Aasha Patel

Aasha Sharma was born in Mumbai in the 1960s into a family of classical Hindustani musicians who considered film music a degradation and popular music a catastrophe. She disagreed quietly for years, then loudly. Her recordings from the 1970s and 1980s draw on the raga vocabulary she was raised in but bend it toward structures her family found scandalous. Critics found them revelatory. She has outlasted most of her critics and all of her detractors, and continues to record in a studio she built in the house she grew up in.