There are singers who belong to an era, and then there are Asha BhosleOne that treated decades as passing trends that it would dip into and then outrun. Bhosle was a singer and was entertaining great singers of pop and jazz long before the internet became accessible. She said in an interview, “I watched Carmen Miranda a lot and tried to copy her style, as I later did with Shirley Bassey.“ Asha Tai, who wore thick sarees and loved making her signature ‘maa ki dal’ and jaggery kheer, was the same woman who watched Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ thrice for ‘Eena Meena Deeka’; who received a letter from the Vatican for the singing of ‘Ave Maria’; And in the 1980s, he became the first Indian singer to form a pop group in Britain named West India Company. At a time when playback voices in India were still neatly boxed – classical, romantic, devotional – Bhosle was slipping between them. Trained in Hindustani classical music, he said, “If you have the will and the passion… you can sing anything.” She strayed into cabaret, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and global pop long before the industry had decided what to call any of it.

As many stories say, the turning point came with the Burman family. SD Burman was the first to show him how to add his ‘input’ to a track to make it play, but it all started with RD Burman, when both of them would sit till 4 in the morning, listening to jazz and rock. When he handed him ‘Aaja Aaja’ for ‘Teesri Manzil’, he is said to have objected to its western swag. This was not a tune that you could understand as a ghazal. It required breathless phrases and limp shrugs. After ten days of rehearsals, he took such ownership of it so completely that it now felt as if it had always been his. That became a pattern. Be it the smoky, rhythmic breath of ‘Piya Tu Ab To Aaja’ or the pop-ballad ease of ‘Chura Liya Hai’, Bhosle could adjust her vocals to match every mood. By the 1990s, when ‘crossover’ became a buzzword, she was already living it. Of his entry into the West India Company he said, “I told my son Anand, I have sung in practically every Indian language, but I have not sung in English.” It was a leap into the unknown that would have intimidated a younger artist. He said of merging Indian vocals with Western club rhythms and electronic music, “Although the music was ready, there was no fixed tune to sing. I created my own beats and melodies.” This ability to improvise allowed him to record ‘Bow Down Mister’ with Boy George, where Indian devotional style met synth-heavy pop. This could have been a drama. Instead, it seemed like a natural extension of what she’d always done with unaffected ease. At the age of 64, she stepped into the spotlight of MTV. She teamed up with Code Red for the song ‘We Can Make It’ and appeared in a music video, matching the boy band and their R&B groove with her silk saree and alopecia. Soon after, she appeared on ‘The Way You Dream’ with REM’s Michael Stipe for his project ‘1 Giant Leap’, this track moved to Hollywood with the 2003 action-comedy film ‘Bulletproof Monk’. Bhonsle did not so much cross the border from east to west as do it on equal terms. Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Hope’ turned him into a cultural reference point, later remixed by Fatboy Slim. The Black Eyed Peas weave their sound into 2000s hip-hop on ‘Don’t Funk With My Heart’. Sarah Brightman takes ‘Dil Cheez Kya Hai’ to operatic pop. In 2005, the Kronos Quartet created an album around them, ‘You’ve Stolen My Heart’. They recorded RD Burman classics at such a pace – three to four songs a day – that the quartet struggled to keep up. This earned him a Grammy nomination. Even in her later years, she seemed game for unlikely pairings, be it a duet with cricketer Brett Lee or a collaboration with Pakistani pop singer Jawad Ahmed that ignored the politics of the times. Which brings us to 2026. Bhosale, now in her nineties, is recording ‘The Shadowy Light’ from her Pedder Road home for genre-blurring British virtual band Gorillaz – her sound a blend of hip-hop, dub and electronica, with a vintage harmonium in the mix – which will be her final collaboration.