🇮🇳 Asha Bhosle

She was born Asha Mangeshkar in Sangli, the fourth child of the classical musician Master Deenanath Mangeshkar. Deenanath died when Asha was nine; the family moved to Pune, then to Bombay, and Lata — the elder sister, then a teenager — took over the household's earning. Asha was put to work singing in Marathi film B-units almost as soon as she could carry a tune.

She eloped in 1949 with Ganpatrao Bhosle, her sister's secretary, sixteen years her senior. The marriage was unhappy, sometimes abusive, and produced three children before separating in the early 1960s. The Mangeshkar household, including Lata, did not speak to Asha for several years. The story is the foundation of every later Asha-Bhosle reading.

The professional break came through OP Nayyar, the composer who paired her with Mohammed Rafi on the soundtrack of CID (1956) and Naya Daur (1957). Nayyar refused to work with Lata Mangeshkar and built his career around Asha's voice. The cabaret song — 'Yeh Hai Reshmi Zulfon Ka', 'Aaiye Meherbaan', 'Aao Huzoor Tumko' — became Asha's signature, in a Bombay where the playback world rigidly assigned cabaret to one sister and the bhajan to the other.

The RD Burman partnership, from the late 1960s through Burman's death in 1994, is the central arc of Indian popular music. Teesri Manzil (1966) with 'O Haseena Zulfonwaali', Hare Rama Hare Krishna (1971) with 'Dum Maro Dum', Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973) with 'Chura Liya Hai Tumne', the Western-jazz textures and bossa-nova rhythms that Burman brought home from his Calcutta apprenticeships — all of it was sung by Asha Bhosle. She married Burman, six years younger than her, in 1980, and was widowed in 1994.

The 1990s reinvention is the most-celebrated late career in popular Indian music. AR Rahman's Rangeela in 1995 — 'Tanha Tanha' and 'Rangeela Re' — at age 62, brought her into the alternative-cinema lineage of Ram Gopal Varma and Mani Ratnam. Anu Malik's Taal sessions, the appearance with the British band Cornershop on 'Brimful of Asha' in 1997 — all of it cemented the unique position of an artist who refused to stop adapting.

She has been awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, two National Film Awards for Best Female Playback Singer, and the Maharashtra Bhushan. She received a Grammy nomination in 2006 for the World Music album You've Stolen My Heart with the Kronos Quartet — the only Indian female playback singer ever nominated.

She runs the Asha Bhosle restaurant chain — Asha's in Dubai, Birmingham, Doha and Manchester — and the Mangeshkar household at Prabhukunj on Pedder Road remains her base. Her daughter Varsha died in 2012, a loss she has rarely discussed in public. She continues to record selectively in her tenth decade.