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Asha Bhosle Melody Queen of Bollywood
Asha Bhosle (Birthday on September 8, 1933) is an Indian Playback singer. She is best known as a Bollywood playback singer, although she has a much wider repertoire. Her career started in 1943 and has spanned over six decades. She has done playback singing for over 924 Bollywood movies and sold many records.
She is the sister of the equally popular Lata Mangeshkar.
Asha Bhosle is considered as one of the most versatile of South Asian singers — her range of songs includes film music, pop, ghazals, bhajans, traditional Indian Classical music, folk songs, qawwalis, and Rabindra Sangeet. She has sung in over 14 languages including Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, English, Russian and Malay.
Asha Bhosle is believed to have sung over 12,000 songs, but such estimates are not easy to validate.
Biography
Asha Bhosle was born in the small hamlet of Goar in Sangli, Maharashtra, into the musical family of Pandit Dinanath Mangeshkar. When she was nine years old, her father died. The family moved from Pune to Kolhapur and then to Bombay. She and her elder sister Lata Mangeshkar began singing and acting in films to support their family. She sang her first film song Chala Chala Nav Bala for the Marathi movie Majha Bal (1943). The music for the film was composed by Datta Dawjekar. She made her Hindi film debut when she sang the song Saawan aaya for Hansraj Bahl's Chunariya (1948).
At the age of 16, she eloped with 31-year old Ganpatrao Bhosle, marrying him against her family's wishes. The marriage failed miserably. Her husband and in-laws mistreated her. After a few years of marriage, Bhosle returned to her maternal home with two children and pregnant with her third child, Anand. She continued to sing in films to earn money.
At that time, prominent playback singers like Geeta Dutt, Shamshad Begum and Lata Mangeshkar (her sister) monopolized the singing for the "heroine" roles and the big films.Asha Bhosle got the assignments they didn't take: singing for the bad girls and vamps or in the second-grade movies. In the 1950s, she sang more songs than any other playback singer in Bollywood, but most of these were in B or C-grade films.
Asha Bhosle first achieved success in B. R. Chopra's Naya Daur(1957), composed by O. P. Nayyar. O.P Nayyar andAsha Bhosle s collaboration produced many hits. More...
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