Have you seen Asha Bhosle onstage? She’s not as tall as you might imagine. When she appeared on the last night of Womadelaide in March she looked somehow shorter than all four members of the Kronos Quartet even though they were sitting down and she was standing. If they had stood then she would have looked like a bright stump next to four tall spires, a small, blue-clothed girl in a large, dark wood. She was serene, though, and had the air of a woman in control of her surroundings. She smiled and the radiance of her power went out in all directions, until it seemed that she could have raised and lowered the lights herself, by lifting one small finger, just so. If they ever put her in a film—her body and face, not only her singing voice—then she should be cast as a general who has to face down a terrifying army. She’d look at them, smile serenely to herself, and incline one little finger—just—so. Off they’d go like rabbits. They should have included her in 300. She would have knocked the Persians flat. They could have called it 1. She sings in The Rough Guide to Bollywood Gold. Of course she does. You couldn’t have a vintage Bollywood compilation without her, any more than you could have one without her sweet-voiced older sister Lata Mangeshkar, or plump-cheeked Mohammed Rafi, or whickering Kishore Kumar, who cultivated a reputation as an entertaining madman by chatting to a group of trees in front of a journalist who came to interview him. Bhosle once had a good line in vamps. She is the woman who, during a song that turns up more than once in Western Bollywood compilations, tries to get the hero stoned. “Dum Maro Dum” doesn’t appear in Bollywood Gold, but that’s no hardship. You can find it in other places easily enough. You could look at the first compilation DJ Ritu put together for this label, The Rough Guide to Bollywood. There it is in all its gaspy loveliness, the very first track.
|
|
Rough Guide to Bollywood Gold
