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Correspondent

23 August 2024 at 4:29:04 pm

Golden Voice

The passing away of Asha Bhosle feels less like the death of a singer and more like the silencing of an entire sensibility. For nearly eight decades, she was not merely a voice behind the screen but the sound of Indian cinema learning to be bold, expressive, irreverent and when it wished, delightfully unruly. Born into the formidable Mangeshkar family, the younger sister of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle was destined for music but not for imitation. Where Lata Didi embodied a near-divine...

Golden Voice

The passing away of Asha Bhosle feels less like the death of a singer and more like the silencing of an entire sensibility. For nearly eight decades, she was not merely a voice behind the screen but the sound of Indian cinema learning to be bold, expressive, irreverent and when it wished, delightfully unruly. Born into the formidable Mangeshkar family, the younger sister of Lata Mangeshkar, Asha Bhosle was destined for music but not for imitation. Where Lata Didi embodied a near-divine purity, being the nation’s conscience set to tune, Asha Tai became its alter ego: playful, sensuous, restless and daring. Together, the sisters defined the golden age of Bollywood playback singing. It is tempting and lazy to frame Asha Bhosle as the ‘other’ sister. Yet her genius lay precisely in refusing such a hierarchy. If Lata was the nightingale, Asha was the jazz improviser who was willing to bend rules, borrow from the West, and infuse Hindi film music with cabaret, pop and a certain urban irreverence. From smoky nightclub numbers to aching ghazals, her voice could inhabit characters that Hindi cinema itself was only just learning to write. Her catalogue, which runs into the tens of thousands of songs across languages, was a veritable parallel archive of post-Independence Indian music. She sang for heroines who ached, wept, vamped, seduced and survived. In doing so, she lent legitimacy to emotions that polite society often preferred to keep offstage. Her life, too, resisted neat composition. A teenage elopement, a troubled marriage, years of financial struggle and single parenthood were formative movements. Thrown out of her marital home, she returned to her family not as a prodigy but as a provider, singing to sustain three children while rebuilding a career. That she emerged not diminished but emboldened says much about the steel beneath the silk. Her later partnership with the composer R. D. Burman was both romantic and revolutionary. Together, they reshaped the soundscape of Hindi cinema by fusing Indian melody with global rhythm and producing songs that still feel improbably modern. When Burman died, she endured another personal rupture; yet her return in the 1990s was a striking reassertion of relevance. It is in relation to Lata that the poignancy of her passing sharpens. Their journeys began in the same household under the stern tutelage of their father, the classical musician Deenanath Mangeshkar, and ended in parallel arcs that now feel like the closing of a cultural epoch. Between them, the sisters had mapped the emotional geography of Hindi cinema so comprehensively that what follows risks sounding like a shallow echo. The age of playback singing, where voices were larger than actors, and the songs outlived the films, has been quietly receding. Asha Bhosle belonged to a time when a singer could define an actress, and a song could define a decade. Her death marks the near-complete passing of a generation that turned cinema into a musical civilisation.

Cheering for Islamabad, Running Down India

When sections of India’s self-anointed ‘liberal’ media cheer Pakistan’s fleeting diplomatic theatre, they reveal less about geopolitics than about their own reflexes.

 There is a peculiar reflex that grips a section of India’s self-styled ‘liberal’ media whenever the world tilts even slightly against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led Central government. It is not analysis, not even contrarianism in the noble sense, but a barely concealed thrill - an instinct to diminish India’s agency if doing so also punctures the political standing of Narendra Modi and the BJP.


The latest spectacle of certain commentators all but applauding Pakistan’s supposed role in brokering talks between Iran and the United States lays this tendency bare. The unspoken subtext was that if Islamabad is at the table, then the Modi government must have failed. This pathetically reductive worldview mistakes geopolitics for a zero-sum morality play.


Sure, democracies require sceptics. But when scepticism curdles into relentlessly reflexive negation, it ceases to be a virtue and becomes an empty posture.


Misguided Praise

What was striking about this episode was not criticism of the Indian government - which was cheap and plentiful anyway - but the evident eagerness by these Indian commentators to amplify Pakistan’s role as though it were a geopolitical triumph.


Any analyst sizing up Pakistan’s claim to diplomatic centrality in West Asia should treat the claims of a failed state with caution, to use an understatement. Its own record of terror and bloodletting against India, its long record of strategic inconsistency, and its limited economic leverage hardly make it an obvious broker between Tehran and Washington. Yet, for a certain section of India’s commentariat, these inconvenient facts were insouciantly brushed aside as Islamabad was momentarily recast as a ‘credible’ mediator.


From the era of General Zia-ul-Haq’s ‘frontline state’ posturing during the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-89) to Pakistan’s periodic attempts to project itself as an indispensable interlocutor with the Taliban after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Islamabad has repeatedly sought relevance through crisis rather than stability.


Each time, sections of the global commentariat indulge the fiction of Pakistan as a grand diplomatic mediator only for it to collapse under the weight of Pakistan’s own contradictions. That some in India now appear willing to reprise this cycle speaks to a curious amnesia closer home.


Time and again, these commentators appear more comfortable magnifying India’s alleged diplomatic ‘setbacks’. Whether it is India’s balancing act in the Russo-Ukrainian War, its positioning on Gaza, its deepening ties in the Indo-Pacific, or its growing economic heft, the response has been to diminish and issue snide remarks against the Indian government rather than to concede anything positive.


Let us be clear about what was unfolding even as these commentators were busy applauding Islamabad’s supposed diplomatic elevation.


A senior commander of Lashkar-e-Taiba - a UN-designated terror outfit with a long and bloody record in India - made a chillingly candid admission. Abu Musa Kashmiri openly claimed that Pakistan’s newfound ‘stature’ as a mediator between the United States and Iran was a direct consequence of the Pahalgam terror attack in Kashmir, in which 26 civilians, mostly Hindus were brutally killed.


Grotesque Morality

So, while Indian journalists of a certain persuasion were busy amplifying Islamabad’s diplomatic pretensions, a terrorist commander was effectively boasting that violence on Indian soil had helped engineer that very perception. If this is not a grotesque inversion of morality, what is?


And yet, where was the outrage? Where was the relentless scrutiny? Where were the primetime monologues dissecting the implications of such a statement?


If that were not damning enough, consider the conduct of the Pakistani state itself during this much-vaunted mediation effort.


On April 9, just hours before talks in Islamabad were to begin, Pakistan’s Defence Minister, Khawaja Muhammad Asif, took to social media to deliver a tirade that described Israel – America’s closest ally in the region -  as “evil,” a “curse for humanity,” and a “cancerous state,” adding that those responsible for its creation should “burn in hell.”


This was not a fringe voice nor some anonymous social media troll but Pakistan’s cabinet minister responsible for defence, for coordinating with the United States military, for overseeing the security of the very talks at which senior American officials were expected to participate. The man, quite literally, was in charge of ensuring that diplomacy could proceed safely.


And what followed this extraordinary outburst? Nothing. No rebuke from the government of Shehbaz Sharif or an attempt to distance the state from its own minister’s words.


This is the ‘neutral mediator’ that sections of India’s intelligentsia were busy lionizing.


The farce did not end there. Days earlier, Prime Minister Sharif had announced a ceasefire - one that, as later reported by international outlets, bizarrely carried a “draft” header and had been pre-cleared by the White House. More tellingly, it claimed the ceasefire applied “everywhere, including Lebanon.” Within hours, Israel categorically rejected that scope.


In diplomatic terms, this is pure confusion masquerading as an ‘initiative’ on Pakistan’s part. From the duplicity exposed during the Kargil War to the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan’s credibility deficit has been structural. That this history is so readily discounted in moments of fleeting diplomatic theatre is wilfully blind, to say the least.


Despite all this unfolding in plain sight, back in India, a familiar set of voices continued to peddle the fiction of Pakistan’s diplomatic ascendancy against the Modi government’s ‘setback.’


What explains this persistence? India’s intellectual and political ecosystem has long been inhabited by figures for whom critique of the Modi government is foundational. While there must be dissenting voices to check the government, the ‘critique’ by this section against the current dispensation has frequently descended into uncontrolled animus, eroding their basic credibility as journalists while giving grounds for strong suspicion with regards to their partisan attitudes.


In such a framework, Pakistan’s elevation serves as a useful stick with which to beat the Modi government. That the stick may be fashioned out of dubious claims, or even stained by the admissions of terrorists, becomes secondary.

This is where the charge becomes truly serious. It is no longer about bias but about alignment with narratives that are actively hostile to India’s interests.

To be blunt: when you amplify an enemy state’s diplomatic credibility at the very moment its own terror proxies are claiming credit for that credibility, you are not engaging in journalism but participating in a gross distortion.


The defenders of this tribe will, of course, protest. They will argue that questioning the government is their duty, that nationalism must not stifle dissent, that uncomfortable truths must be aired.


But there is a basic difference between questioning your government and echoing your adversary. There is a difference between scepticism and selectivity. There is a difference between dissent and derangement. What we are witnessing, too often, is the collapse of these distinctions.


When journalism becomes so predictably adversarial that it begins to mirror the talking points of those who wish India ill, it loses its credibility as an independent arbiter. It becomes, instead, a partisan actor that cloaks itself in the language of ‘liberalism’ - a convenient label under which a set of preordained positions can be advanced without rigorous scrutiny. 


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