Asha Bhosle

Asha Bhosle is an Indian playback singer whose seven-decade music career has produced one of the foundational documents of late-20th and early-21st-century international Indian-cinema-music history — particularly her recording of approximately 12,000 Indian-cinema playback songs across 1948–present (one of the most-recorded female playback singers in international music history). She was born Asha Mangeshkar on September 8, 1933, in Sangli, Maharashtra, British India, into a Marathi musical-and-theatrical family. Her father Pandit Deenanath Mangeshkar was a Marathi-Indian classical-music vocalist-and-stage actor, and her mother Shevanti Mangeshkar was a homemaker. Her older sister Lata Mangeshkar (1929–2022) was also a prominent Indian playback singer.

The April 24, 1942 sudden death of her father from heart-related complications (when Asha was nine) shaped her early-life biographical narrative. Her teenage and early-adulthood music career across 1943–1948 — across multiple Marathi-language stage and Hindi-cinema playback engagements — produced her early-career Indian-cinema playback-singing public profile.

Her 1948 first commercial Indian-cinema playback recording — for the 1948 Hindi-cinema film Chunariya — launched her early-career late-1940s and 1950s Indian-cinema playback-singing public profile.

Her 1957 collaboration with Indian-cinema music-director O. P. Nayyar — across whose 1957–1973 ongoing music-direction work Bhosle recorded approximately 320 Hindi-cinema playback songs — produced her late-1950s and 1960s Indian-cinema playback-music public profile. Her 1966 second-marriage relationship with Indian-cinema music-director R. D. Burman (whom she married in 1980, after their decade-long ongoing music-collaboration relationship) produced her late-1960s and 1970s Indian-cinema playback-music public profile.

Her 1973 Hindi-cinema film Yaadon Ki Baaraat playback recordings (under R. D. Burman's music-direction) produced her 1970s Indian-cinema playback-music commercial peak. Her subsequent multiple Indian-cinema-and-international musical collaborations across the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s have produced her international Indian-cinema-and-non-cinema musical public profile. She has been continuously commercially active across her late-career into her 90s. She has three children from her first marriage (1949–1960) to Ganpatrao Bhosle.

Her name Asha derives from the Sanskrit Āśā meaning "hope" or "desire." Asha has been climbing in American naming since the 2000s.