Asha Bhosle and the New Era

Last Saturday, my family and I were in Essequibo on a pilgrimage to Badrinath Ashram, with its mammoth Lord Shiva murti, when we heard Asha Bhosle had been rushed to a Mumbai hospital with severe respiratory problems. It was a mark of Ashaji’s longevity in the music business that my son, born in 2000, and I, born fifty years before, both expressed concerns. For me, the 1950s were a special time for the over 70,000 Indians who were moved out of the logies in our sugar belt and into over 12,000 new homes stretching from Tuschen on the East Bank of Essequibo to Crabwood Creek on the Corentyne in Berbice.
The 1950s heralded a new era here and in India, and it was rather serendipitous that in the Hindi movie of the same name (“Naya Daur, ” in Hindi), released in the late fifties, there was an important scene involving a murti of Lord Shiva. Asha had sung eight songs in that movie, composed by her companion, music director O.P. Nayar, and the upbeat “Ude Jab Jab Zulfen Teri, ” a mega hit that made her a sensation. In our new housing schemes, almost every family now had a radio in their “high house,” and the song could now be received over Radio Demerara, broadcast from its new High St building, which would become an institution in the community. Indians were not used to having their culture in the public sphere- even if it was relegated to unholy hours.
By now, songs in Indian movies-where actresses would lip-sync pre-recorded songs by playback artists- were beginning to displace the musical genres brought from village India by the indentured laborers into their logies around the sugar factories. The village picturized in Naya Daur would have been very familiar to the older folks who just departed the logies, with their temple, masjid, and run-down range houses. But they were now becoming much more aggressive in their efforts to move up. Even though the PPP had been split and the PNC had been formed by the time the movie was shown at the Earlo Cinema on the Estate Road, Cheddi Jagan’s 1950 promise of a “new era” still redounded.
Not that we analyzed it as such back then, but Asha’s willingness to venture away from the track set by her older sister Lata and into western-inflected sensibility pushed by O.P. Nayar appealed to youngsters like myself in the new zeitgeist. Lata herself, with her soprano voice-possessed also by Asha-had eclipsed earlier, more doleful songstresses like Shamshad Begum. Especially at the bars and wedding houses, alcohol-fueled attempts to reproduce the gyrating moves to Asha’s songs by the item dancer Helen in cabaret scenes dominated. We all conceded that Lata was much more adept at tugging at the heartstrings, but while Asha was no slouch in that department, her forte was generating excitement.
Indian movies were very influential in shaping Indian Guyanese mores, and the breakout movie “Dil Dekhe Dekho” (Try Giving Your Heart) with Shammi Kapoor opposite a debuting Asha Parekh launched a new, aggressive Indian hero from his older brother Raj Kapoor’s typecast village innocent (“Anaari”). Asha Bhosle sang four duets with Mohammad Rafi in that movie. A decade later, when I was writing English “O” levels, the Asha/Rafi duet “O Meray Sona” (Oh My Beloved) from the movie Teesri Manzil, featuring the same Shammi/Asha duo, was blaring from a nearby jukebox, and I had to pause in rapture. My friends thought I had a “brain freeze”!
Indian “filmi” songs and movies were an integral aspect of “Indian culture” that helped to shape our identity in the sixties and seventies, and Asha Bhosle’s style resonated with the younger crowd. Just as the style of Rohan Kanhai “blasting for runs” in his unorthodox manner mesmerized us. He was a product of the same initiative of the sugar barons to move us out of the logies when they established “community centers” centered around cricket.
Nowadays, I wonder what would have happened if we had continued with the folk music traditions we had brought from rural India, where, in certain genres like the call-and-response “Birahas,” the singers extemporaneously dueled verbally. Instead, we started imitating the Bollywood songs until we made a U-turn in the 1980s and revived the Maticore songs we called “Chutney. ” These escalated the “hot” style of singing pioneered by Asha Bhosle years earlier and which appealed so much to our Girmitiya sensibilities.
Maybe she rather than Kanchan should have covered “Kaise Banee”.