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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Asha Bhosle, Lata Mangeshkar didn’t have a cabaret-classical split. It was about genre, style

Consider Asha Bhosle and Kishore Kumar’s duet ‘Chhod Do Aanchal’. The sequence was set in a flower garden, and the girl’s bashfulness was not even remotely relatable to a cabaret dancer.

The queen rests in peace now while millions pay musical tributes by sharing her songs on social media. Asha Bhosle was like a vast ocean, the depths of which are hard to measure. So when opinions such as ‘Lata Mangeshkar was classical and Asha Bhosle was pop and jazz’ and ‘Lata was the voice of the chaste woman but Asha was the voice of the bad girl’ get bandied about, it gives one a pause.

As the saying goes, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Flashback to 1954: A 21-year-old Bhosle rendered Hindi cinema’s arguably first ever cabaret number ‘Jeene Do Aur Jiyo’ in Taxi Driver (1954). Today, the song is more remembered than the on-screen dancer, Sheila Ramani. It was also something of a ‘transition to adulthood’ for Bhosle as, in the same year, she was the voice of the Baby Naaz playing a destitute child in Boot Polish. That year, Bhosle also sang with velvety softness the seductive solo ‘Tera Dil Kahan Hai’, inspired from the film Algiers (1938), in Chandni Chowk. Given its source of inspiration, the tune was obviously Western. But the orchestration........

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