’ into something almost physical. Shalini and I
have talked often about good ‘song actors’ – actors who inhabited a ‘playback’
song with such emotion that they blurred the lines between singer and actor.
Asha was the reverse – she was an excellent ‘voice actor’, well aware of the
emotions evoked by the lyrics and allowing every seductive sigh and rasp of
breath, every chuckle and gasp of laughter, every husky drawl and sensuous
inflexion to erase the distance between word and feeling, singer and listener.
“There’s
no singing without acting,” she declared as she played a definitive role in
the evolution of female desire and transgression in cinema. Where desire was
only to be hinted at, she deliberately set it free. Her carefree abandon, her
emancipated confidence, and the vocal trills that rebelled against boundaries
all brought desire into the mainstream.
So.
To celebrate the soundscape of female desire, here are ten songs, in no
particular order. I have eschewed the usual ‘nightclub’ numbers or cabarets –
those, while sultry, are not really what I’m going for here; it’s clear that
those are performative. For instance, Piya tu, ab to aa jaa is one of
Asha’s most famous ‘sultry’ songs. But it is a stage performance in which
Helen’s character performs for a club audience, mimicking the semblance of
physical desire. Or Husn ke laakhon rang, where the lady is being
blackmailed into singing for the villain. Not all songs on this list are
‘come-hither’ songs, or songs of seduction, either. Sometimes, they are just an
expression of a woman’s desire.
Aaiye
meherbaan
Howrah
Bridge (1958)
Music:
OP Nayyar
Lyrics: Qamar Jalalabadi
Aaiye
meherbaan,
to me, is sultry, sensuous, even erotic. Yet, the sensuality was whisper-soft,
restrained, controlled. Edna (Madhubala) knows well her allure, its power over
men. She’s aware of Prem Kumar’s (Ashok Kumar) disapproval, and while, as a
performer, she’s singing to many men, it is clear that her words are meant for
an audience of one. Come in, she croons, sit awhile, test my affections even. Asha’s voice is as smoky as the atmosphere in the nightclub. She glides over
the notes, and her emphasis on ‘Aaiye’ is delightfully effective. When she
sings Dekha machalke jidhar/Bijli giraa dii udhar/Jiska jalaa
aashiyaan/Bijli ko ye kya khabar, one gets the impression that it’s not
just Madhubala who doesn’t care about the impact of her beauty on men; it’s
Asha who cares not a whit about the world.
Woh haseen dard de do
Humsaaya
(1968)
Music:
OP Nayyar
Lyrics:
Shewan Rizvi
Until
Asha came along, heroines sounded pure, virginal, sweet… the type of girl one
could take home to mother. There was love, longing, yearning, heartbreak,
anguish… but not raw desire. That was left to the men to express. When Asha
determined she wasn’t going to sound like her sister, she changed the rules for
the heroines as well. Suddenly, they were able to vocalise the full range of
their emotions. Listen to Mala Sinha voice Tumhe tum se maangti hoon/Zara
apna haath de do/Mujhe aaj zindagi ki/Woh suhaag raat de do… Asha infuses
love, longing and even pathos into the lyrics. The result is seductive, yes,
but more than that, it is a fully realised expression of the complexities of a
woman’s emotion.
Bheegi
hui is raat ka aanchal
Neend
Hamaare Khwaab Tumhaare (1966)
Music:
Madan Mohan
Lyrics:
Rajinder Krishan
In
Aaiye meherbaan, Madhubala smouldered as she ostensibly enticed a
roomful of men in a smoke-filled nightclub; come in, stay awhile, she croons,
ostensibly to a roomful of men, but in reality, to one man. Here, that invitation is explicit – Nanda’s
character may be quoting the ‘voice of the night’, but the desire is all hers –
direct, and personal. Listen to the breathy ‘haa’ after Sanson mein
saansein. That desire mingles with her laughter as she warns Shabnam
phoolon par jab moti bikhraaye /Tab
ho na juda sharmaake sharmaake sharmaake… Each iteration of ‘sharmaake’ holds
a different note.
Ye
reshmi zulfon ka andhera
Mere
Sanam (1965)
Music:
OP Nayyar
Lyrics:
Majrooh Sultanpuri This
is a song that’s playfully seductive. Sung by a woman on screen (Mumtaz), a
honey trap – her job is to tempt the man (Biswajeet) enough for her lover
(Pran) to take incriminating photographs. Asha’s voice holds mischief, the lure
of something sensual. Listen to how she begins: Ye hai reshmi [pause] zulfon ka
andhera [pause] na ghabraaiye [pause] Jahaan tak mehak hain [pause] mere
gesuoon ki [pause] chale aaiye… The pauses are deliberate. It’s an invitation
to lose oneself in her dark tresses, but there’s a hint of laughter – it’s all
pretence. She’s an enchantress, aware of her power and unafraid to use it.
Aruna
Irani smouldered on screen. Off-screen, Asha lent her voice with the
sensuousness of a woman who wasn’t embarrassed to express her longing. She did
it with confidence, with abandon, with flourish. In doing so, she transformed Aruna’s
character from a woman who loves in vain to someone whose longing, whose
voicing of that longing, empowered her beyond what the narrative lent her. Asha
breathed that sensuousness…. the whistling of a swiftly-drawn breath, the
long-drawn out ‘haay’, is sheer, unabashed, fearless. That is agency.
That is confidence. To be herself. To desire someone. To express that desire. Asha
turned the song into a vocal performance, breath, inflexion, voice… becoming
part of the arrangement. The
last verse is picturised on Asha Parekh, and Asha shifts from seductive to
pathos without missing a beat.
Shaam
bheegi bheegi badan jal raha hai
Gehri
Chaal (1973)
Music:
Laxmikant Pyarelal
Lyrics:
Rajinder Krishan
It’s
the 70s, and Asha's voice has changed since her earliest days. The sensuousness
she brought to her songs has become bolder and more evident. Here, singing for
a fabulously glamorous Bindu, her voice is moody, intimate, and full of intense
physical desire that reflects the lyrics. The breath that she vocally draws
between her teeth, the ‘tch tch’ she adds to ‘badle udaasiyon ki’, the
way she modulates her voice each time she reprises ‘Shaam bheegi bheegi’ –
the camera may be objectifying Bindu, but Asha empowers the character to own
that desire. Co-conspirator
Shalini sent me this song in the days following Asha’s demise.
After
years of hiding her femininity to survive, Minoo Master (Padmini) has been
found out. Raju (Raj Kapoor), heartbroken at being deceived, leaves, but not
before buying her a sari and reminding her that she shouldn’t shy away from
being herself. Alone, Meena is beginning to understand her nascent emotions for
her comrade. This
is a different Asha altogether. Yes, the song is sensuous, even erotic, but the
gravitas in Asha’s voice brings in poignancy and pathos to her expression of
physical desire. Her rendition is soft, focusing on the young woman’s
loneliness; the deep sigh she voices only emphasises an ache that just won’t
be assuaged.
Jawani jaan-e-man
Namak
Halal
(1982)
Music:
Bappi Lahiri
Lyrics:
Anjaan
Different
decade, different sounds, but a distinct voice – Asha was reinventing herself
once again. It was the time for disco, and Asha hopped onto the bandwagon with
gusto. The age of prim and proper heroines was long gone. Zeenat Aman and
Parveen Babi had sashayed their way to the top rung of heroines and changed
everything about them. Here, the woman (Parveen), the honey trap, is performing at a party, but the gist of the song is meant for an audience of one (Shashi Kapoor). Shikari
khud yahaan shikaar ho gaya – the hunter has become the hunted. “Sayyaad ko bulbul se pyaar ho gaya”, she
sings. The song is a little seduction, a little pretence, but she’s also developing feelings for the man she’s been sent to entrap. By now, Asha was regularly
interjecting vocal flourishes – breaths, gasps, sighs, chuckles – into her
songs; Jawani jaan-e-man was no different. Listen to the ‘a-ha’ and
‘o-ho’ that end each antara – her voice is deeper, huskier, more
come-hither.
Aao
na gale lagaao na
Mere
Jeevan Saathi
(1972)
Music:
RD Burman
Lyrics:
Majrooh Sultanpuri
There
is something almost paradoxical about this song. The woman singing it (Helen) has
taken what she wants by force — the man (Rajesh Khanna) is
trapped. And yet, Asha's voice carries not a trace of triumph or command.
Instead, she pleads. Aao na, gale lagaao na — come, hold me close. The
abductor becomes the supplicant. She has his presence; she cannot compel his
desire. That distinction is everything, and Asha understands it completely. Her
voice is warm, coaxing, almost tentative — a softness that contrasts with the strange
and deliberate tension of the circumstances. The arrogance that brought him
here has dissolved entirely; what remains is a woman who wants to be wanted,
who needs to know she’s needed. There is no artifice in her asking, only aching
desire. Each na is a longing, the kind that reaches
toward something it isn't sure it will receive. RD Burman's arrangement holds
her gently, and she lets it — a woman capable of anything, laid low, in the
end, by the simple wish to be held willingly.
Qatra qatra milti hai
Ijaazat (19)
Music:
RD Burman
Lyrics:
Gulzar
By
the late 1980s, Asha had nothing left to prove. And so, Qatra qatra
sounds like nothing so much as arrival – a singer and a song that have found
each other at exactly the right moment. Gulzar's lyrics do not seduce; they explore. Qatra qatra milti hai, qatra qatra jeene do – “Life is but a series of moments, let's live each one”. This is desire stripped of all theatre, all ornamentation. What
remains is need, quiet and enormous. Asha
does not perform this song. She inhabits it. The breaths, the pauses, the way
her voice drops almost to a murmur on certain lines – it is less a vocal
technique than a confession. Where the younger Asha wielded
sensuousness like a weapon, here she lays it down entirely. The woman in this
song does not entice; she simply states what she cannot live without. That,
too, is desire – perhaps its most honest version.
It is fitting that this
list ends here: not with a come-hither glance or a smouldering invitation, but
with a voice that had earned the right to ask for exactly what it needs.
Asha’s
musical legacy is unshakeable. She sustained a career from the late 40s to the
noughts and beyond. She survived the shifting soundscapes of the film industry,
sang for a multitude of music directors, some of whom weren’t born when she first began to sing, and became the voice of generations of heroines, changing her
voice not just to suit them but also to suit the changing times. But there’s
another important part of her legacy that doesn’t get the attention it deserves
– she forged a path for other women to follow. As Sona so eloquently put it: “So,
no, this isn’t grief alone. This is the weight of having witnessed greatness.
Of having learned from it. Of knowing that a part of your own voice exists
because she dared first.”
And
perhaps, that should be her epitaph. She dared.
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