by Legendary singer’s passing triggers maximum industry response: four biopics, seventeen streaming specials, one awards ceremony named after ceremony
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Comedy: Bollywood Mourns At Industrial Scale
MUMBAI — The Indian film and music industry this week mourned the passing of Asha Bhosle, the legendary playback singer whose voice defined six decades of Hindi cinema, whose range was operatic, whose longevity was miraculous, and whose catalogue includes approximately 12,000 songs, which is the kind of number that makes other singers go very quiet and reassess their life choices.
Prime Minister Modi expressed deep condolences, calling Bhosle “iconic and versatile” — understated to the point of comedy, like calling the Himalayas “notable hills.” The PM’s condolence was followed within the hour by approximately forty celebrity Instagram tributes, each longer than the last, each featuring a personal anecdote of varying credibility, and each concluding with a variation of “the world has lost a voice but the heavens have gained one,” which is simultaneously moving and a line that has been used at every musician’s passing since at least 1952.
The Bollywood Response: More Is More
The Hindi film industry’s response to the death of a legend follows a well-established protocol: immediate tributes, followed by discussion of a biopic, followed by four competing biopics from rival studios, followed by a streaming special, followed by a tribute concert that goes slightly over budget and features at least one performer who did not actually know the deceased personally but has “always felt a deep connection” to their work.
By Thursday, three production houses had informally announced biopics, no two of which had resolved the central question of who would play Asha Bhosle, though social media had generated seventeen casting suggestions ranging from entirely appropriate to someone’s bizarre idea involving a computer-generated young Bhosle voiced by an algorithm, which a startup founder in Bangalore described as “disruptive” and everyone else described with words we cannot print.
The Songs: An Embarrassment of Riches
Asha Bhosle recorded songs in over twenty languages, collaborated with every major music director from the 1950s onward, and managed — unlike almost every other figure in Indian music — to genuinely reinvent herself multiple times across decades without the reinventions feeling desperate. The BBC’s arts desk described her as one of the most recorded artists in human history, a claim that is probably true and impossible to verify because the number is genuinely that large.
The songs include romantic ballads, qawwalis, cabaret numbers, folk compositions, disco hits, duets with her sister Lata Mangeshkar (a relationship so central to Indian music that their rivalry, real or media-constructed, was itself a cultural institution), and late-career collaborations with artists young enough to be her grandchildren, which she executed with the ease of someone who has simply never found music difficult.
The Grief: Genuine and Spectacular
Indian celebrity grief is a distinctive phenomenon. It is real — genuine affection for genuine giants is a feature of a country that forms deep emotional bonds with its artists. It is also spectacular, because India has more media platforms, more celebrity commentators, and more hours of broadcast time to fill than almost any other nation, and all of them pivot simultaneously to maximum tribute mode, creating a saturation of mourning that is, paradoxically, slightly numbing.
By the weekend, seven news channels were running continuous Asha Bhosle retrospectives, three of them simultaneously playing different songs that occasionally bled into each other through thin studio walls, creating an unintentional medley that one producer described as “accidental art” and the audio engineers described as “a technical problem we’re working on.” The accidental medley went viral. It had 4 million views by Monday. Asha Bhosle, who appreciated a well-timed coincidence, would have found this funny.
India comedy and more: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
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More in the chorus: NewsThump | The Daily Mash
In Indian comedy, the “guru” is a figure of both reverence and ridicule, because in India, spiritual enlightenment is just a bad business decision away.