On Asha Bhosle (1933-2026)


Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward (or 0161__Rajivan, if that helps)
Abstract. The famous Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle died yesterday. For someone based in the West writing on the singer, one must confront the problem of aristocracy: the solutions taken by the Indian popular film industry to the problems of making popular films seem the solutions of a very high social class, not the solutions of a Hitchcock - prior to observing their success it is natural for "us" to think, "This will never work" and favour the Hitchcockian approach, with its universal assumptions about human bodies and minds. Although various sources describe Bhosle as belonging to a legendary musical family, her approach to achieving film immortality, or trying to, seems more that of the middle or working class: a focus on regular reliability. How close is she to Narayan's Selvi (also the shortened name of my mother, by the way)? In  addition to reflecting on this, I also reflect on how she figures in a one-hit wonder song by the British Asian band Cornershop. Are these one-hit wonders the successes of musicians generally below the level of regulars or are they a message from people high-up, regarding how good we would be if we made popular music? In this case I suspect the latter. The lyrics, unfortunately, make me "extract" the message "This type of woman causes you to go bald." I cannot see any reason to think that, but I reflect on baldness too, including how prominent Oxford ordinary language philosophers (Austin, Strawson, Hart) were bald whereas more recent figures (Timothy Williamson, Derek Parfit, Galen Strawson, T.H. Irwin) have wonderful hair. Has someone at Oxford been working on the problem of hair retention for philosophers - I myself have been warned several times over the years of the risk of baldness, by people of various ages. I am not entirely keen on this, but somehow I don't change course.
Draft version: version 2 (27th May 2026; version 1 13th April 2026)


Written by men?
The Amartya Sen of CNN?


1. Introduction
        I don't check The Guardian daily these days, but I learnt from it yesterday that the Indian playback singer Asha Bhosle died. What is a playback singer? "And why are you writing of the faraway country of India? Are you an Indian?" Let's address the playback question. A playback singer records a song and it appears in a movie and the actor (or actress) appears to be singing it (to the untutored eye?), but actually it has been sung by someone else, the playback singer! Do you know songs, the human voice, and how it can be recorded, mechanically preserved and reproduced?! Asha Bhosle was the most famous of these, not only in her faraway country of India but also here in Britain, here in the West. "What is India to you though? Are you an Indian?" I am not. I am a Sri Lankan Tamil living in Britain, but I have published articles in a journal based in India, more than one perhaps. I have business there, you might say. And other relationships, which I shall come to in due course.
Asha Bhosle, a towering figure of Indian cinema, but how to address Indian cinema, here in the West, here in Britain? In the next part of this paper, I shall discuss this matter and the chief problem of doing so. In the third part, I shall raise the question of to what extent Bhosle's life is like that portrayed by the Indian novelist and short story writer R.K. Narayan in his story Selvi. In the fourth part, I shall address how she is known best in Britain, by means of a popular song referring to her, a song which she does not herself sing, to my knowledge. The fifth part continues reflecting on the popular song and what is perhaps a misinterpretation of its message: that this type of woman causes baldness.


2. Indian cinema: the cinema of The Other?
        Was it 10 years ago? I was in an establishment in the Chinatown district of Manchester, which is now shut it seems. A cleaning woman, if I remember correctly, an older woman, told me that she liked murder-mysteries. I asked her if she liked Hitchcock, the famous British film director, the master of suspense, and she said that she did. We had some common ground, apart from perhaps that she was regarded as a person of eccentric ideas. We were not the only people conversing. There was also a woman around my own age, whom I have known for some time. I remember there were once quite a few who resembled her and I was disposed to group them together somewhat in my mind, but I don't see the others now and she has remained and must be a person of some influence. Are we friends? I was arranging to get a will written and she offered to be a witness, if I needed one. Who else would? Anyway, these memories are a digression probably. They serve merely to introduce Hitchcock. If I were a filmmaker, especially a filmmaker from earlier periods in cinema history, I guess I would try to make films in the Hitchcockian way, as I conceive it - if tasked with making films for wider audiences. Hitchcock said - his first name is Alfred, if you don't know - that the length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. His artful suspense seems to treat the mind as a machine on which effects can be produced: do this and you will be sure to cause suspense. That is how I would try to make a film, I suppose: taking into account the human body, the average human body, or the average human body of a cinema goer (a cinema goer from a country with which I am familiar?), and treating the mind as if it were somehow mechanical. It is the obvious way, at least from my starting position.
        
But Indian cinema is not like this, as everyone knows. Maybe that is an important factor in explaining its success, why Indian cinema is not dominated by Western products, specifically by Hollywood cinema. Indian films, or paradigmatic cases (if I may use such a grand word), are hours longer than Western films, and the action is frequently "interrupted" by song and dance. If the climate is one of Hitchcockian cinema and you tell me you are going to do something like this, I would say, "It will never work. Who is going to sit around for hours in the cinema or even at home, watching this stuff. The viewer will get bored. Their appetite for song and dance, furthermore, is not to this extent." But what do I know? Indian cinema flourishes. My own hypothetical efforts, in contrast, would surely get eclipsed, "destroyed even," by  Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and the gang. What is going on here, to explain this large difference in results compared to anticipated results? I think this kind of cinema cannot work and my kind stands a chance, but I struggle and their alternative flourishes. It is aristocracy, isn't it? Aristocracy or a higher social class is responsible for the Indian paradigm - the Indian popular paradigm, I should say - and this higher social class knows or figures out how to do things in some other way and yet have all the success you dreamed of. (I studied social anthropology in university as an undergraduate and later taught it, and it seems to me that the approach of British social anthropologists is often this: "Try to achieve immortality by writing a book about a little known people, after spending much time there, doing demanding fieldwork." The anthropologists who do this are talented, but the overall strategy has an obviousness about it, a lack of anything mysterious. It's the sort of stupid strategy I would come up with myself. Others don't try to do it that way, assuming they have immortal longings.)

How does this aristocratic alternative approach develop? Does it develop merely from longer experience and power: longer experience teaches one the limitations of the obvious approach, while power puts one in a position to experiment? I don't know. I am disposed to be afraid, and declare that I am an ironic liberal intellectual, much as described by Richard Rorty, even though I sometimes seek out our local dreamlike depictions of the East. Does it develop from having a larger heart, metaphorically speaking? One cares for the people; one's family always has; the people are not treated as mere means to get money from or mere machines to cause effects upon. "Anyway, how are you going to write on Bhosle if she is the product of a cinema paradigm, or bound up with one, which is so different from what you would do?" I am not without method, readers.


3. Bhosle and Narayan
        Sources tell us that Bhosle was born into a distinguished musical family, but my first assessment of her approach to her field is that she is the steady middle class, a cut above competition, maybe more than a cut actually. She is reliable, consistent, and prolific: she is not a single stellar event. "Well, the people need something they can count on."
        Wikipedia says this about her early life:
At the age of 16, Asha eloped with 31-year-old Ganpatrao Bhosle, marrying him against her family's wishes. Ganpatrao was her personal secretary. Following their wedding, her husband and in-laws mistreated her. After a few years of marriage, Bhosle was turned out by a suspicious Ganpatrao and she went to her maternal home with two children while pregnant with her third child. They separated in 1960.
I began to think back to a story I read. It was after the Coronavirus lockdown that I read it. During the lockdown, while libraries were shut, I felt a longing to read the Indian writer R.K. Narayan. I had no Internet in my home then - no broadband, no smartphone, no wifi. I began to write imitations of the writer, whom I much enjoyed as an undergraduate - about 20 years before the lockdown - and would imitate back then too. In the years that followed the lockdown, I read Narayan more, and wrote summaries of his homely stories. Through them, I learnt also about Indian cinema and one of the stories concerned a singer, named Selvi, also the title of the story, and the shortened form of my mother's name. Is Asha's life like Selvi's? Was it? It is not like my mother's life; she is a doctor, not a singer, and her mind is adapted to her field, I think, though maybe there is some perspective from which they and others are so similar. An astrological perspective? Well, Sagittarius and Virgo: not similar, it seems to me. Sagittarius likes adventure and to grasp the essence; Virgo focuses on fine details and is earth-bound in hopes. Sagittarius regards Virgo as skillful, but boring and afraid of life's ups-and-downs. There is much Virgo in my full chart: Mars, Saturn, and one other, I have forgotten. Jupiter?
        In Narayan's story, Selvi marries an older man, Mohan. She meets him as a youth who wins first prize in a music competition: she is brought to him to be photographed and he performs little services for the family and then takes on managing her and they marry in a ceremony no one else knows anything about - she is a star but only he knows her private face."She was undemanding, uninquiring, uncomplaining. She seemed to exist without noticing anything or anyone, rapt in some secret melody or thought of her own... In the course of a quarter-century, she had become a national figure; travelled widely in and out of the country. They named her the Goddess of Melody." Bhosle is Queen of Melody, yes? How can one such as myself compete with Narayan, I wonder: he knows this type and that, the course of their lives; do I even know myself? When you first read Narayan, you probably think anyone can do this, but then you realize the knowledge involved. (The normal way of writing a broadly Chekhovian story is to limit the focus in time, such as to a year or a few years, but Narayan writes these stories that cover large chunks of life. They feel like: "This could have been a novel, but I can't write every novel idea of mine," or some do. But maybe it is: "Try writing this as a novel and you will realize that it is not doable." Not sanely doable?!)
        I can't keep reading the story now; it is making me jealous or envious: his knowledge of the life of a singer, a global singer. And I fear a manager like Mohan, planning in detail all I do. I was discouraged from writing on a New York philosophy cultural relativism book, you know: something I would by myself do.


4. Cornershop's Brimful of Asha
        I presented my impression of Bhosley as reliable, consistent, and prolific: she is not a single stellar event. But in Britain, there is a single "event" associated with her name. She is referred to in the song Brimful of Asha, by the band Cornershop, of which we know almost nothing apart from that they made this popular song: this one hit wonder. In the video, a girl wears the coral coloured top and white trousers a bit like an Eastern print, almost a batik print even. A black girl with two bunches. She dances to a series of musical vinyls, rare ones I presume. Is the dancing ironic? "We don't care about no government warning," the alternative rock-pop singer paradoxically sings, and repeatedly "Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow" and at some point in the video it is suggested that this slight girl plans to put heavy hitters out of business. I once wondered whether it is a portrait of Scary Spice, Mel B, a member of the famous Spice Girls. These days I find it difficult not to associate the video with a certain person mockingly reading my papers. I wrote several between 2022 and 3 and in September was forced into hospital with mental health problems, as sometimes afflicts writers. "Look how little they amount to and yet, you fragile soul, you are ill." Is this her as a youth even? A portrait of an academic. Then again the coral top is like what my mother used to wear. It could even be a portrait of me. 1997: it was released. A schoolboy: I used to go to cornershops and investigate their pornography. (We think that the top shelf pornography magazines disappeared because of the Internet, but is this true? I didn't investigate enough!) But I am regarded as a foolish person, sure to fail, who lives in perennial Shilpa-Shettyhood: why bother?
        The one hit wonder raises the question of "What is going on?" Is it someone from a higher system to popular music letting us know: this is how good I would be in your field? Is it someone below the level of consistent mainstream performers, who luckily ascends once. Some are one type and some are the other? In literature, the poet Christina Rossetti's novella Commonplace is, I believe, a mockery of Jane Austen: "I'm poetry. Anyone can do what she does: these solid novels of the marriage market." (I find Austen hard to read, whereas I much like Rossetti's effort - not because of the mockery. "I know your type of reader and Austen does not," her ghost says? I must try harder with Austen, I suppose, but does everyone mock her for this? Virginia Woolf's Austen-meets-a-beggar is discreetly "She doesn't know this type at all.") Anyway, I assume Brimful of Asha is a message from the higher levels to pop music: offering the dreamed-of synthesis between pop and alternative rock.


5. She balds?
        Is it a misinterpretation or do I take this message from the lyrics: the Asha Bhosle type makes you (a male?) bald? What is this name Mohan, from the Narayan story? "What do you think of that?" Don't know. A cost of certain simple-minded approaches to grand goals?
        I notice that eminent University of Oxford philosophers of the 1950s to 70s are bald: J.L. Austin, P.F. Strawson, H.L.A. Hart. Even Bernard Williams eventually went bald. In recent years, their leading lights have rich heads of hair: Derek Parfit, Timothy Williamson, Galen Strawson. Even T.H. Irwin has hair. In the first decade of this century, I was warned by a friend that if I continued in the philosophy department at Manchester, I would be bald. I had plentiful hair then, whereas the others were mostly baldies: Julian Dodd, Chris Daly, Graham Stevens, and Julian Dodd. Later, in an economics department, I saw many bald men and was warned repeatedly of the risk of baldness. Have Oxford solved this problem somehow? "You solve this problem and you can attract other researchers, otherwise it is only soldiers"? I personally seem to have lost a lot of hair, but I am not sure what exactly is going on; I was anxious about hair-loss for many years but then again I ignored the warnings, always ignored them. I have psoriasis too: I had it from 2007-9 and then it returned in 2010.
        My family encouraged me to use medicine and keep it under control. I personally regard psoriasis as a language but I don't trouble myself much to interpret it; nevertheless I don't like using the heavy-suppression techniques they favour. Maybe I would if I were a fashion model! It is in my interests to look like a viral entity? My hair seems to be struggling back. Asha Bhosle, but in the home mirror, I look excessively pretty! (Forget-me-nots. Hey, it is too late now but a different interpretation of one hit wonders occurs to me: they are or become a test of your knowledge of an arts field. For example, do you know the one hit wonders of the short story? Literary anthologies mostly reward the regular contributors, as they probably must. Also: I forgot about how I used to be taken to an apartment in Whalley Range to watch Bollywood movies…)


References
n.a. n.d. Asha Bhosle. Wikipedia entry. Available at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asha_Bhosle
n.a. n.d. Brimful of Asha. Wikipedia entry. Available at:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brimful_of_Asha
(The songwriter is Tajinder Singh and it was released on August 17th 1997, on the label Wiiija.)
Cornershop. 2013. Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha, Norman Cook Mix (Tjinder Singh) Official Music Video. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBnMRWeV-E&t=4s
Jones, Sam. and agencies. 2026. Indian music legend Asha Bhosle dies aged 92. April 13th 2026. Available at:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/12/indian-singer-asha-bhosle-dies-aged-92
Narayan, R.K. Selvi. In 1984 (1982). Malgudi Days. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Available at:
https://eruditesdps.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/malgudi-days-narayan_-r-k_.pdf
(Will summarize this soon, hopefully.)
Rossetti, Christina. 1870. Commonplace. London: F.S. Ellis. Available at:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b11858da2772cf01402ee6e/t/5c1044fb21c67cfb430ada34/1544570114121/Rossetti-Commonplace-1870.pdf
Woolf, Virginia. 1926. How Should One Read a Book? Read it as if one were writing it. The Yale Review. Available at:
https://yalereview.org/article/virginia-woolf-essay-how-should-read-book


Some other Bhosle obituaries
CNN. 2026. Indian singer Asha Bhosle dies. Available at:
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/04/13/world/video/asha-bhosle-obit-vo-sot-041301aseg3-cnni-world-fast
Gopal, Mayuresh Konnur and BBC News (Reporter) 2026. Celebrities and fans pay tributes to Asha Bhosle. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/ckgeljpk4v9o
Kumar, Anuj. 2026. Asha Bhosle: the voice that defied genres, time. The Hindu Available at:
https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/music/asha-bhosle-legendary-singer-death-obituary/article70854485.ece#google_vignette
NDTV. 2026. Legendary singer Asha Bhosle died… [My title] Instagram. Available at:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXB-jGTE7T9/
NEWS9 Live. 2026. LIVE BREAKING: Asha Bhosle Dies at 92: End of an Era for Indian Music Legend. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_Fd8Feb-ng
("She was not just a singer; she was an emotion." An emotion is what I call various people, now!)
Pragati, K.B. 2026. Asha Bhosle, One of India’s Most Beloved Singers, Dies at 92. The New York Times. Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/12/world/asia/asha-bhosle-india-singer-bollywood.html
WION. 2026. End Of An Era: Veteran Singer Asha Bhosle Passes Away At 92 In Mumbai | BREAKING | WION. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9uJxI_Q0qI
Yadav, Nikita. 2026. Mourners sing Asha Bhosle hit as iconic Indian singer cremated. BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce8jw46p2x4o


One-hit wonders that come to my mind (Western, Wikipedia credits source)
Crazy Frog. 2010. Crazy Frog - Axel F (Official Video). Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE&list=RDk85mRPqvMbE&start_radio=1
(This one troubles me. 2003? Can't get much information. Swedish can't do anti-racism, etc., or can't veil prejudice with enough cuteness? Someone there surely can!)
Azalea, Iggy. 2014. Iggy Azalea - Fancy ft. Charli XCX. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-zpOMYRi0w
Boy Culture. 2025. DNC 1996 Rocks Out to MACARENA: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Delegates. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHRysTfaMi4&list=RDFHRysTfaMi4&start_radio=1
(The song is Macarena by Los Del Rio, Bayside Boys mix. Label: RCA. Songwriters: Rafael Ruiz Perdigones, Antonio Romero Monge.)
Cornershop. 2013 (originally 1997). Cornershop - Brimful Of Asha, Norman Cook Mix (Tjinder Singh) Official Music Video. Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBnMRWeV-E&t=4s
Deee-Lite. 2009. (originally 1990).  Groove Is In The Heart (Official Video). Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etviGf1uWlg&t=20s
(Songwriters: Dmitry Brill, Towa Tei. Kierin Kirby, Herbie Hancock, Jonathan Davis. Producer: Deee-Lite. Label: Elektra.)
Bliss Corporation. 2010. Eiffel 65 - Blue (Da Ba Dee) [Gabry Ponte Ice Pop Mix] (Original Video with subtitles). Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ugkg9RePc
(Originally October 1998. Songwriters: Gianfranco Randone, Maurizio Lobina, Massimo Gabutti. Producers: Maurizio Lobina, Gabry Ponte. Label: Skooby. This box below won't go.)


	KrisKrossVEVO. 2010 (originally 1990). Kris Kross - Jump (Official Video). Available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=010KyIQjkTk&list=RD010KyIQjkTk&start_radio=1